Business & LegalAsk for the VIN instead of buying a plate lookup
Software engineer turned curator and community builder
Raul cut eBaza's vehicle-lookup bill by asking drivers for the VIN when they already have it, instead of paying a plate-to-VIN API on every session. The registry lookup is a convenience, not the product. When the provider is slow or the quota is tight, a typed chassis number is cheaper and often more accurate than a mapping you do not control. Before you meter a third-party call, ask whether the user is already holding the identifier you were about to buy. Paid enrichment is a cost you choose. A form field is not.
Related advice
RaulPrice so low it removes all friction
$19/year sounds like leaving money on the table. But consider the alternative: a $19/month subscription requires convincing someone your product is worth $228/year, handling cancellations, dealing with failed payments, and competing with every other subscription fighting for budget. At $19/year, the price is never the objection. Raul's conversion rate proves that removing friction can beat optimizing price.
RaulBuild the product where the traffic already lives
ebaza.ro was already pulling high-intent insurance traffic, so Raul built the RCA quote flow onto that same domain instead of launching a fresh site that would start from zero. The hardest part of most products is getting in front of people who want them; if you already have an audience or ranking pages in an adjacent space, the fastest path to revenue is to put the product where that attention already lands. Look at the traffic you already have before you go chasing new traffic. Monetizing an existing audience beats building a new one almost every time.
RaulManual curation is a moat, not a limitation
Algorithms can scrape job boards. Nobody can automate the judgment call of "is this company actually calm or just marketing itself as calm?" Raul manually researches every company in his directory, checking employee tenure, real policies, and community feedback. That process is slow, but it's the entire value proposition. What feels like a bottleneck is actually what customers are paying for.
RaulBuild from personal pain, not market research
Raul didn't do market research or competitive analysis. He built exactly the thing he wished existed when he was fired and job hunting. Personal pain gives you an unfair advantage: you know the problem deeply, you can tell real solutions from fake ones, and you won't lose motivation when growth is slow because you genuinely care about the problem.