Stuck? More of the Same Won’t Do
A managerial framework for when data stops flowing
All Wait Until the Water’s in the Living Room
We often advise companies on scraping strategies and tools. A recurring pattern we see is that they only reach out after being stuck on a website or service for months. Sometimes, it’s been over a year since they last extracted the data they need — or offered the service that depends on it.
While the instinct to solve things internally is understandable, it often results in avoidable financial loss. Founders and developers rarely adopt a managerial lens — yet that’s what’s needed. If your company offers price or availability monitoring, with a strong tech team, and leverages proprietary tools, you might resist bringing in outside help. There’s often hesitation to talk openly about scraping, and sometimes, a vague discomfort about regulatory clarity.
So they wait — until the water is in the living room.
Understand The Cost of Downtime
When a key data source goes down, the business impact is immediate: a service becomes unsellable. Meanwhile, your tech team works tirelessly to break through the block. For small teams, this often turns into a personal mission — a matter of pride. But while they push against the wall, the clock keeps ticking. Days become weeks. Weeks become months. And sooner than you realize, it’s been a couple of quarters.
My advice is simple: measure the cost of downtime. Before any issue arises, list every source you extract data from. For each, define two things:
Cost of No Service — What’s the commercial impact if that site goes offline?
Max Time to Escalation — How long will you allow the team to try before seeking outside help?
These costs may come from lost contracts, SLA breaches, or service disruption. Define your limits in weeks. Once an issue arises, hit the stopwatch. If your team doesn’t fix it within the window — or doesn’t have the bandwidth to try — escalate.
This turns downtime into a manageable incident. You’ll make clearer decisions, faster.
Eventually, trying the same approach becomes the real bottleneck.
Don’t Let Hacking Get Too Personal
Web scraping has its roots in DIY culture. There’s a certain thrill in outsmarting a website’s defenses — a technical challenge that feels like a personal test of skill. Developers see it as a puzzle, a head-to-head contest with anti-bot systems. And managers, especially in small teams, often empathize with the battle.
But from a business perspective, here’s a simple truth: technical challenges should never become personal.
The ecosystem around scraping is fragmented. Educational content is sparse, and much of what’s shared online is limited to tools and generic approaches — not real-world problem-solving (a notable exception is this blog by Pierluigi, which is proving by the numbers his different content strategy). That’s why there’s often tremendous value in asking for an independent opinion (with all the appropriate NDAs in place) on possible ways to tackle the issue.
Only one of these two things can happen, and both have their positives:
The external advice is actually helpful, and helps you reestablish the data extraction. Not only you’ll solve your current material problem, but you’ll have the best workshop with your team, allowing them to think and try new approaches to work – something especially powerful in an underground battlefield like web scraping, and you’ll enrich your internal skills, have new tools in your kit, and approach with stronger experience the future challenges
The external advice does not work. In this case you have a stronger point on the feasibility of the website. Not all websites can be hacked, not within your budget and throughput constraints. But one thing is “we can’t find a way to do it”, and one completely other is having the confidence that ever others did not. And you’ve come to this conclusion way faster than hitting and hitting again your hammer on the wall. There’s a definite advantage in understanding the limits, and act soon, even when it boils down to having tough conversations with the client. And you can back this up with more confidence.
Either way, it’s a win. Avoiding the point, on the contrary, is what costs real money.
Businesses are too important to be governed by lone-warrior logic. You don’t bring in an external perspective because you’re failing. You do it because you can’t afford to stall.
The True Value of a Second Set of Eyes
Why is external independent advice so important? Just stating that someone is “better” or more skilled is a short-lived reason, in such a fast moving technology landscape. What I found to be true in all of our projects for external advisors:
1. They try routes different access paths.
Scraping is built on experience. If you have hacked the websites with a certain pattern that works, it’s in our human nature to try again those patterns. But they who worked on different websites than you have, with different requirements, in different sectors, will go paths your team either overlooked or have skipped by design. We have many examples where the solution was there, in plain sight (like a mobile API access with different antibot settings, or a change in fingerprint masking solution) but the team simply did not think about that. Not because your team misses something, but because there is no such thing as omniscience in this field, and, statistically speaking, the addition of an independent perspective multiplies the chances.
2. They’re not bound by your system constraints.
Your tech stack — language, proxy provider, orchestration tools — is a constraint. This might not be obvious at first glance, but there are many cases where we solved a quite challenging scraping issue, just building something external to the current stack, which generated unnecessary calls or slowed down RPS (requests per second). If briefed correctly, focusing on the final outcome and not forcing a specific way to solve a problem (that you are not solving), proved to be extremely powerful, and brought home results faster than expected. An external expert brings no attachments, no assumptions. And sometimes an external voice can say what internally no one dares to say: That old scraping language or framework, that overload of logs, that buggy scheduler. Some disappointments that are known, but no one openly talks about for the effort it takes to build something else from scratch. An advisor can. It shows that the website can be scraped, maybe simply, if only we were to get rid of all of the frills we are still carrying around.
3. They try more tools, more often, just because they can.
Consultants try new things because it’s their job, they have allocated time and resources in their weekly schedule to do so. They stay up to date with the rapid evolution of anti-bot defenses, fingerprinting, headless browsers, unblockers, and AI-assisted tools. Your team is focused on your code, once something works, no need to look further. Yes, I am sure most of the scrapers are also good testers of the latest new toys and tricks, but they do it in their spare time. They simply have less chances to play around. Consultants, on the other hand, do this on their main time. There are more chances they have used configurations, settings, combination of stacks you did not. And when your data source is blocked and your service is down, that is a value.
Key Takeaway: Manage The Risk
High-performing managers use frameworks to make decisions.
Websites will go down. That’s not a risk — it’s a reality. The difference is how prepared you are when it happens. If you know the cost of failure — beyond just extraction — and have a predefined escalation path, you’ll move faster. You’ll manage complexity with clarity.
Data strategy isn’t just about collection. It’s about knowing when to adapt.