January 15, 2025

How MRRScout Works: The Data Pipeline Behind the Weekly Digest

A transparent look at how we collect, score, and surface rising micro-SaaS sites every week — without spending a dollar on data.

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TL;DR

MRRScout is a weekly intelligence service that finds indie SaaS products quietly growing in traffic before they appear on Product Hunt's front page.

This post explains exactly how the data pipeline works — from raw web signals to your inbox every Monday morning.

The Problem We're Solving

Every week, dozens of small-but-interesting SaaS tools silently go from zero to $2k MRR.
By the time they hit the front page of Product Hunt, the early-adopter advantage is gone.

We wanted to catch them earlier. Much earlier.

Signal Sources (All Free)

We pull from six public data sources, continuously:

| Source | What we look for | |---|---| | Product Hunt | New launches before they peak (sorting by newest, not top) | | Hacker News | "Show HN" posts from founders | | Reddit | r/SideProject, r/SaaS, r/InternetIsBeautiful | | GitHub Trending | Repos with a homepage URL — often early-stage products | | Nitter RSS | #buildinpublic, #indiehackers, #sideproject | | Domain registrations | Freshly registered .io, .ai, .app, .tools domains |

None of these require paid APIs. Everything is parsed from public HTML, JSON endpoints, or RSS feeds.

What We Look For on the Site Itself

Once we have a URL, we visit the page and check for:

  1. Payment gateways — Stripe, Paddle, LemonSqueezy, Gumroad, etc. (signals real revenue intent)
  2. Tech stack fingerprints — Next.js, Webflow, Framer, Notion-based sites
  3. Title / meta description freshness — "Launched January 2025" beats "Founded in 2018"
  4. Parked domain filters — we skip GoDaddy landing pages, Cloudflare waiting pages, etc.

The NicheScore Formula

Every discovered site gets a NicheScore from 0–100:

NicheScore = (
  social_heat    × 0.35  +   # upvotes, comments, engagement
  growth_signal  × 0.25  +   # payment gateway present, pricing page
  monetization   × 0.20  +   # stripe/paddle detected
  freshness      × 0.10  +   # domain age < 6 months
  replicability  × 0.10      # niche category keyword match
)

A score above 60 gets included in the weekly digest.

What Doesn't Make the Cut

We deliberately filter out:

  • Sites by companies with 50+ employees (LinkedIn funding rounds > $1M)
  • Big-brand sub-products (anything from Google, Meta, Shopify)
  • Sites with zero monetization signal (pure open source, not a product)
  • Parked domains and "coming soon" pages with no content

The Newsletter

Every Monday morning, we compile sites with the highest week-over-week NicheScore increase — meaning they're gaining momentum, not just existing.

The newsletter is sent via Buttondown (free for small lists) and includes:

  • Product name + URL
  • One-line category label
  • Why it's interesting (top 2 signals)
  • Tech stack detected

What's Coming

We're still in the data-accumulation phase. Once we have 3 months of site-level history, the growth momentum signal gets much stronger.

Future features:

  • Trending categories — which niches are heating up this week
  • Breakout alerts — email when a watched site hits 10k monthly visits
  • Public dashboard — browse the full site database by category/score

Join the waitlist to get the first weekly digest when we launch.

Want to discover rising micro-SaaS before the crowd does?

Join the MRRScout waitlist