Nishad Shah

Take us to the moment you decided to build this — what were you doing and what triggered it?

I was house hunting in Bangalore and had to check multiple Facebook groups daily for direct listings, so decided to build a feed that aggregates across all of these listings without any loss of info.

What did you explicitly decide not to build, and why?

Decided not to add no broker, magic bricks, and other platforms here since they already have feeds themselves. Checking across multiple Facebook groups was the main problem, so only picked that.

What did you discover after you built it — from using it yourself or from showing it to others?

Cleaning the data post-scraping took a lot of time. A lot of random sale listings were getting parsed in the LSM, which was making some parsing errors, etc., which had to be fixed. Scraping Facebook also has its nuances because Facebook only has rate limits, so had to continuously keep navigating it by creating separate login sessions on Facebook.

When did you last open it, and what for?

Opened it today to do a round of cleaning and scraper check