I wrote Python Code to ask 50,000+ COMPANIES for FREE STUFF! // Automation with Python // Part 1

Summary

In this video, a final-year university student and software engineer embarks on a mission to send 50,000 emails to tech companies across Europe, asking for free products. Using Python for web scraping, they extract email addresses from various websites and filter for European companies. After compiling the emails into a CSV file, they use the SendGrid service to bypass Gmail's sending limits. Within minutes of sending, they start receiving replies, with some companies agreeing to send products. The video teases a second part focused on unboxing and analyzing the results.

Takeaways

• 😀 The video creator plans to send over 50,000 emails to tech companies asking for free products.
• 🎓 The creator is a final-year university student and a software engineer.
• 🧑‍💻 The goal is to use web scraping techniques to gather email addresses from tech companies across Europe.
• 🌍 The focus is on European companies to avoid handling an overwhelming number of emails from other regions.
• 📧 The creator found websites listing tech startups and companies but had to work around some issues like hidden email addresses or forms.
• 🔄 To extract emails, the creator used web scraping to clean up unnecessary strings and filter the desired information.
• 🐍 The code was written in Python, using a list of countries to filter for European companies during the scraping process.
• 📂 The scraping process resulted in a CSV file with over 50,000 email addresses ready to be used.
• 🚀 Instead of Gmail, the creator used SendGrid to handle the mass email distribution, bypassing Gmail's daily sending limits.
• 📬 Within minutes of sending out the emails, the creator began receiving replies from companies offering to send free items.

Q & A

What is the main goal of the person in the video?

The main goal is to send over 50,000 emails to different tech companies, asking them to send free products.

What method does the speaker plan to use to gather company email addresses?

The speaker plans to use web scraping, a technique to extract data from websites, to gather email addresses of tech companies.

Why does the speaker focus only on European companies?

The speaker limits the scraping to companies in Europe because scraping globally would result in too many companies, making the project unmanageable.

What challenge does the speaker face when scraping emails from certain websites?

One challenge is that some websites, like Clutch, do not provide direct email addresses but instead offer contact forms. The speaker has to find ways to infer email addresses from company domain names.

How does the speaker handle the problem of emails with ‘mailto’ links?

The speaker plans to strip the 'mailto:' prefix and colon from the email links to extract the clean email addresses.

How does the speaker filter out companies that are not based in Europe?

The speaker uses a list of countries and their corresponding continents, cross-referencing the companies' countries to ensure only European companies are included.

What service does the speaker use to send the emails, and why?

The speaker uses SendGrid, a service that allows sending large volumes of emails, because Gmail restricts the number of emails that can be sent per day (500 emails).

What is the expected outcome of sending 50,000 emails?

The speaker hopes to receive free products from the companies in response to the emails, based on the replies they get.

How many emails were successfully collected by the scraping algorithm?

The scraping algorithm collected 50,187 email addresses, which were saved in a CSV file.

What kind of follow-up content does the speaker plan for the next video?

The speaker plans to release a second video showing the unboxing of the products received and analyzing how many replies and freebies were sent.