Show HN: I built a 1B+ contact database as a solo founder in 60 days

2 points by InfiniteBox 19 hours ago

After evaluating lead generation tools like Apollo, Hunter, and RocketReach, I noticed a common problem: they rely on old database technologies that often contain unverified emails, yet charge premium prices — this inefficiency bothered me.

I decided to approach this differently by leveraging modern AI technologies. I spent time learning the strengths of various LLMs (Grok, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Claude 3.7) and combined the best aspects of each for my solution.

The technical challenges were substantial. To reach 1B+ verified contacts, I had to:

- Implement residential proxy networks using Luminati/Bright Data, with Node.js for connection management and Redis for IP rotation scheduling

- Develop captcha-bypassing systems combining Puppeteer's browser automation with 2captcha API integration and custom computer vision models using TensorFlow

- Perfect web scraping at scale with Python (Beautiful Soup, Scrapy), optimized with asyncio for concurrent execution, and Playwright for dynamic content rendering

- Build a robust backend infrastructure using Laravel PHP framework, vanilla JavaScript for lightweight frontend interactions, and PostgreSQL for storing the structured data with proper indexing

I hope you enjoy using the trial, I made it especially for you guys.