u/biplab_prasad

Hey everyone,

For the last few months, I’ve been building MedScanner (medscanner.in) as a solo dev. It’s essentially a "Skyscanner for Indian healthcare." It compares live prices across 1mg, PharmEasy, Truemeds, and Medkart so patients can bypass hidden checkout fees and easily find 80% cheaper generic alternatives.

I decided to build this in public and share my raw data for the last 30 days. The gap between my server logs and my frontend analytics is wild, and I wanted to share my learnings on Programmatic SEO and tech stack scaling.

1. The "Bot Invasion" (2.4 Million Requests vs. 228 Users)
If I look at my Cloudflare dashboard, I handled 2.4 Million requests, 881k visits, and served 56 GB of data in the last 30 days.
But if I look at Google Analytics? I had exactly 228 Active Users.

Why the massive gap? Because to compete with giant monopolies, I generated thousands of programmatic SEO pages for obscure, long-tail medicines. The massive backend load isn't humans—it's Google and Bing crawlers aggressively indexing my database. (My highest traffic city on GA4 is literally Ashburn, Virginia—the AWS data center capital).

2. The Bing Anomaly
Looking at my GA4 acquisition sources, I found something hilarious. In India, Google is king. But for my site, Bing Organic (88 sessions) is actually beating Google Organic (58 sessions).
My theory? People are searching for their parents' monthly medicines on their corporate office laptops, where Microsoft Edge and Bing are the default browsers.

3. The Tech & Data Challenge
Serving 2.4M requests for a free tool requires heavy optimization. When a user searches, we fetch the prices from all the pharmacies and normalize the messy, unstructured data on the fly (e.g., matching "Dolo-650" to "Dolo 650 Strip of 15"), and return the cheapest final price in under 3 seconds. Handling this mapping across multiple competitors without breaking the UI is the hardest part of the build.

4. The Core Challenge Right Now: Retention
While the SEO engine is clearly working (getting thousands of impressions for obscure medicines), retention is my biggest bottleneck. People search, find the cheapest app, close my site, and go buy it.

My questions for the builders/devs here:

1. For those who do programmatic SEO, how long did it take for your massive crawl spikes to translate into sustained human traffic?
2. To improve retention, I'm thinking of building a WhatsApp bot (e.g., "Text me the medicine, I'll reply with the cheapest link"). Do you think Indian users would prefer WhatsApp over a web UI for this?

Would love any harsh feedback on the tech, the UI (medscanner.in), or the growth strategy. Thanks!

Earlier this week, we shared our Google Analytics data for MedScanner's first month. But today, we want to pull back the curtain on our Cloudflare metrics, because the backend reality of running a healthcare aggregator is completely different.

Last month, i.e. May, MedScanner's edge network was hit with 1.94 Million Requests, 626,000 visits, and served nearly 50 GB of data.

Did we go mega-viral? No.
To be brutally honest, this massive wall of traffic is almost 100% web crawlers (Googlebots, Bingbots, Meta-ExternalAgent and other bots).

When building an aggregator with thousands of dynamically generated medicine pages, search engines have to work overtime to index the database. While 1.94M requests might sound like a vanity metric, to an early-stage product, it’s a massive green flag. It means our programmatic SEO architecture is successfully capturing Google’s "crawl budget."

Handling this heavy level of constant bot traffic while ensuring the site remains lightning-fast for real human users is a serious infrastructure challenge. But seeing our edge network absorb nearly 2 million requests flawlessly is a huge technical milestone for our team.

To the developers and founders in our network: Have you ever been shocked by the massive gap between your frontend GA4 users and your Cloudflare analytics? 😂

(Link to test the platform is in the comments! 👇)

When we launched this medicine price aggregator in mid-April, we had no idea if anyone besides my family would use it. Today, the Month 1 (May) Google Analytics data tells a completely different story:

👥 Active Users: 273 (Up from 29 in April)🖱️ Events Logged: 2,636 (Searches, clicks, comparisons)🔍 Organic Search Users: 42 (Up 4,000% from just 1 in April!)

The most exciting part of this data isn't the total user count—it’s the shift in how people are finding us.

In the first two weeks of May, almost 100% of our traffic was "Direct" (WhatsApp forwards and LinkedIn links). But as the month progressed, the programmatic SEO architecture we built started to kick in.

We started getting hundreds of Google Search impressions for highly specific, long-tail medicine queries (like Pyricool 650mg and Dermigen NF). We also saw a huge spike in crawl requests from Google and Bing bots aggressively indexing our pages!

Indian consumers are actively Googling for cheaper medicine prices, and MedScanner is finally starting to show up to give them the answers.

Thank you to the 270+ early adopters who used the tool this month to save money on their medical bills across 1mg, Truemeds, MedKart, Medplus Mart and PharmEasy.

Month 2 is all about scaling this SEO engine and rolling out our newest feature: Aggregated Generic Alternatives (which we just pushed live this weekend!).

(Link to the free platform is in the comments! 👇)

Last week, MedScanner saw a massive 250% spike in users thanks to a few highly engaged LinkedIn posts and WhatsApp shares.

This week? New users dropped by 52%, and total traffic almost halved down to 40 users.

In the startup world, this is called the post-launch dip. It happens when the initial "friends and family hype" fades, and you are left with your baseline organic traffic.

Am I disappointed? Not at all. This data is incredibly valuable. It taught me two things:

1. Marketing creates temporary spikes, but the product creates long-term retention.
2. Even without a marketing push, we still had 40 people organically hit the platform to check prices for critical meds (like Exemptia) and everyday meds (like Dolo 650).

Phase 1 was proving that Indian consumers are frustrated with hidden pharmacy fees and manual comparison.
Phase 2 (starting today) is figuring out sustainable, organic distribution—specifically SEO—so we don't have to rely on viral posts to get users.

Building a product isn't a straight line up. It's spikes, dips, and a lot of quiet coding in between.

Fellow founders: How did you survive your post-launch dip? Any advice on shifting from "launch hype" to sustainable organic traffic?

Try MedScanner for free at `medscanner.in`

At MedScanner, our goal is to instantly compare the price of a medicine across platforms like 1mg, PharmEasy, Apollo, and Truemeds.

But here is the challenge we are tackling this week: No two pharmacies list a medicine the exact same way.

Pharmacy A lists it as: "Dolo-650"
Pharmacy B lists it as: "Dolo 650mg Tablet"
Pharmacy C lists it as: "Dolo 650 Strip Of 15 Tablets"

To the human eye, these are the same. To a search algorithm, they are completely different products. Building the backend logic to normalize, map, and match this unstructured data perfectly so the user gets one clean, simple price-comparison dashboard is the hardest (and most fun) part of this startup journey.

We are constantly refining our search engine to make it faster and smarter.

If you want to try out what we’ve built so far and see if you can save money on your monthly prescriptions, you can run a free scan today! (Link in the comments 👇)

For my fellow developers: How do you handle messy, unstructured scraping data?