← Firecrawl
Firecrawl role-play cheat sheet
For the mock cold call at the end of most SDR interviews.
What they sell, in one line
An API that turns any website into clean text or structured data that AI apps can use.
Who you'd be calling
Engineering leads, AI/ML leads and data scientists at startups and mid-size tech companies building with LLMs.
Your opener
“Hi Sam, this is Alex from Firecrawl. I know I'm calling out of the blue. Do you have 30 seconds for me to tell you why I called, and then you can decide if it's worth your time?”
Problems you solve for them
- Scraping the web by hand breaks all the time and eats engineer hours
- Raw web pages are messy and not ready for LLMs
- Getting fresh web data into AI agents or RAG pipelines is slow
Discovery questions to ask
- How does your team get web data into your AI product today?
- How much engineer time goes into fixing scrapers when sites change?
- What happens to your product when the data coming in is messy or out of date?
Objections they'll throw at you
“I'm busy right now.”
→ Totally fair, I'll be quick. Is there a better 15 minutes this week, or should I send one line on what we do first?
“Not interested.”
→ Understood. Can I ask one thing so I don't bother you again: is web data something your team uses at all, or not on your radar?
“We already built our own scraper / use something else.”
→ That makes sense, a lot of teams start that way. How much time does your team spend keeping it running, and would a quick comparison be worth 15 minutes?
“Just send me an email.”
→ Happy to. So I send you something useful, what's the main thing you pull from the web, and can we set a quick follow-up for next week?
Competitors worth knowing
Apify, Bright Data, ScrapingBee
Interview tips for this company
- Learn the basics of what an API, an LLM and RAG are in plain words; the buyer is technical and will notice if you can't talk about them.
- Be ready to explain 'web scraping' simply, and why LLM-ready markdown matters. Also try the product before the interview if there's a free tier.
Written from public information about Firecrawl to help you practice. Ask an insider what their role play looked like; it's the best prep there is.