--- title: "Entrepreneur · Various Business Domains - José DA COSTA" description: "Versatile solo venture covering IT services, event tent rental for weddings and parties, and Airbnb apartment management. Applied software engineering skills across all activities." locale: "en" canonical: "https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/journey/entrepreneur-various-business-domains" source: "https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/journey/entrepreneur-various-business-domains.md" html_source: "https://portfolio.josedacosta.info/en/journey/entrepreneur-various-business-domains" author: "José DA COSTA" type: "journey" slug: "entrepreneur-various-business-domains" generated_at: "2026-04-23T15:47:49.435Z" --- # Entrepreneur · Various Business Domains **Organization:** MONSIEUR JOSE DA COSTA **Period:** 2020-08 - 2024-12 **Type:** entrepreneurship **Role:** Entrepreneur ## Company vision The IT side was built on **client missions**: real estate professionals who hired me for custom development, and companies that commissioned me for **large-scale data extraction**. This is where I sharpened my scraping and automation expertise, delivering on concrete and varied business needs. The time-to-profit ratio for the tent activity was challenging (about **6 hours of work per rental** for roughly **10% net margin**), which led me to wind down that activity in 2024. But the hands-on experience - managing clients, logistics, weather surprises, equipment damage - gave me **a practical understanding of business operations** that shapes my engineering perspective daily. ## Overview Versatile solo venture covering IT services, event tent rental for weddings and parties, and Airbnb apartment management. Applied software engineering skills across all activities. - Built a LeBonCoin scraper with Symfony, Docker, and ELK stack - Managed 6 professional tents serving 250+ clients over 4 seasons - Automated quoting, invoicing, and contract generation in HTML/PDF ## Competencies (8) - **Fullstack Development** (confidence 5/5) _(technical)_: LeBonCoin scraper (Symfony, ELK), tent configurator (TypeScript), custom quote generator, business automation tools. - **Scripting & Automation** (confidence 5/5) _(technical)_: Large-scale web scraping, WAF bypassing (Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai), extraction pipelines up to several hundred million items. - **Databases** (confidence 4/5) _(technical)_: MySQL and Elasticsearch for real estate market analysis, ELK stack for competitive intelligence and price monitoring. - **Business Strategy** (confidence 4/5) _(soft)_: Identifying opportunities across 3 distinct markets, commercial positioning, pivoting activities based on profitability. - **Project Management** (confidence 4/5) _(soft)_: Running 3 business lines simultaneously in full autonomy: IT services, event rental, property management. - **Adaptability & Learning Agility** (confidence 5/5) _(soft)_: Juggling daily between coding, field logistics and property management across very different industries. - **Budget & Financial Management** (confidence 4/5) _(soft)_: Invoicing, quotes, margin tracking, profitability analysis per activity - including the decision to shut down tent rental at 10% net margin. - **Problem Solving** (confidence 5/5) _(soft)_: Diverse challenges: technical bugs, logistics surprises, equipment damage, client dispute resolution. ## Achievements - Built and managed a fleet of 6 professional reception tents (18 to 200 sqm total surface), serving 250+ clients across 4 seasons - Developed a LeBonCoin scraper (Symfony + Docker + ELK) for real-time market and competitor analysis - Created a complete system of automated HTML quotes, rental contracts and invoicing - Managed seasonal apartment rentals in Bordeaux (Airbnb) and the Arcachon Bay - Professional photography, marketing materials and website for commercial promotion of the business - Delivered IT services: custom web development, data extraction, website design ## Activities #### Event Rental **Description:** **Rental of professional reception tents**, inflatable marquees and **inflatable bounce castles for children** (PVC 500g/sqm, galvanized steel) for weddings, christenings, birthdays and private events. Catalog of 6 sizes (3x6m to 5x12m, 18 to 80 guests). Delivery, assembly/disassembly services, and personalized configuration advice. #### Highlights - 250+ clients across 4 seasons (individuals, associations, businesses) - Professional tents, PVC 500g/sqm - Laminated assembly guides, color-coded parts system - Deposit system, detailed contracts, photo promotions **Name:** Event equipment rental **Period:** 2021 - 2024 #### It Services **Description:** **Custom IT services** for professional clients and internal projects. Web application development, large-scale data extraction and processing (web scraping), showcase website design, business process automation and technical consulting. #### Highlights - Advanced web scraping and market analysis (Python, Node.js, PHP, Symfony, Elasticsearch) - Custom web application and showcase website development (PHP, Symfony, TypeScript) - Business process automation: quotes, invoices, data pipelines (Docker, Nginx) **Name:** IT services **Period:** 2020 - 2024 #### Property Rental **Description:** Two types of rental activity: **seasonal vacation rental** (short-term via Airbnb) and **long-term furnished rental** under LMNP status (Loueur Meuble Non Professionnel). Apartments and houses in Bordeaux and Arcachon Bay. #### Highlights - Airbnb management with contracts, inventories, promotional photos - Full administrative follow-up (utilities, insurance, co-ownership) **Name:** Seasonal property rental **Period:** 2020 - 2024 **Company Presentation:** French auto-entreprise (**micro-entreprise**), a simplified legal status that allows running a commercial activity as a sole proprietor. In France, this regime is often used as a side business or an entrepreneurial stepping stone. In my case, it became a versatile structure that let me invoice very diverse services as opportunities came: web development one day, tent rental the next weekend, Airbnb property management in between. APE code 62.01Z (Computer programming), based in Bordeaux then Merignac. ## Missions #### It Services - Scraping and automations for the real estate sector: LeBonCoin data extraction with Symfony, Docker, MySQL and the ELK stack for market volume and pricing analysis - Prototyping a web-based tent configurator in TypeScript (Syncfusion EJ2) - Building a custom quote generator for a client, with automated PDF export #### Event Rental - Sourcing and managing professional tent inventory from European suppliers - Drafting rental contracts, managing deposits and client follow-up - Commercial outreach: LeBonCoin ads, Facebook, identifying partner reception venues - End-to-end logistics: storage, delivery (up to 188 kg per tent), assembly, disassembly, cleaning, repairs - Competitive intelligence and diversification research (inflatable castles, EN14960 standards) #### Property Rental - Airbnb property management: promotion, seasonal contracts, inventories, administrative follow-up **Positioning:** I ran this business solo, handling the full chain: from commercial outreach to physical delivery, through technical tool development, invoicing and after-sales service. Each activity - IT, events, real estate - required juggling very different skills within the same day: coding a scraper in the morning, delivering and assembling a 137 kg tent in the afternoon, responding to an Airbnb prospect in the evening. This total versatility built my adaptability and gave me an end-to-end understanding of a commercial activity's lifecycle. ## Scraping Expertise **Title:** Web Scraping Expertise **Content:** Through my freelance missions and personal projects, I developed deep expertise in web scraping and large-scale data extraction. I completed dozens of missions ranging from simple sites (static HTML, open REST APIs, standard pagination) to far more complex targets protected by WAFs (Web Application Firewalls) and advanced anti-bot solutions: Cloudflare, DataDome, PerimeterX, and Akamai Bot Manager. Against these protections, I learned to analyze detection mechanisms (TLS/JA3 fingerprinting, browser fingerprinting, JavaScript challenges, dynamic rate limiting) and to develop reliable bypass strategies: residential proxy rotation, session and cookie management, human behavior simulation, CAPTCHA challenge solving, and headless browser instrumentation. Whether for one-off scraping jobs or continuous extraction pipelines, I master the full technical chain: target site analysis, protection reverse engineering, scraper development (Python, Node.js, PHP), structured data storage, and pipeline reliability monitoring. Some extractions reached several hundred million items, requiring heavy server infrastructure: database clusters, distributed message queues, parallel worker orchestration and real-time load monitoring. This is a domain where I have an excellent skill level, built through years of hands-on practice across varied real-world cases. #### Highlights - Simple sites: static HTML, REST APIs, pagination, JavaScript-rendered (SPA/SSR) - WAFs bypassed: Cloudflare, DataDome, PerimeterX, Akamai Bot Manager - Advanced techniques: residential proxy rotation, TLS/JA3 fingerprinting, browser automation - Languages: Python (Scrapy, BeautifulSoup, httpx), Node.js (Cheerio, Playwright), PHP (Symfony, Goutte) - Full pipelines: extraction, transformation, storage (PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, CSV/JSON), monitoring - Scale: extractions up to several hundred million items, heavy server infrastructure (DB clusters, parallel workers, message queues) **Vision:** Always in motion, always active. Pursuing diverse entrepreneurial opportunities from IT services to real estate, applying software engineering skills to every activity. 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