The Weekend Build

I'm a CS sophomore. For my side project, I wanted to build a dashboard that tracks what YouTube creators and podcasters are saying about any topic — a media monitoring tool for niche communities.

The old way: learn Selenium, fight with YouTube's anti-bot detection, figure out Puppeteer for TikTok, parse RSS feeds for podcasts, handle rate limits, manage proxies. I would have spent the entire semester on infrastructure before writing a single line of actual product logic.

Instead, I used one API and built the whole thing in a weekend.

Step 1: Search Across Sources

One endpoint, multiple content types. No API keys, no auth for basic search. Try changing the query below to whatever topic you're interested in.

curl "https://api.gettrawl.com/api/search/unified?q=machine+learning+tutorial&sources=all"

Step 2: Get a Transcript Without Auth

The preview endpoint is free and requires no API key. Perfect for prototyping — paste any YouTube URL and get the full transcript back.

curl -X POST "https://api.gettrawl.com/api/transcripts/preview" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jPQjjsBbIc"
}'

Step 3: Search Podcasts

4 million shows, searchable with one call.

curl "https://api.gettrawl.com/api/podcasts/search?q=machine+learning"

What I Built

A content monitoring dashboard with three panels. The backend is Python, the frontend is Next.js. Here's the data layer — this is where Trawl saves the most time.

from trawl import TrawlClient

client = TrawlClient()  # Free tier — 1,000 requests/month

# Panel 1: Latest YouTube videos on a topic
videos = client.search.youtube(q="machine learning explained", max_results=10)
for v in videos.results:
    print(f"[YouTube] {v.title}")

# Panel 2: Podcast episodes discussing it
pods = client.podcasts.search("machine learning")
for ep in pods.results[:5]:
    print(f"[Podcast] {ep.title}")

# Panel 3: News coverage
news = client.news.search("machine learning breakthrough")
for article in news.results[:5]:
    print(f"[News] {article.title}")

Time Comparison

What I Learned

The biggest unlock wasn't the time savings — it was that I could actually think about my product instead of fighting with infrastructure.

When your entire data layer is one pip install away, you spend your weekend on the user experience, not on writing scrapers that break every time YouTube changes their HTML.

If You're Building Something Similar

1. Don't write scrapers — they'll break and you'll spend more time maintaining them than building features
2. Start with the free tier — 1,000 requests/month is plenty for prototyping
3. Use the preview endpoints — no auth needed, perfect for hackathons
4. The unified search is your friend — one call, all sources

Even Easier: No Code at All

You don't have to write a single line to get value from Trawl.

MCP + Claude Desktop — Add Trawl to Claude Desktop and just ask: "Search YouTube and podcasts for machine learning tutorials from this week and summarize the top 5." Claude calls the APIs, reads the transcripts, and gives you a summary. That's it. No Python, no API keys, no terminal. Setup takes two minutes — see the MCP server guide.

Make.com — Or build a no-code workflow in Make that searches daily and sends results to your email. Connect the Trawl HTTP module to a Gmail module, set a schedule, and you have a personal content briefing running on autopilot. Great for a portfolio project you can demo without spinning up a server.

Start building at gettrawl.com/docs — the free tier is more than enough for a weekend prototype.