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Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?

#171

Post by Bencheng »

its_down_again wrote: post #153
Bencheng wrote: post #141

I started as a dev shop and built 2 API products based on user demand. 1 is an OCR and document extraction service [0]. We started with three customers asking for the same services and found none that were really useful (and supported Chinese characters) on the market at that time. Lately the product pivoted to based on (fine-tuned) LLM/VLMs and focus on adding various features that LLM out of the box are missing (fi…

Curious how you landed on the idea to partner with local GCP/Azure reps. That’s a smart move, I didn’t realize they’d be open to helping. Did you pitch it as a way to help them close deals by offering custom solutions?

Saw some other products partners with a Cloud vendor for marketing exposure, so we look into it.

It turns out that the most effective and easy way for their sales rep to pitch your products to their client is if you have something complementary. For us, this is because they have similar products, so they can propose it to the client if they don't like the native one.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?

#172

Post by Bencheng »

nopcode wrote: post #155
its_down_again wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious how you landed on the idea to partner with local GCP/Azure reps. That’s a smart move, I didn’t realize they’d be open to helping. Did you pitch it as a way to help them close deals by offering custom solutions?

cloud reps get commission for services sold via their marketplace. Often they even have a bigger financial incentive to sell third party products over native GCP/Azure stuff.

Yeah, but a few years down the road, I learnt that the incentives are often misaligned. For example, the Account Manager wants all their client's consumption in their client's account, so they push the client for a dedicated Cloud deployment, while the other sales rep wants it on the other reseller account, etc.

It also sometimes conflicts with the incentives of us.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?

#173

Post by fallingmeat »

Know a guy who setup themselves as a cert authority for STIR/SHAKEN and pretty much is an almost completed automated system; just issues certs they generate with a small hardware device. Sounds like it easily makes about $10k/month almost pure profit! https://authenticate.iconectiv.com/approved-certification-au...

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?

#174

Post by sanjayparekh »

gervwyk wrote: post #158
sanjayparekh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole geo-IP space started back with my startup, Digital Envoy, in 1999 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39734355 ). The way we went about it was by providing an API to clients but we actually hosted our entire database (encrypted and in a proprietary format) with clients. The reason for this was for latency (back in 1999 we could get about 0.03ms per transaction something that you can't get on any edge del…

Thanks so much for this! I’m just now really trying to put myself out there and get into sales to further develop our business. We’ve been lucky with some early network sales, but for the next chapter of our business ( https://resonancy.io ) I need to build the sales engine and I feel very much out of my depth. Just telling myself its a practice and trying to chip away at it one week at a time.. At this point identif…

IMO - and again, remember this is experience from 20+ years ago although I still do a lot of this now - using these kinds of automated shotgun approaches is a mistake, especially early on and especially if you are selling something. We use an automated engine for our podcast agency (https://edgewise.media) but that is a different pitch when it's "come on my podcast and talk about yourself" versus "I want you to spend money for my widget".

What we did was more labor intensive and a function of these kinds of tools not existing (initial dot-com days). We would read the tech press, etc. and identify companies that might have a use for our tech. Then we would email the top person (guessing their email address usually - and most companies use a small number of variations for addresses) with a custom written, but short, tailored pitch to why they could use us and see if they wanted to talk. No pitch deck or attachments. Literally 2-3 sentences. Something that if even someone is going to quickly delete, something in those 2-3 sentences might catch their eye and make them reply instead of delete. We landed customers like Google (who we ended up later suing - that is a different tale), Doubleclick (who ended up being bought be Google), PayPal, Xbox, and a bunch of others through this method.

Happy to chat more. Startups are hard and all of us should help one another out to make the road a little less hard if possible. Keep at it - I know you'll get there. Hard work will get you there, shortcuts (usually) won't.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?

#175

Post by axpvms »

jlundberg wrote: post #119
bad_haircut72 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the cops hadnt also aggressively pursued people "stealing" music (a bullshit proposition to begin with) Spotify would not have won. For most people avoiding a potentially big fine, even if the chance is small, tips the balance into just paying a few bucks (which is itself a huge price concession from the music industry, who would love to charge what CDs used to cost) - but they cant, that would tip the balance bac…

True that the full win was due to copyright enforcement by various actors. However, in the early days of Spotify the ”play any song with a click” was pure magic and nothing piracy could compete with. A fun anecdote from that time is also that basically the whole Spotify catalogue was full of pirated music — they had not yet secured any music rights and I personally thought they never would succeed with that.

The early days of napster felt like that (with a diminished experience due to lower speed connections). Not to take anything away from your point.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?

#176

Post by jlundberg »

axpvms wrote: post #175
jlundberg wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True that the full win was due to copyright enforcement by various actors. However, in the early days of Spotify the ”play any song with a click” was pure magic and nothing piracy could compete with. A fun anecdote from that time is also that basically the whole Spotify catalogue was full of pirated music — they had not yet secured any music rights and I personally thought they never would succeed with that.

The early days of napster felt like that (with a diminished experience due to lower speed connections). Not to take anything away from your point.

Yeah, I agree. Having one place with a huge music library and downloads in parts of minutes was magic.. :)

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?

#177

Post by dcsan »

MasterScrat wrote: post #120

We run an API to finetune text-to-image models (dreamlook.ai), as a two-person team. When we launched 3 years ago our differentiator was that we could train both cheaper and faster by running on TPUs, these days GPUs have mostly caught up, and open source models are not as competitive as they once were. It’s making ~5k/month these days, not bad as we’re no longer actively working on it, but a fraction of what we were…

I used this neck in the day! You somehow did better Lora training than others in the space! Found you via discord

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?

#180

Post by mrngm »

callamdelaney wrote: post #54
kinard wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridiculous that postcodes/uprns lookups are not open data (yet). hohum.

They are in the UK but you have to have some magic understanding of around 15 separate files. Seems to be purposefully difficult.

NL as well, but the source data has a couple of indirections before you get to the postcode.

It's doable, monthly updatable for free, but requires a bit of processing and understanding of the geo structures.

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