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What's your API? How much MRR? What's your pricing model? How did you find your first paying customers? And most importantly - what problem are you solving that people will actually pay for monthly?
Bonus points if you can share: - Your biggest challenge (rate limiting? customer support? competition?) - Whether you'd do it again - Any "I wish I knew this before starting" wisdom
The challenge when exploring this topic: the incentive to stay under the radar. Those succeeding don't have much to gain from sharing details here. Worst case: it could invite competitors into their space.
Communities that thrive on growth (e.g., open-source) tend to share freely, but API businesses, especially ones which are easy to execute, often guard their edge.
A recent finding I had, while not necessarily an API: services which help you 24/7 stream a lenghty video file. YouTube live streams seem to work well for those lofi-types of channels, and there are services which are built to enable autopilot live streams.
My friend Dmytro[0] has been running a screenshot API called ScreenshotOne[1]. He's been building it solo and has reached $20K MRR recently. [0]: https://x.com/DmytroKrasun [1]: https://screenshotone.com
Anyway, this guy was the go to guy for gas customers, and knew the database inside and out. So he created his own company, resigned as a full time employee, waited until the panic had set in properly.
Then he offered consulting services back to the energy company saying he'd take care of any database processing costs, or cloud migration costs or whatever, and moved the customer data for gas customers to his own system. Then he created an API, waited a while more and said he was going away again.... Or he could stay supporting this setup if the energy company agreed to a monthly fee and API usage. Then, as far as I know, he sat back and just watched the money roll in while he automated everything else about the job.
I know of a guy, but his scenario was quite unique. I was working for an energy company who shall remain nameless, but who's internal IT was a tangle of external consultants milking the place for millions, and ineffective/underserved full time staff who couldn't run a query on a database without a change control committee of consultants milking them for yet more cash. Anyway, this guy was the go to guy for gas custom…