Friends, come warm yourselves by the flaming wreckage of my micro-SaaS
Published in 2022, this chronicle by @graderjs details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 51 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 9 comments
I wanted to try this. I can never get scrapers to work for me. EVER. I once wasted a whole day trying to get one to work and the support was a complete waste. I finally just gave upon the idea of ever being able to get the data I needed by myself without overpaying. This type of stuff helps. His pricing model was great pay for what you use and it gave you a chance to try it cheaply without risking a monthly charge. I think the biggest problem is that techie really don't get how non-techie a lot of their proposed customers are...so you build overly complicated plinko machines...that never seem to work correctly and get upset when we won't even try them. "Once burned, Twice Shy."
Kudos to those who launch. It’s always harder than you’d think. That said, I don’t understand why people go the gimmicky route the moment they want to make something commercial.
Even a micro saas has to provide something of real value. You can’t skip that part, and surprisingly, it’s much easier to charge money if your initial focus is just on making a really good product.
I’m curious to know if this app is still in the App Store?
Great write up. But, yes, this project was 100% doomed from the start — it’s essentially “violate Twitter TOS as a service.” I recall seeing the link title on HN (“ Show HN: Download Twitter data without API keys”) and thinking, wow, no chance that will last a day.
I think Chris could've just hustled a bit more. Instead of dealing with the official APIs, he could've acquired a few proxies and started scraping twitter via the website or mobile app.