First 100 users. From idea to launch. Detailed long read of our first 6 months

Today our News API service has hit our user #100. We've been running our production system since the 1st of this month.

Product

So, our product is a JSON API to find news articles by any topic, country, language, website, or keyword. In other (non-technical) words, we let people search for news articles with code.

Who is t for? Our top use cases are:

• integrate news feed to your platform

• Data Science projects

• News monitoring for PR

Idea

In November 2019 I have come up with some kind of understanding of how I could build my own News API. I did not like existing solutions on the market, so I thought I could do it better (and cheaper)

I was a full-time Lead Data Engineer at this time, and I already had a side project on which I worked with another Full-Stack developer pretty much all the time.

I began to slowly validate my assumptions on a technical side.

After some checks, I was left with 1 big issue: I did not want to manage users/websites/issuing API tokens/payments.

See, I am a Data Engineer, but I am not a web dev. I do not want to build a website, user dashboard, integration payments, etc.

One day in December, I have discovered that there is such a thing as API Marketplace. Basically, API Marketplace works as follows: you connect your backend to it, and API Marketplace begins to manage users (payments, user dashboard, issuing tokens).

That was a breakthrough for me. At this moment my plan was as follows:

• I do my solution on a cloud (AWS)

• Sell/distribute it through an API marketplace

• Landing page via a builder

Preparing for beta

In January 2020, I began writing the code. I also began participating at YC StartupSchool. It was a no-brainer decision to join the program. It is free and should be solid (because of YC). At the very end, the most crucial feature of StartupSchool was the promo list. We got 3,000$ of credits on AWS (then we were added 2,000$ more, so 5,000$ in total).

By February, I asked my friend Maksym (who is also a Data Engineer) to join me as a co-founder.

I spent more than 1 day to find a decent landing page builder. I found 1 which was not super expensive (290$/year) and looked like a website builder for SaaS (not for selling cheap products from China). It is called landen.co And, Landen had the best onboarding procedure in my life. The best example of how to help users understand your product. Btw, only recently I discovered that Landen is managed by just 2 guys!

Our beta was scheduled for the 1st of April. So, we had 2 months to deliver the MVP.

Now, we had to collect emails for beta sign up. Which is hard. I am a technical person I never did marketing.

Somewhere halfway through the development of the beta, some really simple idea came to my head: very simple to code Python package that would allow developers to get the latest news from almost any news website (through RSS) (no dependency on our API solution, fully autonomous). Package link.

That was the very first time for me to do a Python package, but it all worked. We posted it on HackerNews and subreddits of DataScience and Algotrading. It went massive. More than 1,000 upvotes in 2 subreddits combined, plus 26 upvotes on HackerNews.

One-liner for HN: Show HN: Py package to collect normalized news from (almost) any website

One-liner for DataScience subreddit: Python package to collect news data from more than 3k news websites. In case you needed easy access to real data.

One-liner for Algotrading subreddit: Python package to collect news data from more than 3k news websites (marketwatch.com, investing.com, seekingalpha.com, etc. are included). In case you needed easy access to real-time data.

This package made about 300 GitHub stars over the first week. Plus, about 140 sign-ups for the beta.

It was really much more than what we have expected. I never had any public repository. Having 100 stars on GitHub would be a big success for me.

Beta Release Day

As we planned, on the 1st of April 2020, we sent out API keys with instructions and documentation. By that time, we had about 200 people on our email list.

Also, the 1st of April was my first day after quitting my full-time job. I did not leave because of NewsCatcher. I left it because I did not enjoy working there anymore. Plus, I saved enough money to live without any income for about 6-12 months.

If you want to read about the technical side of our beta solution architecture, you can read another long-read here.

Preparing for the real production-ready paid release

We gave ourselves another 2 months to enhance our solution and set up a deadline for the 1st of June.

Over the month of April, I received an email from a US student who lost his internship because of COVID. He wanted to help us with something. So, we decided that it will be beneficial for both of us if he works for the next release for our open-sourced package.

In the end, we put him into credits and he found a paid job!

We were issuing new beta API keys, and getting some feedback.

We made our big update of the Python package that had about 900 stars on GitHub by that time. I did pretty much the same thing. This time, we also were #1 on HackerNews with 420 points.

So, our Python package now has 2200+ stars on Github. Plus, our email list was about 700 people by the time we were launching.

Launch

It was an 18 working hours day for me but in the end, we launched on the 1st of June US time. I just sent an email update to our users. It was a soft launch, nothing spectacular. We are still preparing for an HN and PH launch for our API.

So, over this month, we have 100+ people using our service. A bunch of them are paid clients. I am in the middle of negotiations with about 5 enterprise-level clients.

We still have plenty of work to do to make it a better solution.

What is next?

Sales. I hate to say it but I have to sell it. I am a tech person who just begins in sales and marketing. I suck at it. But, that is what I have to do. I hope to hit 1,000$ MRR by the end of the summer. It could be much more than that, but that would be a good start for us.

If you liked this post, please, help me find clients. Think about a company you know that might use our API and let me know (or, even better, introduce me to them if you have contacts)

How to follow us?

You can subscribe to updates at https://newscatcherapi.com/

I do write almost every day at https://codarium.substack.com/

Our Indie Hackers page https://www.indiehackers.com/product/newscatcher

I definitely forgot to write about a lot of stuff, so just ask me here.