From Zero to Hero to Zero — On the Shoulders of Giants

I have nothing to promote.

I'm "between projects" and figured it may be interesting to share how I went from zero to hero back to zero on my last two projects — and what you may learn from my story. Perhaps someone here will figure out a way around the inevitable, because it can be a fun, fast and very profitable ride, until it's not.

Everyone here knows that it can take forever to get traction. To kindle that fire-starting piece of recurring revenue. They say to launch fast and fail fast — but that's tricky when building momentum takes such an ungodly amount of time.

All of that, however, you can skip.

You just need to figure out how to hitch a ride on a magical bullet train of growth. A train so fast, it will take your product from zero to thousands of users, sometimes literally over night. And it will cost ya ... nothing.

Well, alchemy, you'd say. A shallow claim, impossible to replicate for my project. Like the guy who traded a paperclip for a house, or the million-dollar-homepage one-trick pony that only works... exactly once.

It's not alchemy, though. It exists. Instead of building a bullet train of growth, you just ride on someone else's train. Easy.

But, there is of course, a catch.

I know that, because it happened to me. Twice. Two terribly-programmed websites went from zero to +100k revenue, and then all back to nothing (or almost nothing). Mind you, it wasn't the product, people loved the product. It wasn't the market, the market is still there, even today.

I've written all of this, to warn you.

A few days ago I read about someone's six-month weekend-project — here or HN — going bust literally over night, because they had fallen into this very same pit of trouble.

To understand why so many fall for this, we need to rewind back to when I came across that magical firehose of growth for the first time...

Every once in a good while, a new (social-) platform moves to the main stage. Clubhouse, Reddit, or TikTok — for me, it was Twitter; and for my second rise and fall, it was Instagram. For those platforms, user growth is literally hockey-stick insane. Fantastic for the founders, but rarely for its users or the product.

The dev team is completely overwhelmed with keeping up and hackers out, trying to interview and hire in the hundreds. Endless meetings, triaging, onboarding and partnership inquiries to balance; reworking their internal structures, hierarchies etc. etc. — all at the cost of eventually coming to a complete and utter stand-still, platform-wise.

Users, however, WANT MORE. They want feature A, B and C. They want to do this, and that, and connect it with other tools and platforms.

This is where you strike.

Your job is to build that connective tissue. You build that on-top-of-the-platform product that everyone wants but the main guys don't have time or the headspace to ship, for now.

Once you ship, you're tag-teaming with a superstar. You will get you noticed, and doors will start to open, very quickly.

I always compare it to being far out in the desert. Even if you're shifting some of the best lemon soda there ever was, nobody but the sand and wind will see your offering. Maybe someone rides past and buys a drink, but they'll continue onwards. Maybe they'll tell someone, or a flyer in town is picked up by someone walking by. In reality, you would be a fool to expect a lot of people turning up at your stand in that remote and lonely desert. That desert is the internet, and you're not a superstar. As sad as that thought is.

Now, imagine you would just set up your lemonade stand in the middle of Burning Man. Still far out in the desert, but with A LOT OF THIRSTY PEOPLE around. Money will be made, and that quickly.

Hold up... there was a problem, wasn't there?

Yeah, that nasty catch. It is waiting, holding out patiently. It may be quiet, but it is becoming ready to take you out just when you're extra busy upgrading your lemon juicers.

WHAMMM.... the bad news begin.

You didn't have a permit for that stand, they take you down immediately. That's it, you're banned. For life. Game Over. Refunds, e-mails, wasted lines of code.

Stupid of you to work without a permit, eh? Well, let's say you actually had that permit. Someone at Burning Man Corporate Directors Board happened to notice just how much money that stupid little lemonade stand is making. Everyone is drinking lemon juice, what the hell, who is this guy?

So corporate Burning Man decides to offer this at their new festival bar directly next year. Not only that, there's all these burners who picked up on your success. They'll be bringing all the lemons to the yard, too, next year. Someone's gotta to pay for all that fur. Lemonade stands everywhere :/

Hold up... why are we talking about lemonade stands in the desert?

Because they're easier to talk through than the horrors (and opportunities) that will await you, should you decide to become rich and famous (okay, just temporarily rich) by selling your stuff on someone else's turf.

By turf I of course mean someone else's hype cycle. Remember, you want to ride their bullet train of growth. In my case, it was Twitter and later Instagram — and today may be just about any other super hyped-up social network out there. Clubhouse is gone, but there'll be more soon, you just wait for it, and you will see it calling for you.

By deciding to build a product on top of another platform's API, you solve the biggest problem right out of the gate: traction in the market. They have done all that hard work for you. It's a success, it attracts millions of people and not a day goes by where the news cycle doesn't cover the product, where friends or family talk about it over dinner or at Christmas.

Your job is to swim as close as possible to that giant whale.

Twitter was that whale for me. It allowed me to swim very close (a public API) and it didn't mind me having all the extra fish along the way.

I had noticed that part of Twitter's appeal played directly into people's egos. How many likes do my tweets get or how many followers do I have (I mean, just think of that term for a hot second). Ego stuff.

Twitter's cute and rather basic interface gave everyone that quick ego-boost, but what they didn't give you was a tool to pump this ego-cycle into overdrive.

That's where I swim into the picture.

I created a tool that would basically be the Google Analytics of your social performance. A tool that would help you figure out your own strategies, approaches and targets — with loads and loads of data. SO MUCH DATA.

I charged $20 a year for access, and it took off. The heart of the product was some PHP code that essentially used Twitter's API, cached lots and lots of its data locally, and did some very basic data processing on it. The other 90% of the product was PayPal, Stripe and similar decoration around it, subscription management and support, a mobile app of sorts and some rewrites.

Everything I did was allowed by Twitter. I HAD THE PERMIT.

So, whenever someone company signed up on Twitter, they inevitably started looking for a tool to help them out. A tool that would get them ahead of everyone else.

Did you just land on my page? Well, well, well, just login, subscribe, done.

It was a perfect business. Money kept coming in, revenue went up and server costs remained incredibly low. All the traffic was handled easily by S3 in its early days and two or three incredibly cheap German virtual servers.

I mean, life was fantastic.

Until it wasn't anymore.

A few months in, Twitter's API started to throw time-outs, here and there. First, every once in a while, then daily, then hourly. Connectivity issues became worse, the API got worse and worse from version to version, revision to revision, it became stricter and tighter and even harder to comply with new regulations coming in from corporate Twitter.

I had to tell my users that data can take up to 24 hours, sometimes a week to arrive. I remember when (female lead in latest Spiderman movie)'s account signed up, with (I think) 7 million followers or so, and they sent me an e-mail after a few days asking how long the data would take to process (so they would see their dashboard for the first time). I did the math, and was about to tell them it's only going to be ANOTHER 3 MONTHS, ... should be quick.

Not a great place to be...

Things only got worse from there. Twitter's management noticed that developers started developing... a negative mood. So, naturally, they came up with a great way to re-build trust with all the nerds: a competitive vision chart.

I'm sure you can find it online somewhere. It had a quadrant — 4 boxes — on it, and essentially said: here's 3 things that Twitter would NOT like to see API efforts to be invested (advertising, home feed, etc.) — and one box that had the sweet sweet word "Analytics" on it. I don't remember the exact wording, but it said something along the lines of: "basically, don't do those three, but you can totally do 'analytics' in peace and we will leave you to it."

I was in joy. I survived the visionary corporate dream-killing laser cutter.

I AM THE ANALYTICS NOW.

Until ... a few short months later, Twitter launched their free and fully-featured analytics platform. Out of nowhere. Not a whisper or a word of warning.

And, what's worse — they offered data nobody else had access to. Real-time data. Data like "impressions and views" — none of that stuff was available as a third-party. They didn't copy me, I am not vain nor delusional about it, they just did what some senior/junior engineer pairing felt was the next fun thing to do and they shipped it.

I was crushed.

A free and fully-featured product, offered by the whale itself.

I knew that any further line of code would be in vain, so I decided to stop all feature work immediately, and I haven't touched the code in almost a decade now. While it's still making (very little) money, and is still kind of working, it was a sudden and sad end for a neat little product. I wasn't the only one. Many third-party Twitter apps went down that very same void.

And, quite frankly, I can't complain. I was warned before and during, many times over. You'll find old Hacker News threads where they warned me, I've had conversations with so many others who've had similar experiences. They will break your heart, you will not come out on top the other end. Okay okay, but the money...

I ignored that advice, like many of you will too, because "money now and worries later" felt like a much better plan than "worries now and no money".

I ended up with a product I wasn't able to sell (nobody wants to buy a sinking ship, and I am not the kind of person who likes to profit from a broken car). I wasn't able to see nor transform into a pivot in any form or way.

Eventually, I knew I had to move on to other things. I decided to use up the savings, do contracting work on the side and just hope for the next project to pick me up again.

Just, this time, I wouldn't be stupid enough to build on the shoulders of a giant again. I don't need the bullet train of growth...

Then, I realized that Instagram had no analytics platform.

Well, fool me once...

(I will have to cut the post short here, I'll try to tell the rest of the story in another post if anyone is interested. I did end up making the same mistake twice, continued to create another analytics platform, this time for Instagram, which pivoted early into a scheduling tool and brought in over +$100k revenue before it all came crashing down hard. Including a nice phone call with Facebook's law firm, offering up a 1-hour deadline to get sued, or give up).

Anyways, be safe out there.

Ride the hype, but be ready for the fall. APIs suck. Long live APIs.