I shipped an image manipulation API in 11 hrs
Yesterday I spent 11 hardcore hours building and deploying an image manipulation API based on the well known ImageMagick library. You can use it to turn your ImageMagick command line into a serverless request. You get image manipulation superpowers without having to deploy or maintain any infrastructure yourself.
Here's a Twitter thread documenting my progress:
Here's the product 👉 https://rapidapi.com/chr15m/api/magic-image
Today I am working on adding more features and better documentation. If you have any feedback on the idea, implementation, documentation, or pricing please let me know!
Why I decided to jump in
A few weeks back I read this article by Mauro about building a web scraping API on RapidAPI. He very quickly acquired customers without doing any marketing at all. That's the introvert indie hacker's dream right? In the comments @kotartemiy said that he had a similar experience with his Extract News API. Then I saw this article by @zerotousers about marketplaces being the one place where "Build it and they will come" is still true. The idea of doing no sales and still making sales is too tempting.
So I did some research around search volume and looked for gaps in the APIs offered on RapidAPI. There is no way to tell what the actual volume of users is on RapidAPI. So I didn't know if building this would be a waste of time. However I also knew that I could ship this very quickly on my current stack. That means the most I will waste is a couple of days of work, and I will learn a lot in the process.
So that's it. It's shipped now and ready to roll. Let's see if anybody shows up. I'll write another post following up with numbers in a couple of weeks.
Great API
Question :
Where do you host your API ? and how ? is it serverless?
And now after you publish it ? do you see any traffic?
Hosted on my own Digital Ocean box. No traffic so far.
Very cool! I recently we down the idea rabbit hole of image manipulation APIs. I landed on wanting to build essentially an image shortlinker that would take in an image URL like: https://mystandardcdn.com/moauntains.jpeg and give you back a URL like: fleximage.io/abc123. Then you could prepend on any query strings you want to manipulate the image like, fleximage.io/abc123?width=600&height=100&resizeMode=crop, etc. Then when requested my server would fetch the base image, manipulate it, and return the new image. Ended up dropping the idea though because of no way to market it, no idea who the target audience is, difficult to bill, and competitors were very cheap already.
Seems like your marketplace is a great way to avoid those issues! Let us know how it works out!
Cool idea.