Get insight in usage of the web APIs you provide
Usage of an API is normally a black box. You can try to understand the logs, but there is nothing user friendly about that.
I sold Callcounter to a new owner. This way I can focus all my time on everlint.com, which I enjoy working on more and which has already made some revenue. I hope the new owner of Callcounter succeeds in building a business around it, all the best to him!
Yesterday I was reading the book Traction by Grabriel Weinberg, the creator of Duckduckgo. Inspired by his karma widget that Duckduckgo originally used to get some visitors to it's site I decided to built something like that for Callcounter as well. Let's see how this goes:
https://callcounter.eu/blog/show-off-api-statistics-with-this-widget
I've just finished adding a live demo to the website, which can be used without an account! That should really get visitors engaged! Hope they like it. The live chat is now available on all pages, so if its not to their liking they can start a chat with me about it.
Introducing the free trial didn't get visitors to sign up either. I've now removed the credit card requirement, anybody willing to fill in the sign up form can start a 7 day free trial to evaluate Callcounter. Let's hope this will add some trial users and validate my idea.
After the launch it seemed most visitors were not convinced by the marketing site and demo screencast. To alleviate that I've added a 7 day free trial to the sign up flow. The only downside is this is only possible with a credit card, not with other payment methods (they require a few cents or one euro as validation payment.
Callcounter gathers API usage data and gives you insight in trends, slow parts and errors. This will help you a lot when debugging problems in the APIs your provide.
I just enabled sign ups! To celebrate I offer a free month when using the link I posted in the "product launch" category.
After quite some development I seem to have reached a state where the product would be useful for a Ruby on Rails API service! I'm still testing and improving things of course, but the first customers can really get started and receive value of using the product now.
I've just finished my previous job and am now full time developing Callcounter. The code so far was developed in my spare time and this was enough to prove the technical viability and get some feeling about the usefulness. I'm making everything more robust and developing a marketing site with subscription system.
Usage of an API is normally a black box. You can try to understand the logs, but there is nothing user friendly about that.