Perform Unlimited Google Searches
I found myself doing a lot of Google Searches for SEO. I ran into an issue with captchas and Google blacklisting my IP address. I need a way to perform more searches at a faster rate. So I created an API to bypass it.
After some successful blog posts. I started getting a steady stream of visitors to my website. Not a lot, but better than zero.
https://goog.io finally got it first customer. It was exciting to finally build a project from start to finish and seeing it through till the end.
Now I have code for a SaaS platform that I can modify to deploy other API services.
After months of coding, testing and connecting my website with Stripe I finally finished my website and ready for customers. The only problem was I had no traffic. The only traffic I had was me refreshing the page to test out the HTML code.
I know there was a niche for my Googio, but I needed to get the word out. From my experience with RapidAPI, I knew that blog post was the way to get traffic. So for the next couple of months I was writing a blog for any idea that popped into my head.
I post most of my blog post on https://blog.goog.io/ and do guest posting on Medium and Hacker Noon.
The initial blog posting continue to deliver ~10 new free users a day. I had some users convert to paying subscribers but had no idea what the traffic source were or how to convert more paying customers. Also I didn't like the idea of RapidAPI taking 20% of the profits.
I wasn't working when the pandemic hit. So it was a good opportunity for me to build my own user subscription,and API management system. With my subscription management system I could control the profits, offer more discounts, improve the customer experience, and control my API service more.
So I started to build, https://goog.io
I was at work when I got a notification that someone had subscribed to my Pro plan ($100/month). This was my first paying customer. When I logged on to RapidAPI dashboard I noticed that I was getting a steady stream of free user signups but had no idea why. It couldn't have been because of my one blog post. It turn out my API service was featured in one of RapidAPI's Ruby tutorial, because of how simple and reliable my API service was.
I need a quick way to find out if users would pay for a Google Search API. I didn't want to create a new platform to protect my API service, process payment, and manage subscriptions. So I decided to use RapidAPI an API market place that handles all the payment processing and charge a 20% fee on all transactions.
Hooking up my API to RapidAPI was simple. I had no idea how to price the subsciption so I tested out a Free, $100, and $200 plans. I also spent some time writing a blog post about the service. Then life got busy and I totally forgot about it.
It took a month for me to finish the API server and deploying it to AWS, but I'm finally done building the minimum viable product for https://goog.io. I worked mostly nights and weekends, and I coded the whole thing in Python since that's what I'm the most comfortable with. I containerize everything to make the deployment easier. But I'm excited to start talking to customers and see what they think about the product so far!
I had a large list of queries to ask to perform Google searches. So I thought I could easily write a Python script to automate it. Little did I know that it wasn't a simple. After a few searches I ran into CAPTCHAs. So I developed a system to rotate my IP address on every search request and bypassing the CAPTCHAs.
I've read so many times that you should solve your own problem, and so I sat down and developed an API so I could easily perform searches through the system from anywhere. Which led me to the idea for Googio - A Google Search AP!
I found myself doing a lot of Google Searches for SEO. I ran into an issue with captchas and Google blacklisting my IP address. I need a way to perform more searches at a faster rate. So I created an API to bypass it.