Oilprice API
Provides a simple API for fetching the oil price
As I mentioned in the previous milestone, a lot of oilpriceapi.com traffic comes from SEO. So in reality I have done very little to achieve this. It is just growing organically over time.
What's interesting about the recent batch of new customers is that they're all from the crypto/Ethereum space which I am also heavily involved with but it seems to be a total coincidence.
OilpriceAPI is the first product I've built that has returned a consistent and not insignificant MRR, at least to me anyway.
I built OilpriceAPI initially to scratch my own itch as they say.
I used to work in the Oil & Gas industry and wanted to set up a Twitter bot that would tweet out the latest oil price every hour on the hour.
I browsed about a little bit trying to find a simple way to fetch the data that I needed to do this, but nothing out there was simple or cheap enough to justify it. So I ended up building a bot that fetched the latest price from multiple live sources across the internet, took and average and then tweeted the result.
The twitter account (https://twitter.com/oilpricehourly) was wildly successful for what it was and so I thought others might also like to use the data I was fetching on a regular basis.
In 2019 I finally got around to building out a very simple SaaS solution on top of that original bot and offering the latest oil price through a simple API to others.
It has slowly grown over the following months without any marketing. Mostly this is due to the fact that the website is number 1 in google for "oil price api". I managed to get there due to the popularity of the regular tweets from @oilpricehourly which always link to the website as the source of the data.
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This is the type of product I love, and you've done a great job at executing the site design and API documentation. Congrats. Have you considered doing this for other asset classes?
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Hey Matt, thanks for checking it all out. 😄
I have considered doing other asset classes but there are couple of reasons I’ve decided not to.
- I got kind of lucky with the Twitter account getting popular which seems to have had a big impact on seo.
- I don’t think a similar tactic would work well for another commodity, the oil price is kind of a special case in terms of social interest.
I also tend to jump from idea to idea and I’m several side-projects on from this one now. 😅
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Just FYI, it looks like your Twitter account is currently restricted.
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Congratz Gareth.
I'm curious - do you know who are your customers? This is super niche so I wonder who needs this API.-
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Hey, thanks! Yeah, my customers generally fit into two categories:
- Agency / indy web developers building websites for oil related businesses who want to display the latest oil price on their websites as part of the design.
- Oil industry related companies who want to either chart or display oil price data as part of internal tools or analysis.
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Very cool API. Where you source the data from? Other APIs or scrape the values from websites?
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This is cool, congrats. I really want my next biz to be an api biz. I had alot of admiration for folks who build these things.
Hey @gareth congrats on the latest milestone and looks like things couldn't any more niche than Oil price API haha.
How did you come up with the idea? Was it more of a side project just to build something or did you already know there is a market for it?
Also who are the type of customers are using Oil Price API?
Will providing further analytics like yesterday's price, last week's price etc provide further value to the users?
Awesome! What's the breakdown of your paid plans so far?
Hey, thanks! Breakdown of subscriptions is approx:
Small ($9/m) - 75%
Mid ($29/m) - 18%
Large ($99/m) - 7%
very nice! How did you approach SEO?
Hey, thanks! So oilpriceapi.com has been number one in google for "oil price API", looks like it's number two now but the number one spot is not relevant for that search. If you're a developer looking to get the oil price into your app, that's what you'll search for.
I got to that spot in Google with a bit of luck. I originally set up a Twitter bot (https://twitter.com/OilPriceHourly) that tweets the oil price on the hour every hour. It became quite popular in Oil & Gas twitter. Then I decided to provide the API behind it as a service and linked to it in every tweet as the source of the data. Because the oil price tweets get quite a lot of engagement if the price is volatile, I think this has contributed to it's Google rankings. I'm not totally sure about that, but I haven't done any other type of content marketing for that website.
Ok, that's interesting! I've not heard of that approach before