A year ago I got my first paid customer for my social media scraper API that I had published on API marketplace.

API Published: 14 May 2023
First Paid Customer: 18 May 2023
Second Paid Customer: 8 June 2023 and in June we made $156.7

Learning phase

It took me approx a month to learn a framework, and an additional 15 days to write the code for the API.
I had this idea from October 2022 but I kept procrastinating, telling myself I'd tackle it next month, while simply enjoying life as a young man.

Then, after another month (July 2023), I published another API with lower pricing and more API calls, as it required less maintenance compared to the previous one.

Reddit's Contribution to Growing MRR and Acquiring Paid Customers

Initially I set pricing low to attract customers, later I received advice from this sub and others to increase pricing, I increased pricing and my MRR increased by 1.7x

On 1 Jan 2024, I beta launched own API portal for second API(which was launched in July 2023), we switched our few existing customers from API marketplace to our own portal.

How Much Marketing Have I Done?

So far, I haven't invested in any paid advertising. Instead, I've simply shared information about my API a few times on Reddit and on the API marketplace. Our second paid customer is still with us. Most of the our paid customers are still with us because of quality support, I suggest them solutions based on their use cases for free.

Over the past year, I got a lot freelancing geeks related to social media automation(especially Instagram).

Today both APIs are live and we have around 140+ paid customers with custom plans.

I'm a backend developer, not really experienced in marketing, but I am good at Instagram scraping/automation related works. There's a lot I still need to learn, I am learning a lot things from Reddit and Twitter.