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Friends, come warm yourselves by the flaming wreckage of my micro-SaaS

51 points by graderjs 5y ago

Irongirl1 5y ago
I wanted to try this. I can never get scrapers to work for me. EVER. I once wasted a whole day trying to get one to work and the support was a complete waste. I finally just gave upon the idea of ever being able to get the data I needed by myself without overpaying. This type of stuff helps. His pricing model was great pay for what you use and it gave you a chance to try it cheaply without risking a monthly charge. I think the biggest problem is that techie really don't get how non-techie a lot of their proposed customers are...so you build overly complicated plinko machines...that never seem to work correctly and get upset when we won't even try them. "Once burned, Twice Shy."
brauhaus 5y ago
You do have a talent for writing. I have stuff to do, my wife is calling me downstairs and I couldn't stop reading it. (Ok, now I have to go. She's really mad)
eddyg 5y ago
> I once worked on an app that went into the App Store with no problem despite violating a whole section in the terms of service. That was because some people inside Apple liked the app and gave it the green light. I’m curious to know if this app is still in the App Store?
jdvh 5y ago
Kudos to those who launch. It’s always harder than you’d think. That said, I don’t understand why people go the gimmicky route the moment they want to make something commercial. Even a micro saas has to provide something of real value. You can’t skip that part, and surprisingly, it’s much easier to charge money if your initial focus is just on making a really good product.
FDSGSG 5y ago
I think Chris could've just hustled a bit more. Instead of dealing with the official APIs, he could've acquired a few proxies and started scraping twitter via the website or mobile app.
ramphastidae 5y ago
Great write up. But, yes, this project was 100% doomed from the start — it’s essentially “violate Twitter TOS as a service.” I recall seeing the link title on HN (“ Show HN: Download Twitter data without API keys”) and thinking, wow, no chance that will last a day.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  There is a business model there, but it isn't "write 50 lines to talk to the Twitter API", it's "play cat & mouse with Twitter's anti-scraping techniques". The latter is absolutely valuable and you can make money off it, but it requires significant resources - access to a large pool of IP addresses, an decent engineering team to be able to defeat the protections in a timely manner (as they change constantly) and either be based in a jurisdiction where you can ignore Twitter's lawsuits or have enough cash to litigate it out.
hattmall 5y ago
So is it correct that this was just using the API itself?? Like sort of an API proxy??
Claude_Shannon 5y ago
I just have to say I absolutely love this title.

51 points by graderjs 5y ago

I wanted to try this. I can never get scrapers to work for me. EVER. I once wasted a whole day trying to get one to work and the support was a complete waste. I finally just gave upon the idea of ever being able to get the data I needed by myself without overpaying. This type of stuff helps. His pricing model was great pay for what you use and it gave you a chance to try it cheaply without risking a monthly charge. I think the biggest problem is that techie really don't get how non-techie a lot of their proposed customers are...so you build overly complicated plinko machines...that never seem to work correctly and get upset when we won't even try them. "Once burned, Twice Shy."

brauhaus 5y ago

You do have a talent for writing. I have stuff to do, my wife is calling me downstairs and I couldn't stop reading it. (Ok, now I have to go. She's really mad)

eddyg 5y ago

> I once worked on an app that went into the App Store with no problem despite violating a whole section in the terms of service. That was because some people inside Apple liked the app and gave it the green light. I’m curious to know if this app is still in the App Store?

jdvh 5y ago

Kudos to those who launch. It’s always harder than you’d think. That said, I don’t understand why people go the gimmicky route the moment they want to make something commercial. Even a micro saas has to provide something of real value. You can’t skip that part, and surprisingly, it’s much easier to charge money if your initial focus is just on making a really good product.

FDSGSG 5y ago

I think Chris could've just hustled a bit more. Instead of dealing with the official APIs, he could've acquired a few proxies and started scraping twitter via the website or mobile app.

ramphastidae 5y ago

Great write up. But, yes, this project was 100% doomed from the start — it’s essentially “violate Twitter TOS as a service.” I recall seeing the link title on HN (“ Show HN: Download Twitter data without API keys”) and thinking, wow, no chance that will last a day.

Nextgrid 5y ago
There is a business model there, but it isn't "write 50 lines to talk to the Twitter API", it's "play cat & mouse with Twitter's anti-scraping techniques". The latter is absolutely valuable and you can make money off it, but it requires significant resources - access to a large pool of IP addresses, an decent engineering team to be able to defeat the protections in a timely manner (as they change constantly) and either be based in a jurisdiction where you can ignore Twitter's lawsuits or have enough cash to litigate it out.

hattmall 5y ago

So is it correct that this was just using the API itself?? Like sort of an API proxy??

Claude_Shannon 5y ago

I just have to say I absolutely love this title.