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DEEP DIVE
A solo developer makes $32K a month from a tool that takes screenshots of websites. Here are 12 boring APIs you could build next, and the one number that decides how big they get.
There’s a business that does exactly one thing. You send it a web address. It sends you back a picture of that web page.
That’s it. That’s the product.
I know. When I first read about it I thought, surely that’s a free feature somewhere. Surely Google does that. Surely you can just press a button on your phone. And you can, if you want one screenshot. But if you’re a company that needs 50,000 screenshots a month, automatically, with the cookie banners removed, the ads blocked, the lazy images loaded and the fonts not broken, it turns out you really, really don’t want to build that yourself.
So you pay ScreenshotOne.
It’s run by one guy. Dmytro Krasun, a server-side engineer who quit his job and launched it solo in May 2022. No funding, no cofounder, no employees. Today it does $32,000 a month across more than 1,000 paying customers, and it’s served over 100 million API requests.
The first month it made $7.
Now here’s why I actually wanted to write this one.
Most business stories stop at the good number. This one doesn’t, because Dmytro did something almost nobody does. Earlier this year he posted publicly that his growth had stalled. Then Jason Cohen, the founder of WP Engine, offered to go through every number in the business live on camera. Dmytro said yes. He opened the dashboard. And Jason told him, pretty much to his face, that the business had hit a ceiling that no amount of hard work would break through.
That hour is the most useful thing I’ve found on the internet about building a boring software business. Not because of the success. Because of the ceiling, and because the reason for the ceiling is something you can check before you build anything.
So this issue is two things. The playbook for the “boring infrastructure API” model, the unglamorous plumbing that other companies pay for so they don’t have to build it. And the one number that decides how big any of these gets, which is the thing most people never think about until it’s too late.
We are going to cover:
How does a one-person API get 1,000 customers with no sales team and almost no blog? The traffic system is sitting in plain view on his website, and I’ll walk through it page by page.
The formula that told Dmytro exactly where his business would stop growing, and how to run it on your own idea in five minutes.
The stickiness test: why the same product can be a $30K business or a $300K business depending on one question.
12 boring APIs you could build next, scored on how sticky their customers are, plus 3 I’d avoid.
The new distribution channel both Dmytro and Jason landed on, which barely existed two years ago.
Where this model breaks, including the part about not having taken a real vacation in three years.