20+ data APIs built, exactly one carries the whole thing. Zero marketing. Still not sure what made it click.
I've been scraping for years, mostly freelance and side stuff. Eventually thought - I clearly enjoy this too much, might as well productize it. So I started shipping data APIs on a marketplace.
Built 20+ over time. Same effort, same code quality, same setup across all of them. Figured a handful would land.
What actually happened: 19 make near zero. One does ~$1k/mo, fully organic - never ran an ad, never posted anywhere, never did outreach. People just found it through marketplace search and subscribed.
The part that still bugs me as a builder: I can't cleanly explain why that one. It's not more polished than the others. My best guesses are (1) it sits in a niche with real recurring demand where the official access is painful, and (2) it happened to match what people were already searching for. But that's post-hoc reasoning.
Takeaway I'm sitting with: distribution is way more lopsided than effort. You don't get 20 small wins, you get 19 zeros and one thing that pays for everything. Maybe the game is just shipping enough shots to hit the one, rather than trying to make each one work.
Anyone else running a portfolio of micro-products - is the 1-out-of-20 pattern normal, or did I just spray too wide instead of doubling down?