I actually did this too... I create Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/) which (when I created it) was an RSS syndication platform as a service.

You gave us RSS feeds and then we would index them and send you the output without having to deal with the insanity of RSS feeds.

This was a decade ago though.

I've been running it since and now it's more of a massive search engine of content - nearly a petabyte at this point.

We have an Elasticsearch API which our customers query. We also have a streaming API if you just want to listen to the crawl data directly.

It's been a wild ride but here's my big takeaway - if your company is profitable it actually might be because you're sitting on something MASSIVE and don't realize it.

Datastreamer was the first company in the content indexing space and we were WAY ahead of everyone else.

I was more focused on enjoying life, traveling, backpacking, etc.

In retrospect when you're sitting on a rocket it might make sense to buy more gas and light up that bad boy.

I'm actually in the middle of a (mild) pivot of Datastreamer right now. We think it might have significant value for the coming 'code war' we're in right now with Russia.

With companies continually looking at social media as a way to manipulate democratic societies these governments need tools (and data) to figure out where they're being attacked and how their citizens are being manipulated.