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I built a social media analytics API. At its peak, it brought in about $23k/mo, with server costs at about $3k/mo. When I got a job at Instagram, they decided it was a conflict of interest and told me to sell it, which I did for a very healthy six figure sum.

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I know Meta pays a lot, but did you ever consider an alternate path where you didn't take that job and instead grew the service out further? $23k/month is good money.

I thought about it, but I hadn't originally built it to make money. It was a weekend hack project that I never expected to do that well, and suddenly the prospect of centering my life around a product I didn't really feel passionate about felt like a nightmare. I had a lot of anxiety about whether my external dependencies I'd built on top of would continue to work, and reached the point where a large payoff was worth it to de-risk myself from $23k/mo becoming $0/mo with no exit.

gotcha, certainly a win so congrats! Would be interested to hear what it did.

smart move

You couldn’t sell it then accept the position?

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