Growing an API monitoring and analytics tool

Meet Simon Gurcke.

Simon is a software and machine learning engineer from Germany. He migrated to Australia 🦘 8 years ago and now lives on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland with his family.

Simon is the founder of Apitally, an API monitoring and analytics tool. Below is his story.

The story told by Simon Gurcke

About a year ago (in 2023), a combination of three things sparked my journey as a solo founder:

Need

I was a software engineer at a healthcare company called GenesisCare and responsible for multiple products with REST APIs.

I needed analytics and monitoring for these APIs, mainly to understand how they were being used. But dealing with healthcare data comes with a lot of regulatory red tape, which meant we couldn’t just use any SaaS tool.

Inspiration

I came across Plausible, a privacy-focused web analytics tool, and I wondered if something similar existed for REST APIs. I couldn’t find anything and realized there was a gap in the market for a simple and affordable tool with a focus on data privacy. The idea for Apitally was born.

Time

The company I worked for at the time went through a rough patch with a lack of direction, leaving me with spare time and mental capacity. I needed something to take my mind off the uncertainty at work - a side project.

Launching Apitally

I launched Apitally after about 4 months of coding.

It was still very basic and only had a simple template-based landing page. I had no followers on social media, no users apart from myself, and admittedly a rather unsexy product to promote - it doesn’t even use AI.

Consequently, I didn’t expect much from my first Product Hunt launch. But it went better than expected.

I was featured, landed on #27 for the day and a few users signed up, which motivated me enough to keep going. People seemed to like how easy Apitally was to set up, compared to other tools on the market, while providing key API metrics and insights out of the box.

It took another three months before I got my first paying customer, who provided great feedback on a video call before subscribing to a paid plan. His team is still one of the most active users of Apitally.

Marketing

As a software engineer I naturally tend to focus on developing the product, instead of investing my time in marketing.

I keep trying to convince myself that Apitally just needs that one additional feature before the customers line up. Of course I know that’s not how it works. I just enjoy building features, and using them myself afterwards.

Of the few things I have done to promote Apitally, directly targeting communities of the various supported web frameworks has been the most successful approach so far. For example, one of my blog posts is linked in the FastAPI docs, which generates a steady stream of highly relevant traffic and boosted my search engine rankings.

I’ve also posted in many relevant subreddits and GitHub discussion forums - examples below:

• Apitally - Simple API monitoring & analytics for Fastify apps

• A super easy-to-use API monitoring & analytics tool

The current state of Apitally

Despite my relatively poor efforts in marketing so far, Apitally’s user and customer base is growing, slowly but steadily. And to be honest, as a father of two little kids with a (now busy) 9-to-5 job, I don’t mind it that way.

I’m in this for the long run, rather than trying to make money quickly. I take pride in building a quality product, learning as I go, and that takes time.

Below is the visitor stats from the Apitally website. The peak in June was due to a blog post that was shared around a bit.

Apitally currently has about 100 monthly active users (MAU) and is cashflow-positive. The freemium model allows users to get started for free, so my challenge is converting them to paid users.

For small apps and single users (eg. hobbyists) Apitally is free to use. For higher allowances (more allowed app instances) and team features I offer affordable monthly subscription plans;

• $19 Starter Plan

• $49 Premium Plan

Currently MRR is at $465, which is just above my expenses. Monthly expenses may seem high, but Apitally processes a lot of data (~500 requests per minute), which requires more powerful cloud resources than most small SaaS.

My intention is to keep growing Apitally at a manageable pace (for a team of one), keep it fully bootstrapped and maintain the key principles of simplicity, affordability and data privacy.

In terms of marketing, I plan to focus mainly on SEO (like my blog), as most users learn about Apitally from search engines.

Get in contact with Simon Gurcke:

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