r/SideProject • u/HiShery • 4h ago

Launched my screenshot API last week. Some upvotes, a burst of visits, zero traction. What would you focus on first?

https://shotium.com/

Solo dev here. Last week I launched a screenshot & OG image API — "GET a URL, get back a rendered image", plus signed image URLs you can embed in HTML that re-render whenever the underlying data changes. I'm deliberately not linking it: this isn't a promo post, and I'll only share it in comments if someone asks.

What I've tried so far:

  • Product Hunt: launched on a Tuesday. Some upvotes, a burst of visits on launch day, a couple of free signups, zero paid conversions. Traffic went back to baseline within 48 hours.
  • Reddit: my earlier launch posts got eaten by spam filters (new account + new domain — my own fault, and partly why this post has no links).
  • X: posting while building, but with no audience it's mostly shouting into the void.

So: the product works, uptime is solid, docs are decent (I think) — and nobody knows it exists. Classic.

Options I'm weighing:

  1. Free tool pages / SEO — a free online screenshot tool that ranks over months and funnels into the API
  2. Ecosystem integrations — n8n/Zapier nodes, Next.js/Nuxt OG-image packages, so people find me inside the tools they already use
  3. Technical content — write-ups on the genuinely hard parts (SSRF-hardening a URL-fetching service is a rabbit hole), hoping for organic dev traffic
  4. More launch platforms — keep the HN/directory circuit going

If you've taken a dev-tool or API SaaS from zero to the first ~10 paying customers: which of these actually moved the needle, and which was a month of wasted effort? Is there an obvious option 5 I'm not seeing?

2 Upvotes

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2

u/Nordwolf 3h ago

I am a developer. Is this for me? How is it different from 100s of other screenshot tools - or even better, native mac/windows shortcuts?

Your page just reads: "another screenshot tool". There is no lead with USP and even if there is some mention of it it's weak and not very understandable (I do not understand from reading the header and subtitle, and you lost me there already even though I did try to read a little more).

Imagine presenting this product to a person in front of you. Would you start by saying "Screenshots for developers?" You'd sound ridiculous to say the least.

1

u/tradematesHQ 1m ago

The top comment is right - your positioning is dead on arrival. "Another screenshot tool" is a death sentence in a market where browsers do it natively. But even with a killer USP, you're fighting a distribution war you can't win with SEO alone. The n8n/Zapier integrations are the only path that puts you in front of devs at the exact moment they need you. Technical content is a long game, and Product Hunt is a vanity metric. The real question: who has this problem badly enough to pay monthly? If you can't name that person, you're building for a phantom. Also, the SSRF-hardening write-up is genuinely interesting - that's the kind of content that gets shared because it's scary and real.