Show HN: Download Twitter data without API keys In April last year I started thinking about using Twitter in a smarter way. I wanted to do analytics on my tweets and find out more about people following me on Twitter. What kinds of things do people who follow me like and retweet? I decided to dig into the data and find out. When I went to try and download Twitter data in raw form I found I quickly got bogged down writing API wrangling code and fiddling with API keys. I just wanted to crunch some data but here I was wrangling Twitter's API. This was such a frustrating experience it suddenly looked like an opportunity to me. Was there room for a product here? A product which does one simple thing: help people extract Twitter data painlessly without writing any code. I did some research and discovered some tools that purported to do this, but none of them worked well for my use-case and all were badly designed and/or expensive. I decided to take a shot at it. I worked on this as a side project in a "calm company" fashion. Each week for 26 weeks I would put aside one day to chip away at the features. I tried not to think about how the issue tracker was filling up more and more. Several times I pared back the feature set to try to really focus on the core use-case. When my first user reached out and engaged I knew I might be onto something. I kept posting progress on Twitter and a few more people started to use it each week. Some of them came back, hinting at possible user retention. I hired a writer to write some articles to help with SEO and I kept working towards and MVP that I could use to test the market. Finally the day arrived where all of the critical issues in my issue tracker were closed. That meant it was launch day. That was yesterday. So here I am releasing this on Hacker News to you, dear reader. God speed little micro-SaaS, may the winds of fortune be at your back. https://tweetfeast.com/ February 2, 2022 at 08:28PM
Comments
Post a Comment