The archive · Small Business & Money · Product decision · 2019
Mohd Danish sells his bootstrapped public-apis.xyz API directory for $22k
A solo developer in India turned a GitHub public-API list into a searchable site, rode Product Hunt traffic, and sold it for $22k in nine months.
Public APIs (public-apis.xyz)
What it had to solve
Danish, a bootstrapped solo developer in India, saw that developers everywhere shared GitHub's curated public-API list, but nobody owned a searchable version of it — and he wanted a micro-startup that could actually sell.
How it works
In December 2019, "My Bootstrapped Micro-Startup Got Acquired" spread across Hacker News from mohddanish.me — the blog of Danish, a solo developer in India. The product was public-apis.xyz: a searchable directory of public APIs that took a much-shared GitHub list and gave it a proper, browsable home on the web.
The move was packaging rather than invention. Instead of creating a new dataset, Danish built the layer on top of an existing one — search, browse, a page per API — registered a hyphenated .xyz domain, and launched it on Product Hunt, where developer traffic spiked. Screenshots in the post-mortem showed most of that traffic arriving through Hacker News and Product Hunt launches rather than building gradually.
He ran the site bootstrapped and sold it after roughly nine months for $22,000 — a sum commenters weighed against Indian living costs (one estimated about thirty months of expenses) and against a few weeks of a US senior engineer's salary. The thread's argument was whether he had undersold a growing asset or wisely cashed out momentum that launch screenshots suggested would be hard to sustain.
Why it lands
- He sold convenience, not data: the GitHub list was free, so the value lay in making it searchable and ownable.
- A solo developer with no audience inherited demand that already existed, instead of having to create it.
- Launching on Product Hunt timed attention to the sale, turning a traffic spike into an exit window.
- A $22k price beat nine months of local salary, so the exit made sense even where it looked tiny by US standards.
What it did
Roughly nine months in, a buyer paid $22,000 for the bootstrapped site; his post-mortem drew 233 points and 83 comments on Hacker News on 2019-12-12, where readers debated selling too early versus cashing out launch-dependent traffic.
What you can take
Packaging wins: one solo dev added search to GitHub's API list and turned it into a $22k exit — but buyers price traffic that survives the launch, so sell on durability, not the spike.
Since then
Commenters identified Danish's newer project, TweetJobs.dev, and urged him to hold out for more on any future sale. The durable lesson readers drew was about momentum pricing: buyer-savvy commenters pointed at the Hacker News and Product Hunt spikes in his screenshots, while others defended the bird in hand — $22,000 bought years of building time in India. The mohddanish.me essay stayed the primary record of the deal, and the HN thread, 233 points and 83 comments, remains where its price was argued over.
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