Latest / The Indie Hacker Podcast with Fexingo: Solo Developers, SaaS Side Projects, and Independent Tech / How a Solo Dev Hit 10K MRR With a Simple API Integration
Transcript
- Lucas: Mia Chen is a solo developer based in Portland, and she runs a SaaS called SyncSimple. It's a tiny API integration that connects inventory data between Shopify and a handful of smaller e-commerce platforms like WooCommerce and BigCommerce. Luna: Okay, so she's solving the inventory sync problem. That's not exactly new territory — there are big players like Zapier doing that. Lucas: Right, but that's the thing. Zapier handles thousands of integrations, but it's a middleman with a per-task pricing model that gets expensive fast if you're syncing inventory every few minutes. Mia's approach was dead simple: a single-purpose API that does just one thing — keep inventory counts in sync between two platforms — and she charges a flat $19 a month. Luna: Flat pricing for a specific pain point. Makes sense. How did she find her first customers? Lucas: She didn't build a landing page or post on Product Hunt. Instead, she went to niche e-commerce forums — places like the Shopify subreddit and a few WooCommerce Facebook groups. She saw people asking, 'How do I sync inventory when I sell on both platforms?' and she'd reply with a simple, 'I built something that does that, here's a link to try it.' Luna: So she sold in the comments section. That's a classic indie hacker move. Lucas: Exactly. She had a minimal prototype — an API endpoint and a basic setup page. No branding, no fancy interface. In the first week, five people signed up. Four of them were paying within the trial period. That gave her the signal to keep going. Luna: And from there, how did she scale to 10K MRR? That's about 500 customers at nineteen bucks a month. Lucas: Close — she actually hit 10K MRR with about 480 subscribers. The growth came from two things: word of mouth in those same forums, and a partnership with a single Shopify app developer who recommended SyncSimple as an add-on. That one referral channel drove about 60 percent of her signups. Luna: That's huge. A single integration partner feeding her customers. Lucas: Right. And she didn't have to pay for ads or content marketing. She just focused on making the API reliable. The key metric she tracked was sync failure rate — if it dropped below 99.9 percent, she'd get an alert and fix it immediately. Customers stayed because it worked. Luna: That reliability is probably the moat. If the API breaks, inventory gets out of sync, and a store could oversell. That's a nightmare for a small business. Lucas: Exactly. Mia told me that her biggest competitor isn't another micro-SaaS — it's the manual process. Store owners who update inventory by hand in two or three platforms. She's selling time and peace of mind. Luna: And speaking of peace of mind, this is actually a good moment to mention something. A show like this — it's ad-free, and that's intentional. But it does cost time and a bit of money to keep going. If you've gotten something useful out of these episodes, a couple of dollars a month genuinely makes a difference. Lucas: Yeah, that's right. We're talking about small-scale sustainable businesses — and this show runs the same way. Listener support at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo is what keeps it independent. No big sponsors, no pressure. Just knowing it's useful to people. Luna: Exactly. And Mia's story is a good example — a small, focused product can work if you solve one problem really well. Lucas: Right, back to her strategy. She didn't try to integrate with every platform at once. She started with just Shopify to WooCommerce. That's a single integration. Once that was solid, she added BigCommerce, then a couple of smaller platforms like Square Online and Wix Stores. Each new integration opened up a new customer segment. Luna: So she expanded the addressable market without spreading herself too thin. Lucas: Exactly. And she priced consistently at $19 per month for any single integration pair. If you wanted to sync Shopify to both WooCommerce and BigCommerce, you paid $38 — two separate subscriptions. Some customers grumbled, but she found that most only needed one pair. Luna: That's a clever bundling decision. It also keeps the product simple from her end — each integration is independent. Lucas: Right. The other smart move was that she didn't build a landing page until she hit 200 paying customers. She used a simple GitHub README as her website for the first six months. It explained what the API does, how to set it up, and had a link to a Stripe checkout page. That's it. Luna: No marketing site, no blog, no social media presence. Just a README and a payment link. That's about as lean as it gets. Lucas: Yeah, and she told me she was nervous about launching a proper site because she thought it would invite more competition. But eventually she did put up a simple landing page — a one-pager with a screenshot of the setup flow and a testimonial from a customer who said it saved them ten hours a week. Luna: That's a powerful testimonial. Ten hours a week is a real number. Lucas: It is. And that page converted well. She went from 200 to 480 customers in about four months after the landing page went live. The main driver was still the partner referral, but the landing page helped close people who found her through search. Luna: So the SEO play was minimal — just the landing page and some forum posts. But the partner channel was the rocket fuel. Lucas: Exactly. And she wasn't paying for that partnership — it was a mutual recommendation. The Shopify app developer recommended SyncSimple because it solved a gap in their own product. Mia never asked for money, just a link in their documentation. Luna: That's a smart, low-cost distribution strategy. I wonder how many solo devs overlook that kind of indirect partnership. Lucas: A lot, I think. They focus on building features or running ads when a single integration partner can do more for you. Mia's approach is a case study in focus. One problem, one integration, one partner, one price. Luna: And now she's at 10K MRR. Does she plan to keep it as a solo operation? Lucas: She says she wants to stay solo for now. She's thinking about adding a few more integration pairs — maybe to ERP systems like Odoo or even to some POS systems. But she's in no rush. The revenue covers her living expenses in Portland, and she likes the independence. Luna: It's a good life. And a good reminder that you don't need a huge team or a complex product to build a sustainable SaaS. Lucas: Right. Pick a narrow pain point, build the simplest possible solution, and get it in front of the people who are already complaining about it in public forums. That's the indie hacker playbook, and Mia executed it perfectly. Luna: I'll be watching to see if she adds that ERP integration. That could be a whole new revenue stream. Lucas: Yeah, me too. And if it happens, we'll probably have her back on the show.