Title: 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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x2F;or expensive. I decided to take a shot at it.<p>I worked on this as a side project in a &quot;calm company&quot; 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>God speed little micro-SaaS, may the winds of fortune be at your back.
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