I Built a Screenshot API from Tbilisi — 50 Users, 9 Paying, Here's Everything I Learned

Let me start with the real numbers, because the internet is tired of vanity metrics. 50 total users. 9 paying customers. 2,900 API requests. 9.8% error rate. ~$9/month MRR from external users (one confirmed paying customer via Paddle). 900+ cold emails sent. 35 Twitter followers. That's what six months of full-time solo development looks like for SnapAPI, a web capture and content extraction API that I built from Tbilisi, Georgia. This isn't a story about hockey stick growth or the mythical overnight success. This is what actually building a SaaS alone looks like — the grind, the failures, the small wins, and the brutal lessons that nobody tells you on Twitter. The Backstory: Why I Moved and Why I Built This Four years ago, I was a Swift and iOS developer in Saint Petersburg, Russia. I was doing okay — not broke, not rich, just... fine. But fine doesn't scale, and I had a family: my wife (a talented hair colorist), our 10-year-old son, and dreams bigger than what seemed possible in Rus