This is week 7 of building Forgelab in public — a lean developer API platform. Every Friday I post honest numbers: what shipped, what didn't, and what I'm thinking. No vanity metrics.
What shipped this week
PDF to Images API
The headline ship: any PDF can now be converted to PNG or JPEG via a single REST call. No Poppler setup. No Ghostscript. No server dependencies to manage.
curl -X POST https://forgelab.africa/api/pdf/to-images \
-H "X-API-Key: your-key" \
-F "file=@report.pdf" \
-F "format=png" \
-F "dpi=150"
Response is a JSON array with base64-encoded images, one per page. You can specify which pages to convert or do the whole document.
What this unlocks: document preview thumbnails, OCR pre-processing pipelines, image-based document workflows — without running a server-side PDF renderer yourself.
2 more blog articles
- "New: Convert PDFs to Images via REST API — PNG, JPEG, Any Page" — the launch post with full curl, Node.js, and Python examples
- "5 API Key Security Mistakes That Expose Your App (And How to Fix Them)" — practical security guide targeting developers searching for API security patterns
Blog is now 11 articles deep. These are written to rank for developer search queries, not as marketing filler.
Honest numbers
| Metric | This week | Last week |
|---|---|---|
| MRR | $20 | $20 |
| Paying customers | 2 | 2 |
| Waitlist signups | 15 | 15 |
| APIs live | 5 | 5 |
| Blog articles | 11 | 9 |
| Services running | 11 / 11 | 11 / 11 |
| Errors (last 24h) | 0 | 0 |
No new revenue this week. MRR flat at $20. Zero waitlist movement. I'm not going to spin this — the product is live and stable, but it's not growing yet.
What I'm watching
Disk usage jumped from 22% to 41%. That's log files, SQLite databases, and the free tools getting used. Not alarming yet but I'm keeping an eye on it. Cleanup script on the to-do list.
All 11 services running clean — web, PDF API, Image API, QR Code API, Invoice API, PDF-to-JSON API, social manager, customer manager, admin dashboard, customer dashboard, Stripe relay. Zero crashes, zero restarts needed this week.
The 5 APIs that are live
- PDF API — merge, split, compress, convert, PDF→images
- Image API — resize, compress, watermark, format convert
- PDF to JSON API — extract structured text and metadata from any PDF
- QR Code API — generate (PNG/SVG/base64) and decode QR codes
- Invoice API — generate professional PDF invoices from JSON (15 currencies, 3 templates)
Free tier: 5 calls/month, no card required. forgelab.africa
What's next: Currency API
Next build in the pipeline is a Currency API — real-time global currency rates via REST. Clean, fast, reliable. Target users: developers building multi-currency invoicing tools, e-commerce sites, fintech apps, and dashboards.
The endpoint shape will be something like:
# Get latest rates
GET /api/currency/rates?base=USD
# Convert an amount
POST /api/currency/convert
{ "from": "USD", "to": "EUR", "amount": 100 }
After Currency API: OCR API (extract text from images and documents).
Honest reflection
There's a gap between "product is live and working" and "product is growing." I'm sitting squarely in that gap right now.
Five APIs running. Solid infra. Eleven blog posts. Two paying customers. $20 MRR.
The problem isn't product quality — it's reach. Not enough developers know Forgelab exists. The free tools bring some organic traffic but the conversion funnel isn't moving. I think the next lever is more direct outreach: clearer Reddit presence, getting into developer communities where the problem is being discussed, and tightening the docs so the "getting started in 5 minutes" promise is actually true.
Revenue goal is $25,000 in 6 months. I'm at $20 MRR with no clear timeline for when the curve bends. That's uncomfortable to write, but that's where we are.
Next Friday I'll have the Currency API shipped and hopefully a clearer picture on distribution.
Forgelab — forgelab.africa
PDF API · Image API · PDF to JSON · QR Code API · Invoice API
Free tier: 5 calls/month, no card required.
Top comments (1)
The "no vanity metrics" framing is one of the rarer things in the buildinpublic tag and it's the reason I read this all the way through.
One question on the MRR-flat-at-$20 number: do your 2 paying customers also use the new PDF Images API, or are they still on the original API set? My hypothesis (from a parallel cold-start, Day 16 / $0 MRR / 0 sales) is that for a small N of paying users, expansion revenue from existing customers moves the needle faster than acquiring net-new logos. Same code, no marketing surface required, customer already trusts the auth flow.
The PDF→Images API specifically is a strong upsell pitch to anyone who's currently using your other 4 APIs for document workflows — they have a budget line item open and a working integration. The conversion from "your existing API user" to "your PDF Images API user" should be the cheapest first sale you can engineer this week.
(For context: I'm 16 days into a $0-audience cold start with an MIT-licensed Apify Actor for Gmail inbox triage. 21 dev.to articles, 245 readers/week, 0 followers, 0 sales — so I'm watching your week-7 numbers carefully because $20 MRR is where I want to be by week 10. The Friday-honest-numbers cadence is what I'm copying.)