In 20 days, BeatAPI has crossed 600 signups, $600+ in revenue, and a peak day of about 800 unique visitors. Today I want to talk less about those numbers and more about what we're actually doing, and why.
I came from an investment background. AI pulled me in enough that I left it to write code myself. Since then, the way I look at a product has changed twice.
First I looked at it the way an investor does—how big is the ceiling, how much room is there to grow. Then I looked at it the way an engineer does—frontend, backend, database, the actual mechanics of getting something built. In this latest project, the lens changed again. I think almost entirely from the user's side now. What does this person actually need? What can we actually give them?
Where BeatAPI actually came from
I'm a heavy agent user. Over 99% of my work runs through Codex. That's where BeatAPI's idea came from, not from a market report.
Codex couldn't make a video in my workflow without a separate generation API. I had to wire one in just for that.
It couldn't read what was happening on TikTok or Instagram without additional data access either. Another API, another account.
Over time I'd installed dozens of MCPs and Skills. I was managing somewhere between 15 and 20 different API keys just to keep everything running.
Then I tried the same workflows on Claude, on OpenCode, and on other agent runtimes. Most of it didn't carry over cleanly—nearly everything I'd configured had to be rebuilt. That was the moment I started thinking: why not build one all-in-one agent toolkit layer, and put everything I actually need into it? That's the shape BeatAPI started from.
What 600 signups made me realize
Only after I actually started building did I notice something about myself: I rarely put myself in someone else's shoes before this.
When I was investing, I looked at the macro market. When I was building products, I looked at system bugs. In this project, I'm carrying growth, strategy, and product at the same time.
It's the first time I've genuinely believed a good product is one you use yourself every day—built with real empathy, from the user's side, solving a problem they actually have.
The question I wrote on my whiteboard
Our early marketing was built around features, specs, and advantages. The response was flat. For a while, I didn't think hard about why.
Then one day I finally sat with it honestly and put myself in the user's seat: if I saw this product description as a stranger, why would I use you?
I wrote that question on the whiteboard next to my desk. It's still there. I still look at it every morning before I open anything else—why does someone need BeatAPI, and what problem are we actually solving for them?
What that question led to
That question is what pushed me toward something valuable but genuinely slow: real case work.
Find the specific problem a person actually hits while using an agent. Figure out what we can offer. Help them through it in a way that becomes a real case—not a feature announcement.
I think this is the most effective growth model available to us right now, even though it doesn't scale the way a content calendar does.
Before this project, the podcasts I listened to were about agent trends, AI safety, infrastructure—the macro view, wearing a different hat.
Now I pay more attention to founders doing far less scalable things. One is running free case tests with a hundred users directly on Reddit. Another is emailing two hundred early users one at a time just to ask what was actually breaking for them, and pulling them into a demo.
An open invitation
If you're using agents and see real potential there, or you've hit any friction while using one, I'd like to hear from you directly.
Email me at karmen@beatapi.io, or learn more at beatapi.io.
BeatAPI's ambition is to become a general capability layer for any agent, built to actually solve the problems people run into while using one.
Originally published on the BeatAPI Blog.
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