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I built a dev tool with great distribution but I can’t sell
I built something a bit backwards. ReqRes (reqres.in) has 48,000 registered users, 300 signups a day, and I’ve never spent a penny on marketing. ChatGPT is the third-largest traffic source - ahead of Bing - because every REST API tutorial on the internet links to it and LLMs just absorbed that. Over 100 engineers at one of the Big 4 IT services firms signed up on their own. 333 universities teach with it. The distribution has been compounding for over a decade. Revenue is early. I added paid tiers about a year ago and it’s growing, but slowly - because I’m a product engineer, not a sales person, and it turns out those are genuinely different skills. I can build the product, I can make it work, I can keep it running on $80/month of infrastructure. What I can’t do is pick up the phone and call the QA team lead at a Fortune 500 company whose engineers are already using ReqRes for free and say “let me show you the Team plan.” I think there’s a meaningful business inside ReqRes that I’m not the right person to unlock. The user base is there, the product is there, the segments are identified - QA automation teams at large IT outsourcing firms, university computer science departments, AI agent developers. What’s missing is someone who actually enjoys the selling part. So I’m putting this out there: if you’re a sales-minded person or a commercial co-founder type, and the idea of monetising a developer tool with 10 years of organic distribution sounds interesting, I’d like to hear from you. I’m open on structure - could be commission-based, revenue share, equity partnership, or something else entirely. Happy to talk about what makes sense. DM me or hello@benhowdle.im.
ReqRes possesses an extraordinary organic distribution moat and 'default' status in developer education, which is a rare and highly defensible asset. While the founder identifies a significant gap in commercial execution, the sheer volume of high-intent enterprise and academic traffic represents a massive 'coiled spring' opportunity for a commercial co-founder.