Why I Built API Alerts

I need to be honest about how this started.

After building Shadowcat I was becoming the go-to guy for push notifications in my circle. An online friend asked me to help him build a quick Android app that could receive a push notification that he could trigger himself. I walked him through it and we got it working.

That night I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And for weeks after. This idea kept growing in my head for what could become an evolving notification platform. A proper SaaS.

I want to acknowledge that the spark came from helping someone else with their problem. I don’t know if that’s crossing a line, but I want to be upfront about it.

The idea grew fast

It started simple in my head. A mobile app and a backend. Submit an alert to the backend, get it on your device as a push notification. See a list of everything you’ve received. Done.

Then it kept expanding. What if you could submit alerts with an API key assigned to separate projects? Now I can get different notifications from my various apps and know which project they came from. Cool.

What if I wanted to add other people to a project? Feed different alerts into different buckets? My thoughts were that we’re getting into Slack territory here and that’s bad. I don’t want to compete with Slack. But this isn’t a chat app. It’s purely events. No conversations, no threads, just “this thing happened.”

It’s kind of like an analytics system, except you only send the events you actually care about. Getting a push notification when a user buys something in your app. Another push when someone new registers. These are amazing little moments during the day. I no longer have to check my analytics dashboards once a month to find out not much happened. Seeing 10 new users in a month? Ok fine. Getting notified the moment each one signs up? That’s cool.

I’d built things like this before with the Slack API, but it was tiresome. Making a new Slack app every time, configuring webhooks, dealing with permissions. I wanted a dead simple integration. One SDK call to get a notification from anywhere.

The bigger vision

What I really planned to build was much larger than a mobile app for indie developers. I wanted API Alerts to be a business tool. An alert and event routing platform.

Push notifications are fine, but what if you wanted to get it as an SMS instead? Or an email. Or a Slack message. Or a webhook. With a simple API and some routing rules, users could send an event to API Alerts and route it wherever they need it. No Slack app setup, no dev team involvement.

A tool simple enough that a manager could plug API Alerts into their stack. Connect it to a Segment or PostHog trigger when a user makes a purchase and get a Slack message in #sales. Hook it up to a monitoring tool and if a cron job fails, send an SMS to the tech team. That’s the vision.

The reality of building it

There was a problem. I’m a mobile developer. After 13 years of professional development I still didn’t know how to build a website.

So I built the app first, put together a basic website, and launched. I had to release early because the alternative was spending two years in silence building the full platform and then doing a big launch that nobody would know about anyway. Better to get something useful out there and build up from it.

I relaunched “projects” as “workspaces” to improve the teams side of things and sell workspace subscriptions rather than user accounts. Apple also rejected me for “accepting payments” that weren’t even built yet. I had to rework my onboarding flow to look like an account check process rather than a registration button. That’s a whole other story.

Where we are now

I’ve spent over 2 years on API Alerts. I’ve had to learn how to build websites from scratch while simultaneously building a full SaaS backend. The mobile app has been live and immediately useful the whole time, which is good because behind the scenes I’ve been building the event routing engine.

We’re a few months away from releasing routing to SMS, WhatsApp, email, webhooks, and Zapier. It’s been a long road but we’re close.

The funny thing is, it started from a 30 minute call helping a friend set up push notifications. Sometimes you don’t find your idea. It finds you.