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I didn't build out an account page for https://ipinfo.io until we had about 500 paying customers. If you needed to update your credit card or make other account changes you had to email me, and I'd update the database manually. Only after I was spending at least an hour every day dealing with those sort of requests did we go and build out a full account dashboard, where users could manage their accounts themselves, plus also do bulk uploads, see a graph or request volumes, and interact with the API via a UI. Before that the focus had been 100% on the API and the data quality.


People were emailing you their credit card numbers?


No, I'd create and share a one time link that'd take them to a page where they could enter their CC details via stripe Checkout.js.


How did you acquire the customers if I may ask?


StackOverflow has been a big source of users for us: https://blog.ipinfo.io/i-answered-99-stack-overflow-question...


You can get knocked for spam if you do that.


Only if you're spamming, and not actually answering questions with a useful solution while declaring your affiliation.

Here's an example answer: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/409999/getting-the-locat...


If I may, where do you get the data?


How long did it take to get 500 customers?


3 - 4 years.




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