Interview with the founder of Webhook.site

What is Webhook.site

Webhook.site is a service that offers tools for creating, managing, and testing webhooks. The platform was initially created and is currently maintained by a single developer. This website generates a monthly recurring revenue of $20,000 through its subscription model.

In this interview, we speak with Simon Fredsted, the founder of Webhook.site.

How did you come up with the idea for the business(https://webhook.site/)?

It was just a simple, free service to begin with. In 2016, I'd been working on an application that would support webhook subscriptions, and needed a way to test and see what was being sent.

How did you build the product?

I've always sketched out the UI first with pen and paper and then start building it. Webhook.site started with Laravel, AngularJS, WebSockets and SQLite. I put it on a VPS at DigitalOcean.

I'm now running about 20 servers in total on Hetzner in Germany, and SQLite has been replaced with Redis, MySQL and Elasticsearch over the years.

How big was your team when you started?

It was just me, and it's still only me!

How did you launch the business?

I made a post on HackerNews, which got a good amount of upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12952692

How have you grown the business since its launch?

I kept Webhook.site as a free service for quite a while, but people started contacting me asking how to support it, so I made a Patreon. A surprising amount of people signed up, and some of them started asking for features, like forwarding requests to another URL. I made this available to Patreon subscribers.

After a while, I realized I had to turn it into a proper business, so I had meetings with a lawyer and accountants and set up a proper limited liability company. I also switched from Patreon to using Paddle as a proper payment platform.

The forwarding function turned in to Custom Actions, which lets users build workflows that run every time a Webhook.site URL is hit, with scripts, conditions, JSONPath extractions, etc. Some of my customers have scripts that are thousands of lines and 100+ actions. It's really cool to see what people build.

I've never done any sort marketing for Webhook.site, so I would say that most of my traffic comes from Google – probably thanks to the domain name – and word of mouth, e.g. on Twitter.

What do your finances look like?

I have a MRR of about $20K. 10-20% of that goes to pay for expenses like servers and accountants.

What lessons have you learned?

• Don't follow the hype. I can't stress this enough. Don't optimize prematurely. You don't need microservices and to rewrite everything in Go. You're not Google. Focus on making your users happy instead.

• Path of least resistance. Webhook.site is ready the moment you visit it; no sign-ups, pop-ups or clicks needed, and many people have written to me to say they appreciate that.

• When, for example, a customer submits an angry, frustrated support ticket, perhaps there's something else behind it, and this was just the drop that overflowed the glass. It's my job as a founder to emphasize with them and find out how I can improve.