Kieran O'Brien sold two software companies in 18 months.
The first one raised $1.5M and got acquired by Viral Nation. The second one sold over a text message to Iman Gadzhi.
The weird part: neither company contained a single piece of original technology.
"All three of my software companies have just been productized APIs," Kieran told Brett Malinowski on The Brett Way. A productized API is exactly what it sounds like: data that already exists, wrapped in a clean interface, sold to a niche that feels the pain. That's the whole playbook.
I pulled the full two-hour episode apart, cross-checked the numbers against the press coverage, and broke down how a kid who "barely had $500" at 17 did it twice before most founders ship once.
What a productized API actually is
Every social platform has an API that exposes your follower counts, views, and engagement. The data is free. It's just ugly and scattered.
MediaKits, Kieran's first company, pulled that data into one live, shareable media kit for influencers. Social APIs + clean UX = company.
His second company, AgencyReporting.com, did the same thing with a CRM's API: the data existed, the reporting dashboard was bad, so he built a better window into it.
His current company, Shopgenie, productizes the APIs of small business point-of-sale systems for auto repair shops.
Three companies. One mechanic:
- → Find data that already exists behind an API
- → Find a niche that needs that data and hates how it's presented
- → Build the clean version and charge for it
There's no invented tech anywhere in that list. Just data someone else maintains, presented better, for a buyer who's sick of screenshots.
The $25,000 quote that started everything
At 17, Kieran was running a freelance marketing operation for automotive businesses, making a couple grand a month. One client sold auto parts online and wanted to spend budget on influencers, so Kieran went to his friend JR (of the JR Garage YouTube channel) to set up a deal.
The brand asked for a media kit. Kieran opened Photoshop and made one by hand.
Then he watched the problem repeat everywhere. Influencers were screenshotting their analytics to send to sponsors, and the screenshots went stale the moment they hit send. Talent agencies had full-time graphic designers on staff doing nothing but changing ones to twos in PDF media kits.
So he got a quote from a dev agency to build the fix.
$25,000.
"That's the most amount of money I've ever heard in a sentence. I barely have $500."
Most people stop there. Kieran spent the next few years building his agency to $50-60K a month in top-line revenue (taking home $20-30K) and poured basically all of it into getting MediaKits off the ground. He and his co-founder Casey Adams never took a salary from it. His agency partner Kaden kept the agency running while Kieran went all in.
Raising $1.5M on clickable mockups
Here's a number nobody posts on X: the $1.5M seed round took over 9 months to close.
Kieran still has his old fundraising CRM on his laptop as motivation. It says they talked to 350 people to get 30 yeses. One-on-one calls, 30 to 45 minutes each.
At the time they had no customers, no live product. Mockups and clickable prototypes, raised at a $5M valuation.
The round snowballed exactly the way he describes fundraising working: a $25K check, then $50K, then $100K, then $150K, because "investors are friends with other wealthy people" and nobody wants to miss what their friends just got into. Manufactured FOMO, grassroots edition.
And the cap table was the strategy. Wiz Khalifa. The FuckJerry guys. TikTok star Josh Richards. Not because celebrity money spends differently, but because every investor was a door into the exact communities MediaKits needed: talent agencies, music labels, creators.
Remember that. It pays off in about two paragraphs.
Launch party, Product Hunt, then two flat months
MediaKits launched with a party in LA where every drink was sponsored (beverage brands wanted their products in influencers' hands, so the catering was free) and Wiz Khalifa showed up. The next day they posted on Product Hunt and finished #2 product of the day.
Result: a couple thousand signups.
Then it flatlined. Two months of almost nothing.
This is the part of every founder story that gets edited out. The launch spike is not product-market fit. It's your network clapping.
For context on how little they spent to get through this: $40,000 on paid marketing over the entire life of the company. A marketing agency owner who spent tens of millions on ads for clients spent almost nothing on his own startup.
One TikTok took them from 5 signups a day to 500
In November, Josh Richards (investor, remember) had the MediaKits account post a TikTok showing the product. It went viral in the TikTok creator community.
5 or 6 signups a day became 500 a day. Overnight.
A second viral wave hit the Twitch streamer community, and MediaKits crossed 30,000 users in under 6 months.
But here's the detail I'd steal before any of the viral stuff: the money didn't come from creators. It came from B2B bulk seats sold to talent agencies, the same agencies paying designers to update PDFs by hand. Some of the biggest music labels in the world ended up as customers, reached through the cap table.
Free individual users made the product spread. Agencies paid the bills.
The exit: an acquisition offer and a term sheet on the same desk
By the end, MediaKits had two pieces of paper in front of it: an acquisition offer, and an offer to raise another round at an eight-figure valuation.
Kieran took the exit (Viral Nation announced the acquisition in July 2022). He's honest about the trade: he wasn't fully vested, so he "made a little bit of money on the acquisition" and could have made more by staying. He left anyway and bet on himself.
Then he did the thing every founder fantasizes about: sold his cars, gave up his apartment, and moved to Bali for 4 months with one suitcase to build the MVP of the next company.
(If you're weighing your own version of this decision, I wrote a full breakdown on how to sell a SaaS business, including how buyers actually value it.)
The second exit was a text message
While running MediaKits, Kieran's agency used a white-labeled CRM (built on GoHighLevel) that had one glaring hole: the reporting was terrible for one specific slice of analytics his clients cared about.
So his team built their own dashboard on top of the CRM's API, for themselves. Then he bought the domain AgencyReporting.com "for way less than you might think" and productized it.
"It's media kits for marketing agencies," he jokes in the episode. Same concept: take analytics from an API that already exists, centralize them in a nice UI.
It grew to a decent monthly run rate as a side project. He listed it on MicroAcquire and got inquiries. Then he remembered he knew someone with an audience of thousands of agency owners: Iman Gadzhi, a friend since 2017.
One text. "Hey bro, I've got this software that does this."
Deal done, faster than the marketplace and without the fees. Kieran's own take: if Iman had said no, it would have sold on Acquire.com anyway. He mentions a guy on there who builds the same CRM every single month and sells it for $30K. Every month.
The lesson isn't "be friends with Iman Gadzhi." It's that micro SaaS products with real MRR are liquid assets now. There's a whole marketplace (Andrew Gazdecki's Acquire.com) where $1K to $100K acquisitions of tiny, single-problem tools happen constantly.
The playbook, if you want to run it
Pulling the tactics out of two hours of conversation:
- → Wrap, don't invent. Social APIs, CRM APIs, POS APIs, and now LLM APIs. The data layer exists. The money is in the presentation layer for a specific niche.
- → Pick a niche you've actually worked in. Kieran's "unsexy" base was auto repair marketing. "If you try to build software where you don't deeply understand the problem, you'll always be one step behind a competitor that does."
- → Ship embarrassingly early. His stated biggest mistake: polishing MediaKits for months before launch instead of charging from day one. Early adopters only use the core feature anyway (he surveyed them, and it was consistent).
- → No-code is fine at scale. His current team has four developers and still chooses Bubble and Make.com where it works.
- → Distribution is the only moat. "If you build a great product and start making money, someone is going to rip you off. It's not if, it's when." Brand and distribution are the defensibility, not the code.
- → Build the exit option early. An audience owner in your niche is a one-text buyer. A marketplace is the fallback.
If you want proof this works as a bootstrapper with zero celebrity cap table, read how Mickey bootstrapped a social media API to $1M ARR. Same thesis, no funding.
FAQ
What is a productized API?
A productized API is a software product built by wrapping an existing API (social media data, CRM data, payment data, an LLM) in a focused interface for a specific customer. The underlying data or capability already exists; the product is the packaging, workflow, and niche positioning. MediaKits productized social platform APIs into live media kits for influencers.
Is an API wrapper a real business or too easy to copy?
It's a real business, and yes, it will get copied. Kieran's answer is that software itself stopped being defensible once building got cheap, so the moat is brand and distribution in your niche. MediaKits won the influencer niche through a cap table full of creators, one viral TikTok, and B2B deals with talent agencies, not through code nobody else could write.
How much can you sell a micro SaaS for?
Small single-problem tools trade constantly on marketplaces like Acquire.com, often in the $1K to $100K range, with established SaaS companies commanding multiples of annual revenue (Kieran cites 10 to 15x multiples as the reason he picked software in the first place). AgencyReporting.com sold directly to Iman Gadzhi after drawing inquiries on MicroAcquire, which shows the two main paths: a marketplace listing or a direct buyer who owns your audience.
Do you need to know how to code to build a productized API?
No. Kieran says the MVP barrier is "that low": no-code tools like Bubble and Make.com can call APIs and present data, and his own funded company still uses both alongside four developers. The hard parts are picking a niche you understand deeply, talking to customers before you build, and charging early.
Hear the unedited version of stories like this
A $25K quote he couldn't afford turned into two exits before 25, with a 9-month fundraise and two dead-flat months in the middle that nobody screenshots.
That middle part is what my podcast is for. I interview bootstrapped founders doing $100K to $10M a year who show the real dashboard: the flatlines, the pricing mistakes, the deals that almost died.
