| First of all I'm sorry to hear that you have to shut down your app, but I'm confident that things are going to work out just fine for you. I actually had a very similar experience when I was 18 as well. I decided to make a book search engine that would aggregate reviews from different sources across the web and provide a high quality, clean interface to quickly see information about a book and links to buy it on Amazon. The problem my service solved is that the Amazon interface is extremely ugly, and while I'm sure it is fine tuned for maximum sales it is definitely highly lacking in aesthetics and is cluttered with a lot of garbage. My goal was to create the cleanest, most minimal but extremely useful book search engine. In retrospect my service was breaking many TOS because of the way it worked. When someone entered a book title or author name it would utilize Amazon API's to get information about relevant books that matched the query, then it would scrape book information from Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes and Nobles, and the New York Times sunday book review among other sources, then it would cache that scraped information in my own database for future reference. I justified this to myself by thinking it was okay because I was remixing the information to generate my own summary pages that were cleaner and more useful, but the reality is that I was pretty much parasitizing these other services to build my own database. At its peak my service had many GB's of scraped data from other sites and was getting about 5000 searches a day which was netting me about $500-$700 a month from commission on Amazon referrals sales. But after I started getting some press coverage in The Next Web, etc all the services that I was utilizing started sending me cease and desist notices. People used my site because it was cleaner and nicer than Amazon but Amazon didn't appreciate that I was scraping their content to build my own site so they cut off my API access and closed my Amazon Associate account. In the end it was a wild six month ride in which I made a few thousand dollars but more importantly got tons of experience in coding a scalable site, and best of all I started getting a lot of job offers. At one point I was getting three or four job offers a month from different startups from the HN community. Eventually I decided to settle down at one of them where I could continue developing my coding skills. Things turned out very well, and the ride of personal growth and discovery isn't over for me yet. Every day I get to code interesting things for my current startup company and this time its a legitimate business that isn't going to get shut down for stealing content. Even though you probably feel very disappointed about having to shut down your service like I did when I had to shut down mine, you can be confident that with your skills things will turn out just fine for you, and a lot of interesting startup companies will probably be eager to employ you. |
Glad you made some money off the dev time you put in!