Mindset The boring, narrow niche is the moat
Building OCR tools for developers
OCRskill extracts structured data from procurement documents. It is not glamorous, and that is exactly why it is defensible. A narrow, unsexy, high-volume job is one most founders skip while looking for something more exciting, which leaves the field open to whoever is willing to go deep on it. Mihai out-specializes general LLMs on document extraction precisely because he only does that one thing. Boring problems with real, repeated demand are where a solo builder can build something a frontier lab will never bother to beat.
Related advice
Mihai Own your compute to keep a high-volume API profitable
OCRskill runs on owned bare-metal hardware instead of rented per-call GPUs, and that is the reason the margins hold at volume. Per-call cloud inference is convenient at the start and brutal at scale: your cost grows in lockstep with every request, forever. For a product whose whole job is to be cheap per call and run constantly, owning the compute converts an unbounded variable cost into a fixed one. If your product's economics depend on doing one expensive operation millions of times, model the bare-metal version before you assume the cloud is cheaper.
Mihai For a developer tool, the integration is the product
OCRskill's customers are developers, and what they buy is not the OCR model, it is never having to write brittle string parsing again. The API takes a schema and returns a typed object that matches it. For a developer tool, the quality of the integration (how few steps it takes to go from request to usable data) is the actual product, and the underlying technology is just how you deliver it. Spend disproportionate effort on the API surface, the docs, and the first five minutes. That is the part your buyer experiences and the part they tell other developers about.
Mihai Programmatic SEO works for developer tools too
SEO advice is usually framed around consumer products, which makes technical founders assume it does not apply to an API. It does. Build a page per document type, per use case, per integration, each answering a real question a developer searches before they commit to a tool. Add FAQ schema for the specific technical questions they ask. Developers Google their problems exactly like everyone else, and a tool that ranks for "extract structured data from a PDF" gets found at the moment of intent. Do not skip programmatic SEO just because your buyer writes code.
Mihai When you are far cheaper than the alternative, price sells itself
OCRskill is so much cheaper per call than the general-LLM alternative that the price tag does part of the selling on its own. When you have a real structural cost advantage (a specialized model, owned hardware, a narrower problem), put the comparison front and centre instead of hiding it. A prospect who can see that you cost a fraction of the obvious alternative for the same or better result has most of the buying decision made already. A genuine cost advantage is a marketing asset, not just an accounting one.
Extracted from
Why I Built a Specialized OCR Engine in the Age of ChatGPT