Since you use four (!) keyword listening tools, I'd be happy to show you another. In addition to the ones you use, syften.com supports Slack communities, dev.to, stack exchange, upwork and a few other places. I'm happy to onboard you personally, I'd really appreciate your feedback and would love to see how you set it up.
I'm able to support myself from my online business now, but it took three years of learning and struggle to get here. This was not time wasted, as I grew a lot.
I get a compliment from time to time from my users asking if I'm really running my product solo.
The tool is https://syften.com and it's a keyword notification service for Reddit, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Slack communities, Facebook groups etc.
I think that the biggest help was the Indie Hackers community.
Interestingly, after reading all of Paul Grahams essays and going through startup school I saw no spike in my MRR. On the other hand, reading a handful of James Clear articles had a profound effect. It's important to keep in mind that if what you read doesn't change your behaviour then it's just entertainment.
I see that your tool is mentioned constantly in online forums: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Areddit.com+O... - that's 526 results. I suggest keeping an eye on those mentions and reply to any questions someone might have, or clear up any misconceptions.
You might think it's silly to interact directly like this for a product priced at $1, but keep in mind Reddit and Hacker News have very good SEO, so these questions (with your answers) will pop up when people search for your, or similar, tools online.
Moreover, for the same reason, you can monitor your competitors and recommend your tool when you have the advantage.
I don't think that at your price point ads will work for you.
I recommend that approach because that's what I've been helping people do for the past year. I'm the founder of Syften (https://syften.com). I'm happy to onboard you personally, I've sent you an email.
Hey, welcome to the club. I'm working on Syften.com.
I'm focused on helping startups engage in conversations, so I try to send the notification within one minute. Here for example is how I used Syften to grow Syften by an additonal $640 ARR from one Reddit comment: https://syften.com/blog/post/one-comment-640-arr/ . It also has features like being notified when someone replies to you on Hacker News.
PS. I'm wondering, how in the world can you monitor GitHub? There is no API that I know of. Surely you don't scrape the entire GitHub every minute?
They don't handle this by design, and this is called a payment gateway - a simple service that just charges cards. If they were to handle this they would become a merchant of record, and there is FastSpring and Paddle that do it. Because of the different problems they solve they charge more.
It's possible that what you loved was not programming, but being a maker. As a professional programmer you're no longer a maker, the owner of the company is. You're executing his vision, not your own.
You'd probably enjoy building sand castles by the sea, but wouldn't like working as a construction worker building sky scrapers.