IP info has a, it's a freemium offering, we have a free API that allows for, you know,

anybody to make up to a thousand requests a day completely for free without even registering

for an API token. The thinking behind that was, like I say, when I launched the very first

version, hey, this would be used by hobbyists and developers, to make it really easy to use,

you don't even need to sign up, call it through a command line or a simple bit of code,

and everything will work great. We suddenly got to this point where we said, hey, we think we have hundreds of thousands of free users using the free plan. We had no way to reach out to all these

free users that you loved the free offering, but no way to even kind of communicate, hey,

here's all the new cool stuff we're doing, you know, no way to get in touch.

I'm Ben Dowling. I'm the founder and CEO of IPInfo.io.

This is Code Story, the podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries who share in the critical moments of what it takes to change in industry

and build and lead.

A team that has your back.

I'm your host, Noah Laparte, and today how Ben Dowling spent an evening building a tool

that is your trusted source for IP address data.

All this and more on Coat Story.

Ben Dowling lives in Seattle and loves it there.

He is married and a father of three kids ages 11, 8, and 5.

So he's a busy dude. He loves to hike and

recently took his family on a weekend trip to Mount Rainier. He loves to snowboard and get away from

the screen, though he admits that tech is also his hobby, building side projects, apps, websites,

etc. Then was working on a bunch of different side projects in 2013. The process to get IP info was manual, tedious, and filled with headaches across those projects.

After he felt this pain point multiple times, he decided to build a solution to solve it,

...