Jonathan Geiger Quit His Job While Earning Less Than His Salary

Deciding to Go Full-Time with Revenue Below His Salary

In the summer of 2026, Jonathan Geiger left a startup where he had worked for nearly five years. Around the time he resigned, the combined monthly revenue of SocialKit and PostPeer that he published was about $4,500, less than his salary at the time. He chose full-time work anyway because the products had kept growing on the hours he put in at night and on weekends for roughly three years. He wanted to see how far his products could go when he gave them his full attention.

Geiger is an Israeli developer who started programming out of an interest in games and later widened his range to web development. In a 2024 interview, he described working full-time at a startup while building his own products. At the company he implemented specific features such as a Google review collector, a quiz builder, and a tool for flipping through PDFs. The experience of finishing a small feature into something real users could use piled up alongside his day job.

LectureKit, an early personal product, was a tool that helped developers build their own online course service. It provided course management features while leaving the screen and user experience for developers to design themselves. In November 2023, while preparing a minimum viable product, he released it and asked for feedback. The habit of showing a product to the outside and checking the response while keeping his day job had already started.

LectureKit was later sold for $6,750 and CaptureKit, a web data collection product, for $15,000. The two disclosed deals add up to $21,750, all earned while he held a job. Before considering resignation, he gained experience running software and also experience completing a product another business would want to acquire.

Accumulating Familiar Technology and a Sales Path

His criteria for choosing products grew more specific over time. Geiger has said he looked for two or three competing services in an area he understood that were already earning revenue, then picked the points within them worth improving. Narrowing the field that way made data collection and automation APIs his main area.

On July 13, 2025, he announced that he had shipped a new product, SocialKit, while employed. SocialKit extracted transcripts, summaries, and engagement metrics from social media video and served them as data other software could use. Customers sent a video address and received the results they needed, then connected them to their own analytics tools or workflow automation. The product reduced the development burden of assembling platform-specific collection, transcription, and summarization on one's own.

How he handled limited development time showed up in his technology choices. In a piece published in March 2025, Geiger explained that he reused tools he knew and kept the setup fast to configure. He used Railway to cut server setup time and managed services such as MongoDB Atlas for database administration. Rather than chasing only the cheapest option, he counted his own time as a cost and postponed optimizations he did not need yet.

He also reused groundwork already in place between products. SocialKit carried over the authentication, payments, API key management, documentation structure, and landing page patterns from CaptureKit. The approach cut the repeated preparation of starting a new product and allocated time to the features unique to it.

Running Development and Customer Acquisition Together

SocialKit offered paid plans from launch, and its first month's monthly recurring revenue was $13. Customers could test the API with free credits and then choose a subscription that matched their usage or a one-time credit purchase. The structure supported both customers who processed data repeatedly and customers whose workload arrived in bursts. Opening the payment path from the beginning let Geiger check whether interest turned into actual payment.

Finding customers ran alongside development. The approach he described was writing one or two related articles a week and creating pages explaining individual APIs, use cases, and alternatives to competing products. He drew article topics from the problems customers actually searched for. With search traffic as a main growth path, feature development and the work of making the product discoverable continued together.

He applied the same reuse principle to content production. One topic became a blog article and an explainer video, which he then reused as a short video and several social media posts. He also ran a free YouTube transcript extractor as an entrance that received search visitors, some of whom converted into paying customers, he said. It was a way to reduce the burden of creating new promotional material each time while reaching people with the same problem through several paths.

Meeting real customers also widened his view of the product. Geiger said the share of paying customers who used no-code tools and automation was higher than he expected. SocialKit was offered so it could be connected to tools such as Zapier, Make, and n8n, and he presented fast customer response as a strength. Implementing the API and helping customers connect that API to their own work became parts of the business together.

A Second API and the Full-Time Experiment

In April 2026, PostPeer appeared to take on social media publishing. Attaching posting features to several platforms required connecting each platform's API and account authentication method, and founders experienced the hassle while building their own products. PostPeer bundled posting and scheduling into one API. Where SocialKit addressed the demand for pulling data out of social media, PostPeer addressed the demand for sending content out to several platforms.

Co-founder Yoav Mendelson joined PostPeer. Geiger split the platform integration work with his partner and said he could keep developing PostPeer even while he concentrated on SocialKit. For a product where platform approval and integration take time, co-development was a way to secure continuity of work. His way of running the business began to include products he built alone alongside products he built with someone else.

He also kept trying to use his own products as operating tools. In a piece published in April 2026, he described a setup where an AI agent wrote five tweets a day and scheduled them through PostPeer. He could receive the results of a run by email, and edit or cancel scheduled posts before publication. Automating repeated writing and scheduling, he was using the product through the same path as his customers.

When he decided to go full-time, he set an experiment period of about one year. He planned to grow the products and try several things during that time, and to return to employment if the results fell short of expectations. He said candidly that losing a fixed salary was what he feared most. The added time would go into strengthening search traffic and steadily producing social media posts and YouTube explainer videos.

Focusing on PostPeer After the Sale

In an interview published on July 28, 2026, the combined monthly revenue of the two products was given as about $6,400. SocialKit accounted for about $3,500 and PostPeer about $2,900. Broken down, monthly recurring revenue from subscriptions was about $5,200, and one-time payments averaged about $1,200 a month. Subscriptions and credits purchased as needed made up the revenue together.

On August 16 of the same year, Geiger announced the sale of SocialKit. The disclosed deal size was $85,000 in total, combining a $75,000 product sale price and $10,000 in consulting fees. It was his third sale after LectureKit and CaptureKit, and he said he would grow PostPeer afterward. Even after switching to full-time work, he was choosing between keeping a product and selling it to focus on another.

As of September 25, 2026, PostPeer's public figures were $4,419 in monthly recurring revenue and 122 active subscriptions. The number appears on a TrustMRR page connected to the payment service Polar. Because it is the revenue of a jointly run product, it cannot be equated with Geiger's personal income, but it shows that the work of growing a paid business continued after he left his job.

What supported Geiger's switch to full-time work was the deal experience accumulated during employment and an attitude of putting a deadline on later experiments. He put more time into products customers were already paying for while leaving open both the possibility of returning to employment and the possibility of selling a product. For him, running his own business was also a matter of deciding which products to grow and which to hand over, and of allocating his time accordingly.