I Built A Screenshots App On The Side And Grew It To $3.8K/Month

Rishi Mohan

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Published: April 21st, 2024

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About
Business

Rishi Mohan

Founder, Pika

$3.8K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Pika

pika.style

from Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India

started January 2022

$3,799

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

Hi, I’m Rishi Mohan. A design engineer by profession, and a design engineer by hobby. I run a profitable SaaS called Pika along with my full-time job.

Pika helps in automating image generation through API and design appealing screenshots and mockups. It was launched in early 2022 as a side-project and started gaining traction very quickly after launch.

Although Pika started as a simple screenshot editor and mockup generator tool, over the years Pika has grown to serve not only individual creators, designers but also startups, companies and agencies.

Pika currently offers 3 products:

API for Image generation
Screenshot editor
Pika Embed, simple integration to add screenshot editor in any app

With monthly recurring revenue at $3,500, Pika is close to crossing my monthly salary, which would be an amazing personal milestone.

Pika is being used by designers, creators, writers, teams, startups, agencies etc. to design visual assets for various needs. Most Pika customers use it because it helps them design beautiful images in no time. And they can also automate generating images from templates using Pika API.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

As a designer, I used to spend countless hours in Figma, meticulously crafting marketing images for posting on Twitter, Dribbble and other apps. Taking a screenshot, putting a background, carefully selecting the best set of colors for gradients, crafting patterns, shadows and what not.

Realizing that the process was both complex and repetitive, I thought to streamline the creation of these images. And so, Pika was born. It started with a very simple app where you just add a screenshot, and customize it with presets of gradient backgrounds, shadows, browser frames etc. And in the output you get a beautiful looking and more appealing image to share, and in seconds and not minutes.

After using the app more and more, I realized it had scope for improvement and was convinced of the usefulness of it. The moment of validation of the idea was when I launched it on ProductHunt and it received unexpectedly good appreciation. Pika received over 600 upvotes and was 2nd ranked product on that day.

Unlike now, at that time there were not many apps that used to do this and the competition was low, which is why I guess it did well with users.

And since I was running Pika as a side-project, I didn’t have any pressure of making money or anything. So I was just trying to be creative and thoughtful with new features in the app, which also worked well and users loved the progress.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

The first version of Pika was pretty simple and it took me a couple days to build and couple more to polish it for initial launch.

The Idea

It was pretty simple, my main focus behind the app was to make it fast and easy to create beautiful marketing images.

To build the screenshot editor, I needed basic options to start with. Like adding a beautiful gradient background, make the screenshot rounded, add shadow to it and add padding around the screenshot etc.

Since I had been doing the same in Figma, I had an idea and plan on how the initial version could look and how to build it.

Execution

After the planning came coding. 😅

I booted up a new project with tech I was most familiar with: Next.js and TailwindCSS.

I wanted to keep it simple and straightforward, so had no plans to add registration/login etc. The idea was to open the app directly to the screenshot editor, ready to be used.

I was able to code and design the app in 3 days. I like designing so I made sure to put that extra touch to make the app look and function nicely.

I deployed the app on Vercel and hosted on a subdomain on my personal site. I spent $0 in building and deploying the first version of the app.

I have a simple theory, the better the product the less marketing you will need. Keeping on this, Pika grew an average of 5 to 10% every month since the launch and currently at 250+ customers.

Describe the process of launching the business.

I started with the soft-launching Pika on Twitter.

I have been and am very active on Twitter. Most of my network includes people who’re makers and SaaS owners. And so I felt Twitter is a great place to share about it and get feedback from.

One week after I started working on the app, I shared it on Twitter. People actually found it useful and some of them started using it so much they needed new features and had feedback to share.

embed:tweet

Later on I did the ProductHunt launch and it went great too. I got tons of feedback and I was excited to work on those.

I remember receiving many DMs. And specially a feature request from Chris Evans, founder of Incident.io.

It was special because he said he would be willing to PAY if I add that feature in Pika, and before that moment I had never thought of monetizing Pika.

And at that point I realized I could turn it into a subscription based product since it’s something people like to use. And if they can get great output and save their time, they would find it valuable. After talking to some more users I validated the usefulness, and that helped me decide to make Pika a subscription based product keeping the free plan as well.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

The thing that has worked best for me is improving the product itself.

I have a simple theory, the better the product the less marketing you will need. Keeping on this, Pika grew an average of 5 to 10% every month since the launch and currently at 250+ customers.

Most of Pika’s marketing is organic and its users have played an incredible role in bringing new users. Since most of Pika’s screenshot editor features are absolutely free to use without any registration required, paired that with good UX and fast results is why new users adopt Pika well and recommend it to others.

Another channel that has worked well is Twitter, and especially at the time of Pika’s inception. I’ve been building Pika in public and sharing its progress, new features, milestones on Twitter. This has helped me not only acquire new users but build a good relationship with them.

And an ever going effort is in getting traffic from Search Engines. I’ve worked on SEO since the start and Pika gets okay-ish traffic and conversions from Google, something I want and am focusing more on recently.

Build in public, and choose a technology stack you're confident with. Focus on learning and try to sell features before launch. And remember, end users don't care about implementation; they want a functional product with a great user experience.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Pika has been profitable since the start.

I’ve made sure the expenses are as low as possible, and tried to put manual effort wherever I could to save costs. So for example, where I could have automated emails for customer feedback I used to manually write and send those. This also helps in knowing users closely, their use cases, their requirements etc.

Cost of running Pika right now is around $200 to $300, while Pika is now making close to $3,500 in MRR. The total revenue is usually higher.

In terms of traffic, Pika gets 30k to 50k pageviews every month, most of which comes from Google. The average time on site fluctuates from 7 minutes to 10 minutes.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

My recent learning is that just because I can build the app myself doesn’t mean I shouldn’t take anyone’s help in building it. And I’ve recently started working with Dinesh to help me with the backend aspects of Pika API, Zapier integration etc. and it’s been incredible how fast things are moving.

Another good thing I’ve always believed in is to explore and experiment as much as possible. I’ve explored lots of ideas with Pika.

For example, I experimented with showing ads to free users and it has worked surprisingly well, not just in increasing revenue but also for partners who were able to get good exposure from Pika.

embed:tweet

My latest exploration is Pika Embed. With Pika Embed, anyone can integrate a full-fledged screenshot editor in their app easily and quickly. I already have a partner for Pika Embed and talking with more.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

My favorite is Stripe, because it handles payments for my SaaS and shows me the MRR.

Others include Slack which I’ve been using more recently to communicate with Dinesh and some users, Crisp for chatting with customers and providing Customer support. I love Supabase and use it for databases and auth. Vercel makes it easy to deploy and host the app and Pirsch helps me with analytics and events tracking.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

I’m not a book person, I do read fiction but not so much of self-help books.

The resources that have helped me the most are basically random articles on the web. Be it technical, about marketing, or about ideas, the internet is full of resources for guidance.

So nothing specific, just Google what you’re struggling with and keep looking until you find a solution.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Build in public, and choose a technology stack you're confident with
Focus on learning and try to sell features before launch
Remember, end users don't care about implementation; they want a functional product with a great user experience
Learn to strike a balance between different aspects of your product – not everything needs to be perfect
Invest in your brand rather than your product's, and experiment as much as possible
Above all, always remember that done is better than perfect

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

No plans on hiring full-time.

I will definitely need help with content and marketing since I want to push more on getting targeted users and improve search traffic conversions.

Where can we go to learn more?

If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below or write me an email at [email protected]!

If you’re looking to automate image generation or design marketing images, you should check out Pika!