13 ms·

My 2 Year Journey to $10K MRR

654 points by ronyfadel 6y ago

humbleMouse 6y ago
Interesting, although from reading the blog I still don’t know what banner bear does except for taking an audio files and creating video out of it.
- fastball 6y ago
  They generate Open Graph content (images and videos) for you. OG is what you see when you post a link in a messaging app or similar and it pops up with an image + description (link preview). This service automates the image generation part so you don't have to. Basically it makes link previews for your site sexier / more engaging in a (semi) automated way.
  - runjake 6y ago
    Great explanation! I had no clue what open graph was, and this succinctly explains it.
  - fookyong 6y ago
    Actually Bannerbear generates any image of any size, for any purpose :) Open Graph images is one use-case, but it's actually quite a small niche within my current customers. The most common use case is people who have spreadsheets full of data that they want to turn into some sort of image, like a product catalog in an excel sheet that you want to turn into social media posts. Another use case is any time in an app where you need to generate an image on-demand. For example if you're sending a weekly summary email to your SaaS users and you want to generate some sort of dynamic image to show their usage stats (with charts / metrics etc).
    - Rastonbury 6y ago
      Hey you landing page looks great, can I ask if you designed it from scratch?
      - fookyong 6y ago
        yes, pretty much designed from scratch. Although the underlying grid layout framework is bulma.io https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/the-bannerbear-marketing-site-tech-stack/ https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/the-bannerbear-marketing-sit...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
waynesonfire 6y ago
how did you get your first paying customer?
- JamesAdir 6y ago
  https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/how-to-get-your-first-25-saas-customers/ https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/how-to-get-your-first-25-saa...
  - jimkleiber 6y ago
    I loved the nuance in this link. How basically he tried a lot of things and many of them failed or kinda worked and somehow it came together over time. Probably some of the best marketing advice I've ever received. In a way, almost a sort of non-advice. Edit: thank you for sharing it!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ksec 6y ago
Off Topic. I love the way how this is being presented. But there is something about the design, along with the main BannerBear website seems to be off scale. I had to Zoom Out twice to make things looks normal.
- bberenberg 6y ago
  Huh you are exactly right. As soon as I zoomed out twice it looked perfect.
- OJFord 6y ago
  > I had to Zoom Out twice to make things looks normal. 80% (two zooms out from default in FF) is my default, since I found that was by far my most common choice per-site, changing it more often than not. I also have quite a few at 67%, and only the odd site (HN for example) at 100%. Just seems to be a trend for everything to be 'big' and (to me and you) 'zoomed-in'-looking. This is consistent (as in I do the same thing, it doesn't sync unfortunately) across my Linux desktop & (retina) MacBook Pro, before someone says something like 'well Linux is janky like that, try a Mac, they just work' :). (I use 'Zoom Page WE' in Firefox for persisting per-site zoom levels: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/zoom-page-we https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/zoom-page-we)
- sneakymichael 6y ago
  I find that a lot of sites seems to be designed on, and looked at internally on, large-screen desk setups (e.g. 27" iMac), so everything looks somewhat huge on smaller laptop-size screens (e.g. 13" MacBook).
  - ksec 6y ago
    That was my first thought as well. Designer must have been large screen display.
    - fookyong 6y ago
      I use a 13" MacBook Air :) I guess large fonts is just my preferred aesthetic - may not be to everyone's taste.
drawkbox 6y ago
What a great write up and very open and honest. The timeline format is amazingly clean and I am a sucker for timelines. I think the product is great and the name bannerbear really is memorable. I think that is a major key along with a great product. You have to be able to remember the name easily without effort and the two word format works well for human memory. Being high up in the alphabet is smart as well in terms of lists, it may not help much later but early on naming like this is important. > I would do one week of code, then spend the following week tweeting / blog posting about what I shipped — then repeat That is gold for indie/small business value creation and extraction. Many times marketing is like audio/sound for games, an afterthought for the programmer/creator/product person. Here you have a system that locked it in but only after creating, how it is supposed to be. I think it is a great way to avoid burnout as well, you are refreshed on both creating and promoting on those weeks. I believe that there is value creation (product/creative/engineering) and value extraction (marketing/business/finance) and it has to be in that order. There has to be enough value created to value extract and this system is quite nice. More excellent point: > The best way to make money on the internet is to ignore everyone telling you how to make money on the internet, and just do some hard work. https://twitter.com/yongfook/status/1328865845527805952 https://twitter.com/yongfook/status/1328865845527805952 > Knowing your target market is good, knowing your target's Job to Be Done is better > Jobs to Be Done is only something you understand after talking to users > Upgrade your user, not your product This is how you make products people love. Even if it is only a few minutes a day, when people use a product if it is fun or refreshing and makes their lives easier, that is game mechanic that is replayed. Same goes for games, it is all in the basic game mechanic, it has to be fun. Focus on the lives of the user/player of your product. I like to parallel that to like a fun game or a comicstrip, bring joy to people even if it is only a very small slice of their day, it will be a good part of their day. Make your product a "friend" of the user/player. You have all the little details that make your presentation fun like a good indie game with details and easily approachable. Even your subscribe form has a refreshing way to look at the captcha, rather than "confirm you aren't a robot" it is "confirm Humanity". Nice touch, but your presentation is a series of nice touches. Well played, these things are hard to instill in company cultures and usually only present in smaller more product people, or even gaming, focused projects. I just love everything presented, it has that thing that makes it fun. Congrats on your success Jon Yongfook I am sure you are headed to much higher ground with your North Star in focus all along.
ronyfadel 6y ago
A little note: I'm not the blog post's author but I've contacted Jon to reply to questions in the comments.
- fookyong 6y ago
  Thanks for the submission! It was the middle of the night for me, so I'm only just replying to comments now in the morning :)
jdlyga 6y ago
MRR = monthly recurring revenue
- jspash 6y ago
  TY!
sdoering 6y ago
Wow. Great write up and cool timeline format. I had never heard of the "Open Startup" [1] idea and clicked - and was stunned (positively) about the transparency. [1]: https://www.bannerbear.com/open/ https://www.bannerbear.com/open/ Edit: Is this a thing now showing the numbers for the world to see? I like it - but just have no prior experience.
- ronyfadel 6y ago
  It's a trend, yes: - https://baremetrics.com/open-startups https://baremetrics.com/open-startups - https://openstartuplist.com/ https://openstartuplist.com/
- voiper1 6y ago
  I first heard about it with buffer and ghost https://buffer.com/revenue https://buffer.com/revenue https://ghost.org/about/ https://ghost.org/about/ I think buffer also made their various iterations of salary formulas public.
  - eric_khun 6y ago
    We're hiring engineers and an EM btw ;) https://journey.buffer.com/#vacancies https://journey.buffer.com/#vacancies
- fookyong 6y ago
  As others have mentioned, it's a movement that has been driven by some really inspiring, transparent stories over the last 10 years or so. I was personally inspired by Buffer: https://buffer.com/revenue https://buffer.com/revenue And also Pieter Levels: https://nomadlist.com/open https://nomadlist.com/open Folks like these showed that it is possible to grow a business solo or with a small team, which was and still is hugely inspiring to me. I'm just doing my part to continue the practice, to hopefully positively influence the next generation!
- bemmu 6y ago
  I've always shared my numbers openly (http://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes http://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes). It makes a lot of sense for getting feedback and some initial customers as well, especially if you're just building something alone.
sixhobbits 6y ago
> In my case, I found that the more documentation I wrote the more conversions I got. I think this is key and great documentation is one of the most underrated parts of business. Stripe nailed this. Digital Ocean nailed this. Most places don't or can't. [note - personal bias as I have a startup in this space, but it seems very clear to me and I think there's a win-win in businesses focusing more on their docs in terms of improving global efficiency and improving sales and trust in that business - it's just really low hanging fruit in a majority of cases I've seen]
- speg 6y ago
  Reminds me of 2005 and trying to figure out jQuery vs. Mootools. jQuery had lots of docs with examples, and I never was able to wrap my head around Mootools.
  - nnadams 6y ago
    I second this exact comparison. Being able to try and customize jQuery UI components was also what sold me back then. I think simple web-based demos in your docs go a long way in explaining what your product actually feels like to use. Even a demo that's a bit contrived is useful. People will even just mindlessly play with demos. They are very worth doing in my opinion.
- PaulWaldman 6y ago
  I found that technical blog posts and documentation have made me aware of brands I otherwise wouldn't of known existed. Digital Ocean was great at this in the early days. I don't know if they haven't put as much effort into as of late or changes in SEO, but I don't seem to get funneled there by search engines as frequently.
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    https://www.digitalocean.com/community/pages/write-for-digitalocean https://www.digitalocean.com/community/pages/write-for-digit... This is a fantastic way to get your marketing into stratosphere. I'm seeing more and more companies doing it.
devortel 6y ago
The video generation demo is pretty neat but it took nearly 2 minutes to finish rendering. I'd be interested to know how this scales under high workloads and how updates can be deployed without disrupting long running processes like this one.
- thegeomaster 6y ago
  For updates, you can do your classic blue-green deployment: wind down traffic for instance (remove from load balancer etc), wait until it finishes outstanding jobs, deploy update, resume routing traffic, repeat for every instance (or do it in groups).
- fookyong 6y ago
  Founder here - thanks for giving that a try! It's a good question. There's still a lot to be optimized on the video side of things. But the reason it took 2 minutes is because of things like: - Checking the video length before rendering - Converting to a standardized format so that the renderer doesn't trip up - Handing off to AWS Lambda, which involves some network I/O - Handing back to my Rails app So there's a lot of back-and-forth right now that could be optimized. It will scale nicely under high workloads because my main Rails app isn't really doing much except handing off to AWS Lambda, but this means there is a speed hit both in terms of the I/O and also the Lambda being underpowered. You can actually see the two main processes happening if you watch the progress bar on the video demo. You'll notice that the first 50% is a bit slow - that's my Rails app doing some validations, conversions, and packaging things up nicely for the Lambda. The last 50% seems to move faster - that's the Lambda rendering the final video and then passing it back to Rails. There's definitely a lot of scope for speeding things up in the first 50%. As for disrupting long-running processes, I can safely deploy my Rails app any time as it's not performing any of the rendering jobs (on images or video) it's just acting as the job expeditor and receiver of webhooks.
oksurewhynot 6y ago
was this really hard to read for anyone else? The spacing and layout is really hard to make sense of.
- artembugara 6y ago
  same.
- ativzzz 6y ago
  Agree, don't think this format makes for a very legible or compelling post, but I guess his target market probably likes it.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  Yes. I really don't understand the constant war against text.
- jcun4128 6y ago
  yeah felt the same, didn't feel like I was reading a blog more like the landing page with how big/sectioned everything was. read on 1920x1080
- allenu 6y ago
  It's really beautiful, but I admit that I'm not a fan of the "bite-sized" formatting that's common these days. I found myself scrolling through it to look for some more depth, but the mix of embedded self tweets with short sentences left me with more questions than anything.
0898 6y ago
Off-topic I know, but how can I make my blog look like this? So many posts like this on Hacker News have this clean, confident, gentle-exposition style. (As you can tell I don't really have the design vocabulary, but hopefully looking at the site you know what I mean.) Is there a particular Wordpress theme that people use? Or is this another CMS like Ghost?
- atom-morgan 6y ago
  I'm guessing he designed it himself but if you have Twitter you can ask him directly: https://twitter.com/yongfook https://twitter.com/yongfook
- klohto 6y ago
  https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/the-bannerbear-marketing-site-tech-stack/ https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/the-bannerbear-marketing-sit... This should explain the stack
  - devlopr 6y ago
    "All the javascript on the marketing site is good ol' JQuery" JQuery works perfectly here.
- brundolf 6y ago
  The creator's bio says he's a professional designer, so he probably designed it himself
- config_yml 6y ago
  Probably using Tailwind CSS.
luthfur 6y ago
"I would do one week of code, then spend the following week tweeting / blog posting about what I shipped — then repeat" This right here is a very important organizing principle for indie devs. It's more effective than say doing both coding and promotion in parallel by dividing the the day into two.
- geniium 6y ago
  This is very interesting IMHO !
- odonnellryan 6y ago
  This works for larger companies and larger teams, too.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  In contrast, splitting the day helps to pivot more easily. I've had situations where I thought I wanted to work on a certain feature but when I talked about it, people didn't want that feature. So if I spent a week implementing it, it would have been a waste of my time.
  - coffee 6y ago
    Reverse your process. Talk about it to people first, then work on a feature they need (in aggregate).
- eloff 6y ago
  I think I would prefer to code for the first half of the day, and market for the last half as my concentration wanes.
  - arunaugustine 6y ago
    I have tried that in my work at my startup and failed. Alternating days did not work either. Jon's recommendation about alternating weeks is what I am going to try next.
waylandsmithers 6y ago
> Don’t target your SaaS at other indie hackers. It’s a small niche of people who like to build things. This is what I've never totally understood about product hunt. Is the goal to get feedback from other creators, or launch to an audience that isn't necessarily your target market?
- notretarded 6y ago
  Yes
- zhangshine 6y ago
  There are many bloggers trying to find something to write about on Product Hunt. They may try your SaaS and write free blog posts about your SaaS to their audience.
tunesmith 6y ago
I like the note about alternating dev weeks and marketing weeks, and using the marketing weeks to market what you developed the week previous. Documentation could also be considered part of the marketing bucket, too.
buzbe_uk 6y ago
Great story - thanks for sharing that. So many useful learnings in there - and the final product looks slick! How did you decide on pricing in the end?
eliseumds 6y ago
Just signed up and am finishing the integration. One thing though: I don't think 30 requests is enough in the free plan, there are many features to be tried out. After reaching the limit, I'm still not confident that I should commit to your service. Maybe you could shove a watermark in there after the 30 free requests? Just so that people can keep testing out different templates, colour combinations, dimensions, stuff like that. Our designer wants to play around with the template creator now but I had to create some throwaway accounts for him to do so. Congratz on your journey, you're in a market that has been barely explored, so much potential.
- chrisdirkis 6y ago
  I do not think that a watermark would be a good idea, though I understand the desire for an expanded free plan. The example I have in mind is the Unity game engine, where free users have a splash screen in their exported games. Since most users who aren't paying are also not making great games, Unity's name and reputation is now attached to solely those bad games. Similarly with the generated images, adding a watermark to (some of the) free ones will mean that the images you have your name on are the ones that are being generated by users who aren't paying; either because they're not making enough to justify it, or they're making bad content that you don't really want to be the main thing with your name on it out there.
  - fookyong 6y ago
    Absolutely spot on analysis :) For people who are on the trial and need more quota, I simply tell them they are welcome to create 2nd, 3rd etc accounts. I have no issue with that. "How much free quota" to give is a question with no right answer. So instead of forever trying to tweak that number, I have left it at an amount that seems to be working and I don't increase it for anyone (I have not even built in the ability to extend a free trial).
    - marcusstenbeck 6y ago
      If you ever change it a very restrictive rate-limit could work too. It might be annoying to maintain or combine with the existing credit system tho. On the other hand, people creating multiple accounts to test things out is a very nice indicator of interest.
locallost 6y ago
It looks very polished. The pop effect when done is very cool. If I may ask, who are the people that need this? QR code generator is kind of clear, but for e.g. image generation? Bloggers maybe?
- fookyong 6y ago
  Founder here - I'll answer! Basically anyone who needs to do repetitive image generation. The idea came from when I was working in Ecommerce. We would be uploading anywhere from 5 to 50 new products to our store every day. And those products would have multiple photos (different angle views). And from those different views, we would be manually creating all sorts of marketing assets e.g. ads, social media posts etc. On top of the image, we would usually want to overlay things like our logo, or a coupon code, or the product name etc. All of this stuff was done manually and it was a PITA. So my product is aimed at two types of customer, 1) the above type of user who needs some kind of highly-scalable and flexible banner generation API. Digital ad agencies, ecommerce stores. 2) a lower volume type of customer who wants to do the same but at a smaller scale, maybe for their own solo business. These customers use Zapier to integrate with Bannerbear, rather than using the API directly. Hope that helps explain the use cases!
  - locallost 6y ago
    thanks a lot! it makes a lot of sense, I just don't know anything about the day to day business of e-commerce to be able to figure that out.
brundolf 6y ago
On its face this seems handy: automatically generate pleasing social-media images for different links on your site instead of fiddling with photoshop by hand, and throw in an integrated CDN to serve them But the pricing, for the above, seems insane: $99/mo for the standard plan So I assume I'm missing something about what this service can do, and what value it provides. Can anyone fill me in?
- encoderer 6y ago
  Here is the value: If you were going to produce these images anyway, using some other means, it's probably costing you more than $99 a month.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    I guess if you're a company with a full-time designer, probably paid $30-$50/hr, depending on the number of images you need that may work out
    - albertgoeswoof 6y ago
      It’s for small business that can’t afford a dedicated designer. At the moment you pay a freelancer a couple grand to do your branding every few years and you make these designs yourself. $99/month is cheaper and is 80% as good as a freelance designer every couple of years
- fookyong 6y ago
  Founder here - I provided a few more details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25936813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25936813 I agree with you, automated open graph images are not a problem worth paying lots of money to solve. That's pretty much the exact realisation I had at the mid point in this timeline - see the "Rebrand" section for the details. So at that point I pivoted Bannerbear to be able to generate any kind of image, for any purpose. New use cases are things like, generating ad variations, generating instagram posts, generating dynamic in-app images (e.g. in the welcome email for Bannerbear you get a personalized image header which is generated on-the-fly by Bannerbear) and these use cases are a lot more valuable to the end users.
de11 6y ago
Great post. Website and product looks sleek.
fudged71 6y ago
I’m curious how much development, marketing, and maintenance is needed to maintain this level of revenue. How long can you coast? How long can you go without new features? I know that may not be the goal and there are other reasons to work on it, but hypothetically...
- drpancake 6y ago
  If you have a healthy churn rate (say 5% or less) and you're getting some residual number of signups every month through SEO or some other passive channel, then theoretically you could coast for a long time. The obvious downside being that your competitors may eat your lunch.
- fookyong 6y ago
  It's a good question. My churn rate is still quite high at around 10%. So I definitely cannot coast, I have to actively market and make sure my growth is higher than my churn. When I take my foot off the pedal and stop marketing, I feel it - I get less targeted signups and less conversions. So this is a full time job right now, it's not a "set and forget" style business!
  - pmarreck 6y ago
    Do you use ImageMagick for image generation? (I've had issues with it and am always looking for a replacement, but it just does SO much...) Do you do it yourself or via third party? What does your stack look like? Ruby on Rails and...? I just retweeted you btw. Very impressive, actually even a little intimidating. I don't know if you're looking to be bought, but if you haven't had offers already, I'm sure they're coming your way soon
  - fudged71 6y ago
    Thanks. I suppose if you had minimal or negative churn you could take a break. Where do you feel the churn is coming from?
tnt128 6y ago
Curious is this using imagemagik for backend image generation? What about videos?
cercatrova 6y ago
I've been following Yongfook for the past 2 years now, super cool guy, I'm glad that he got Bannerbear to click, I know he was trying out many different ideas over the years.
cooervo 6y ago
amazing, kudos!
harrisreynolds 6y ago
This is really cool to see. I looked at adding an integration with Bannerbear into WeBase several months ago but decided it was too niche of a product. But as it grows it could be really beneficial to revisit this integration. Nice work! [1] https://www.webase.com https://www.webase.com
- fookyong 6y ago
  Founder here - thanks for giving it a try! My email is open any time you have questions in the future when you revisit Bannerbear :) jon@bannerbear.com
robinhood 6y ago
You deserve it. I've followed your progress and it’s such a joy to follow. Congrats!
HeadHonchoSP 6y ago
Took 7 tries to figure out a revenue model. Guess we all get there eventually. Great post
semireg 6y ago
Another solo founder here with a similar product (it generates images), similar revenue and similar age. I went the Electron route so my solution uses local compute and you get to save designs to your desktop. You can batch process thousands of images from spreadsheets, etc. The kicker is I built this for label printing. So the output can be full color or dithered black and white, and my app talks to a few dozen supported USB thermal label printers. Like the author described.. I niched down. Check out my app at https://label.live https://label.live BannerBear is cool and the marketing is truly inspiring. Keep up the good work!
- fookyong 6y ago
  Awesome product and name / domain! That list of bar code types blows my mind - and shows me that clearly this is a niche I know nothing about :)
- syncro 6y ago
  Cool product. Would you be willing to share rough revenue numbers?
  - semireg 6y ago
    Revenue is in the same ballpark as BannerBear with similar growth. However, most of my licenses are one-time and I just recently introduced a subscription. Like BannerBear, my competition in the desktop space is very expensive for customers.
biztos 6y ago
Congratulations on the milestone! I really liked the blog but didn’t quite get what the product was for, until I tried the Tweetagram demo, which is awesome! https://www.bannerbear.com/demos/tweetagram?tweet_id=1354742921455656962 https://www.bannerbear.com/demos/tweetagram?tweet_id=1354742... I bet this is a fun product to build. Best of luck with it!
afry1 6y ago
Hey Jon, really enjoyed that writeup! It's a cool idea to plot out the journey you've been on with little summaries and links to the blogs and videos/talks/ideas that you were focused on at the time. Cooler still that the beginning of the journey was a 12 startups in 12 months project. I'm actually in the middle of doing that as we speak, and am about to finish month one. Definitely feeling that "final 10% of effort seems to take as long as the previous 90%" thing currently ... kind of wondering whether I'll have something shippable or usable in the next two days. But even if I don't, next month is another chance to get it right and to build off of the things I've learned in month 1. Anyway, I'll be interested to see more from you. If you're curious to check out my work I'm putting up weekly blog summaries here: https://startupinamonth.net https://startupinamonth.net. Definitely gonna start keeping track of what I'm reading and thinking about so I can do a similar overview post in a year or two :)

654 points by ronyfadel 6y ago

Interesting, although from reading the blog I still don’t know what banner bear does except for taking an audio files and creating video out of it.

fastball 6y ago
They generate Open Graph content (images and videos) for you. OG is what you see when you post a link in a messaging app or similar and it pops up with an image + description (link preview). This service automates the image generation part so you don't have to. Basically it makes link previews for your site sexier / more engaging in a (semi) automated way.
- runjake 6y ago
  Great explanation! I had no clue what open graph was, and this succinctly explains it.
- fookyong 6y ago
  Actually Bannerbear generates any image of any size, for any purpose :) Open Graph images is one use-case, but it's actually quite a small niche within my current customers. The most common use case is people who have spreadsheets full of data that they want to turn into some sort of image, like a product catalog in an excel sheet that you want to turn into social media posts. Another use case is any time in an app where you need to generate an image on-demand. For example if you're sending a weekly summary email to your SaaS users and you want to generate some sort of dynamic image to show their usage stats (with charts / metrics etc).
  - Rastonbury 6y ago
    Hey you landing page looks great, can I ask if you designed it from scratch?
    - fookyong 6y ago
      yes, pretty much designed from scratch. Although the underlying grid layout framework is bulma.io https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/the-bannerbear-marketing-site-tech-stack/ https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/the-bannerbear-marketing-sit...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

waynesonfire 6y ago

how did you get your first paying customer?

JamesAdir 6y ago
https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/how-to-get-your-first-25-saas-customers/ https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/how-to-get-your-first-25-saa...
- jimkleiber 6y ago
  I loved the nuance in this link. How basically he tried a lot of things and many of them failed or kinda worked and somehow it came together over time. Probably some of the best marketing advice I've ever received. In a way, almost a sort of non-advice. Edit: thank you for sharing it!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ksec 6y ago

Off Topic. I love the way how this is being presented. But there is something about the design, along with the main BannerBear website seems to be off scale. I had to Zoom Out twice to make things looks normal.

bberenberg 6y ago
Huh you are exactly right. As soon as I zoomed out twice it looked perfect.
OJFord 6y ago
> I had to Zoom Out twice to make things looks normal. 80% (two zooms out from default in FF) is my default, since I found that was by far my most common choice per-site, changing it more often than not. I also have quite a few at 67%, and only the odd site (HN for example) at 100%. Just seems to be a trend for everything to be 'big' and (to me and you) 'zoomed-in'-looking. This is consistent (as in I do the same thing, it doesn't sync unfortunately) across my Linux desktop & (retina) MacBook Pro, before someone says something like 'well Linux is janky like that, try a Mac, they just work' :). (I use 'Zoom Page WE' in Firefox for persisting per-site zoom levels: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/zoom-page-we https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/zoom-page-we)
sneakymichael 6y ago
I find that a lot of sites seems to be designed on, and looked at internally on, large-screen desk setups (e.g. 27" iMac), so everything looks somewhat huge on smaller laptop-size screens (e.g. 13" MacBook).
- ksec 6y ago
  That was my first thought as well. Designer must have been large screen display.
  - fookyong 6y ago
    I use a 13" MacBook Air :) I guess large fonts is just my preferred aesthetic - may not be to everyone's taste.

drawkbox 6y ago

What a great write up and very open and honest. The timeline format is amazingly clean and I am a sucker for timelines. I think the product is great and the name bannerbear really is memorable. I think that is a major key along with a great product. You have to be able to remember the name easily without effort and the two word format works well for human memory. Being high up in the alphabet is smart as well in terms of lists, it may not help much later but early on naming like this is important. > I would do one week of code, then spend the following week tweeting / blog posting about what I shipped — then repeat That is gold for indie/small business value creation and extraction. Many times marketing is like audio/sound for games, an afterthought for the programmer/creator/product person. Here you have a system that locked it in but only after creating, how it is supposed to be. I think it is a great way to avoid burnout as well, you are refreshed on both creating and promoting on those weeks. I believe that there is value creation (product/creative/engineering) and value extraction (marketing/business/finance) and it has to be in that order. There has to be enough value created to value extract and this system is quite nice. More excellent point: > The best way to make money on the internet is to ignore everyone telling you how to make money on the internet, and just do some hard work. https://twitter.com/yongfook/status/1328865845527805952 https://twitter.com/yongfook/status/1328865845527805952 > Knowing your target market is good, knowing your target's Job to Be Done is better > Jobs to Be Done is only something you understand after talking to users > Upgrade your user, not your product This is how you make products people love. Even if it is only a few minutes a day, when people use a product if it is fun or refreshing and makes their lives easier, that is game mechanic that is replayed. Same goes for games, it is all in the basic game mechanic, it has to be fun. Focus on the lives of the user/player of your product. I like to parallel that to like a fun game or a comicstrip, bring joy to people even if it is only a very small slice of their day, it will be a good part of their day. Make your product a "friend" of the user/player. You have all the little details that make your presentation fun like a good indie game with details and easily approachable. Even your subscribe form has a refreshing way to look at the captcha, rather than "confirm you aren't a robot" it is "confirm Humanity". Nice touch, but your presentation is a series of nice touches. Well played, these things are hard to instill in company cultures and usually only present in smaller more product people, or even gaming, focused projects. I just love everything presented, it has that thing that makes it fun. Congrats on your success Jon Yongfook I am sure you are headed to much higher ground with your North Star in focus all along.

ronyfadel 6y ago

A little note: I'm not the blog post's author but I've contacted Jon to reply to questions in the comments.

fookyong 6y ago
Thanks for the submission! It was the middle of the night for me, so I'm only just replying to comments now in the morning :)

jdlyga 6y ago

MRR = monthly recurring revenue

jspash 6y ago
TY!

sdoering 6y ago

Wow. Great write up and cool timeline format. I had never heard of the "Open Startup" [1] idea and clicked - and was stunned (positively) about the transparency. [1]: https://www.bannerbear.com/open/ https://www.bannerbear.com/open/ Edit: Is this a thing now showing the numbers for the world to see? I like it - but just have no prior experience.

ronyfadel 6y ago
It's a trend, yes: - https://baremetrics.com/open-startups https://baremetrics.com/open-startups - https://openstartuplist.com/ https://openstartuplist.com/
voiper1 6y ago
I first heard about it with buffer and ghost https://buffer.com/revenue https://buffer.com/revenue https://ghost.org/about/ https://ghost.org/about/ I think buffer also made their various iterations of salary formulas public.
- eric_khun 6y ago
  We're hiring engineers and an EM btw ;) https://journey.buffer.com/#vacancies https://journey.buffer.com/#vacancies
fookyong 6y ago
As others have mentioned, it's a movement that has been driven by some really inspiring, transparent stories over the last 10 years or so. I was personally inspired by Buffer: https://buffer.com/revenue https://buffer.com/revenue And also Pieter Levels: https://nomadlist.com/open https://nomadlist.com/open Folks like these showed that it is possible to grow a business solo or with a small team, which was and still is hugely inspiring to me. I'm just doing my part to continue the practice, to hopefully positively influence the next generation!
bemmu 6y ago
I've always shared my numbers openly (http://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes http://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes). It makes a lot of sense for getting feedback and some initial customers as well, especially if you're just building something alone.

sixhobbits 6y ago

> In my case, I found that the more documentation I wrote the more conversions I got. I think this is key and great documentation is one of the most underrated parts of business. Stripe nailed this. Digital Ocean nailed this. Most places don't or can't. [note - personal bias as I have a startup in this space, but it seems very clear to me and I think there's a win-win in businesses focusing more on their docs in terms of improving global efficiency and improving sales and trust in that business - it's just really low hanging fruit in a majority of cases I've seen]

speg 6y ago
Reminds me of 2005 and trying to figure out jQuery vs. Mootools. jQuery had lots of docs with examples, and I never was able to wrap my head around Mootools.
- nnadams 6y ago
  I second this exact comparison. Being able to try and customize jQuery UI components was also what sold me back then. I think simple web-based demos in your docs go a long way in explaining what your product actually feels like to use. Even a demo that's a bit contrived is useful. People will even just mindlessly play with demos. They are very worth doing in my opinion.
PaulWaldman 6y ago
I found that technical blog posts and documentation have made me aware of brands I otherwise wouldn't of known existed. Digital Ocean was great at this in the early days. I don't know if they haven't put as much effort into as of late or changes in SEO, but I don't seem to get funneled there by search engines as frequently.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  https://www.digitalocean.com/community/pages/write-for-digitalocean https://www.digitalocean.com/community/pages/write-for-digit... This is a fantastic way to get your marketing into stratosphere. I'm seeing more and more companies doing it.

devortel 6y ago

The video generation demo is pretty neat but it took nearly 2 minutes to finish rendering. I'd be interested to know how this scales under high workloads and how updates can be deployed without disrupting long running processes like this one.

thegeomaster 6y ago
For updates, you can do your classic blue-green deployment: wind down traffic for instance (remove from load balancer etc), wait until it finishes outstanding jobs, deploy update, resume routing traffic, repeat for every instance (or do it in groups).
fookyong 6y ago
Founder here - thanks for giving that a try! It's a good question. There's still a lot to be optimized on the video side of things. But the reason it took 2 minutes is because of things like: - Checking the video length before rendering - Converting to a standardized format so that the renderer doesn't trip up - Handing off to AWS Lambda, which involves some network I/O - Handing back to my Rails app So there's a lot of back-and-forth right now that could be optimized. It will scale nicely under high workloads because my main Rails app isn't really doing much except handing off to AWS Lambda, but this means there is a speed hit both in terms of the I/O and also the Lambda being underpowered. You can actually see the two main processes happening if you watch the progress bar on the video demo. You'll notice that the first 50% is a bit slow - that's my Rails app doing some validations, conversions, and packaging things up nicely for the Lambda. The last 50% seems to move faster - that's the Lambda rendering the final video and then passing it back to Rails. There's definitely a lot of scope for speeding things up in the first 50%. As for disrupting long-running processes, I can safely deploy my Rails app any time as it's not performing any of the rendering jobs (on images or video) it's just acting as the job expeditor and receiver of webhooks.

oksurewhynot 6y ago

was this really hard to read for anyone else? The spacing and layout is really hard to make sense of.

artembugara 6y ago
same.
ativzzz 6y ago
Agree, don't think this format makes for a very legible or compelling post, but I guess his target market probably likes it.
Enginerrrd 6y ago
Yes. I really don't understand the constant war against text.
jcun4128 6y ago
yeah felt the same, didn't feel like I was reading a blog more like the landing page with how big/sectioned everything was. read on 1920x1080
allenu 6y ago
It's really beautiful, but I admit that I'm not a fan of the "bite-sized" formatting that's common these days. I found myself scrolling through it to look for some more depth, but the mix of embedded self tweets with short sentences left me with more questions than anything.

0898 6y ago

Off-topic I know, but how can I make my blog look like this? So many posts like this on Hacker News have this clean, confident, gentle-exposition style. (As you can tell I don't really have the design vocabulary, but hopefully looking at the site you know what I mean.) Is there a particular Wordpress theme that people use? Or is this another CMS like Ghost?

atom-morgan 6y ago
I'm guessing he designed it himself but if you have Twitter you can ask him directly: https://twitter.com/yongfook https://twitter.com/yongfook
klohto 6y ago
https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/the-bannerbear-marketing-site-tech-stack/ https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/the-bannerbear-marketing-sit... This should explain the stack
- devlopr 6y ago
  "All the javascript on the marketing site is good ol' JQuery" JQuery works perfectly here.
brundolf 6y ago
The creator's bio says he's a professional designer, so he probably designed it himself
config_yml 6y ago
Probably using Tailwind CSS.

luthfur 6y ago

"I would do one week of code, then spend the following week tweeting / blog posting about what I shipped — then repeat" This right here is a very important organizing principle for indie devs. It's more effective than say doing both coding and promotion in parallel by dividing the the day into two.

geniium 6y ago
This is very interesting IMHO !
odonnellryan 6y ago
This works for larger companies and larger teams, too.
cercatrova 6y ago
In contrast, splitting the day helps to pivot more easily. I've had situations where I thought I wanted to work on a certain feature but when I talked about it, people didn't want that feature. So if I spent a week implementing it, it would have been a waste of my time.
- coffee 6y ago
  Reverse your process. Talk about it to people first, then work on a feature they need (in aggregate).
eloff 6y ago
I think I would prefer to code for the first half of the day, and market for the last half as my concentration wanes.
- arunaugustine 6y ago
  I have tried that in my work at my startup and failed. Alternating days did not work either. Jon's recommendation about alternating weeks is what I am going to try next.

waylandsmithers 6y ago

> Don’t target your SaaS at other indie hackers. It’s a small niche of people who like to build things. This is what I've never totally understood about product hunt. Is the goal to get feedback from other creators, or launch to an audience that isn't necessarily your target market?

notretarded 6y ago
Yes
zhangshine 6y ago
There are many bloggers trying to find something to write about on Product Hunt. They may try your SaaS and write free blog posts about your SaaS to their audience.

tunesmith 6y ago

I like the note about alternating dev weeks and marketing weeks, and using the marketing weeks to market what you developed the week previous. Documentation could also be considered part of the marketing bucket, too.

buzbe_uk 6y ago

Great story - thanks for sharing that. So many useful learnings in there - and the final product looks slick! How did you decide on pricing in the end?

eliseumds 6y ago

Just signed up and am finishing the integration. One thing though: I don't think 30 requests is enough in the free plan, there are many features to be tried out. After reaching the limit, I'm still not confident that I should commit to your service. Maybe you could shove a watermark in there after the 30 free requests? Just so that people can keep testing out different templates, colour combinations, dimensions, stuff like that. Our designer wants to play around with the template creator now but I had to create some throwaway accounts for him to do so. Congratz on your journey, you're in a market that has been barely explored, so much potential.

chrisdirkis 6y ago
I do not think that a watermark would be a good idea, though I understand the desire for an expanded free plan. The example I have in mind is the Unity game engine, where free users have a splash screen in their exported games. Since most users who aren't paying are also not making great games, Unity's name and reputation is now attached to solely those bad games. Similarly with the generated images, adding a watermark to (some of the) free ones will mean that the images you have your name on are the ones that are being generated by users who aren't paying; either because they're not making enough to justify it, or they're making bad content that you don't really want to be the main thing with your name on it out there.
- fookyong 6y ago
  Absolutely spot on analysis :) For people who are on the trial and need more quota, I simply tell them they are welcome to create 2nd, 3rd etc accounts. I have no issue with that. "How much free quota" to give is a question with no right answer. So instead of forever trying to tweak that number, I have left it at an amount that seems to be working and I don't increase it for anyone (I have not even built in the ability to extend a free trial).
  - marcusstenbeck 6y ago
    If you ever change it a very restrictive rate-limit could work too. It might be annoying to maintain or combine with the existing credit system tho. On the other hand, people creating multiple accounts to test things out is a very nice indicator of interest.

locallost 6y ago

It looks very polished. The pop effect when done is very cool. If I may ask, who are the people that need this? QR code generator is kind of clear, but for e.g. image generation? Bloggers maybe?

fookyong 6y ago
Founder here - I'll answer! Basically anyone who needs to do repetitive image generation. The idea came from when I was working in Ecommerce. We would be uploading anywhere from 5 to 50 new products to our store every day. And those products would have multiple photos (different angle views). And from those different views, we would be manually creating all sorts of marketing assets e.g. ads, social media posts etc. On top of the image, we would usually want to overlay things like our logo, or a coupon code, or the product name etc. All of this stuff was done manually and it was a PITA. So my product is aimed at two types of customer, 1) the above type of user who needs some kind of highly-scalable and flexible banner generation API. Digital ad agencies, ecommerce stores. 2) a lower volume type of customer who wants to do the same but at a smaller scale, maybe for their own solo business. These customers use Zapier to integrate with Bannerbear, rather than using the API directly. Hope that helps explain the use cases!
- locallost 6y ago
  thanks a lot! it makes a lot of sense, I just don't know anything about the day to day business of e-commerce to be able to figure that out.

brundolf 6y ago

On its face this seems handy: automatically generate pleasing social-media images for different links on your site instead of fiddling with photoshop by hand, and throw in an integrated CDN to serve them But the pricing, for the above, seems insane: $99/mo for the standard plan So I assume I'm missing something about what this service can do, and what value it provides. Can anyone fill me in?

encoderer 6y ago
Here is the value: If you were going to produce these images anyway, using some other means, it's probably costing you more than $99 a month.
- brundolf 6y ago
  I guess if you're a company with a full-time designer, probably paid $30-$50/hr, depending on the number of images you need that may work out
  - albertgoeswoof 6y ago
    It’s for small business that can’t afford a dedicated designer. At the moment you pay a freelancer a couple grand to do your branding every few years and you make these designs yourself. $99/month is cheaper and is 80% as good as a freelance designer every couple of years
fookyong 6y ago
Founder here - I provided a few more details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25936813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25936813 I agree with you, automated open graph images are not a problem worth paying lots of money to solve. That's pretty much the exact realisation I had at the mid point in this timeline - see the "Rebrand" section for the details. So at that point I pivoted Bannerbear to be able to generate any kind of image, for any purpose. New use cases are things like, generating ad variations, generating instagram posts, generating dynamic in-app images (e.g. in the welcome email for Bannerbear you get a personalized image header which is generated on-the-fly by Bannerbear) and these use cases are a lot more valuable to the end users.

de11 6y ago

Great post. Website and product looks sleek.

fudged71 6y ago

I’m curious how much development, marketing, and maintenance is needed to maintain this level of revenue. How long can you coast? How long can you go without new features? I know that may not be the goal and there are other reasons to work on it, but hypothetically...

drpancake 6y ago
If you have a healthy churn rate (say 5% or less) and you're getting some residual number of signups every month through SEO or some other passive channel, then theoretically you could coast for a long time. The obvious downside being that your competitors may eat your lunch.
fookyong 6y ago
It's a good question. My churn rate is still quite high at around 10%. So I definitely cannot coast, I have to actively market and make sure my growth is higher than my churn. When I take my foot off the pedal and stop marketing, I feel it - I get less targeted signups and less conversions. So this is a full time job right now, it's not a "set and forget" style business!
- pmarreck 6y ago
  Do you use ImageMagick for image generation? (I've had issues with it and am always looking for a replacement, but it just does SO much...) Do you do it yourself or via third party? What does your stack look like? Ruby on Rails and...? I just retweeted you btw. Very impressive, actually even a little intimidating. I don't know if you're looking to be bought, but if you haven't had offers already, I'm sure they're coming your way soon
- fudged71 6y ago
  Thanks. I suppose if you had minimal or negative churn you could take a break. Where do you feel the churn is coming from?

tnt128 6y ago

Curious is this using imagemagik for backend image generation? What about videos?

cercatrova 6y ago

I've been following Yongfook for the past 2 years now, super cool guy, I'm glad that he got Bannerbear to click, I know he was trying out many different ideas over the years.

cooervo 6y ago

amazing, kudos!

harrisreynolds 6y ago

This is really cool to see. I looked at adding an integration with Bannerbear into WeBase several months ago but decided it was too niche of a product. But as it grows it could be really beneficial to revisit this integration. Nice work! [1] https://www.webase.com https://www.webase.com

fookyong 6y ago
Founder here - thanks for giving it a try! My email is open any time you have questions in the future when you revisit Bannerbear :) jon@bannerbear.com

robinhood 6y ago

You deserve it. I've followed your progress and it’s such a joy to follow. Congrats!

HeadHonchoSP 6y ago

Took 7 tries to figure out a revenue model. Guess we all get there eventually. Great post

semireg 6y ago

Another solo founder here with a similar product (it generates images), similar revenue and similar age. I went the Electron route so my solution uses local compute and you get to save designs to your desktop. You can batch process thousands of images from spreadsheets, etc. The kicker is I built this for label printing. So the output can be full color or dithered black and white, and my app talks to a few dozen supported USB thermal label printers. Like the author described.. I niched down. Check out my app at https://label.live https://label.live BannerBear is cool and the marketing is truly inspiring. Keep up the good work!

fookyong 6y ago
Awesome product and name / domain! That list of bar code types blows my mind - and shows me that clearly this is a niche I know nothing about :)
syncro 6y ago
Cool product. Would you be willing to share rough revenue numbers?
- semireg 6y ago
  Revenue is in the same ballpark as BannerBear with similar growth. However, most of my licenses are one-time and I just recently introduced a subscription. Like BannerBear, my competition in the desktop space is very expensive for customers.

biztos 6y ago

Congratulations on the milestone! I really liked the blog but didn’t quite get what the product was for, until I tried the Tweetagram demo, which is awesome! https://www.bannerbear.com/demos/tweetagram?tweet_id=1354742921455656962 https://www.bannerbear.com/demos/tweetagram?tweet_id=1354742... I bet this is a fun product to build. Best of luck with it!

afry1 6y ago

Hey Jon, really enjoyed that writeup! It's a cool idea to plot out the journey you've been on with little summaries and links to the blogs and videos/talks/ideas that you were focused on at the time. Cooler still that the beginning of the journey was a 12 startups in 12 months project. I'm actually in the middle of doing that as we speak, and am about to finish month one. Definitely feeling that "final 10% of effort seems to take as long as the previous 90%" thing currently ... kind of wondering whether I'll have something shippable or usable in the next two days. But even if I don't, next month is another chance to get it right and to build off of the things I've learned in month 1. Anyway, I'll be interested to see more from you. If you're curious to check out my work I'm putting up weekly blog summaries here: https://startupinamonth.net https://startupinamonth.net. Definitely gonna start keeping track of what I'm reading and thinking about so I can do a similar overview post in a year or two :)