Building a profitable business in a crowded market by giving products away for free

Rik Schennink built Pintura in an overcrowded market and completely ignored the competition, focusing only on his "Why": Proving that web can rival a native experience.

Here's Rik on how he did it. 👇

The transition from job to indie hacking

Before starting this, I was a full-time front-end developer at an agency. I always felt like things weren’t moving fast enough or weren’t optimal. I felt like everything should be done differently, but I just didn’t have the energy to change things, certainly not in a big corporate environment.

My first attempt at indie hacking was an iOS game that I built when the iPhone was first released. That took two years of my time — a bit too much, and risky as well.

Then, I learned about the Envato market and started building web components in my free time. I slowly pivoted towards image editing and uploading as I found there was a market there. But in 2018, I left the Envato ecosystem and launched Pintura on my own platform.

I slowly started working less and less at my full-time job, going from 40 hours, down to 36 hours with a day off every other week to work on products. Then 32 hours. And then, I quit and kept the lights on with 32 hours per week of freelancing.

Three years later, I let go of my last client.

Pintura and other products

I’m not great at business — I just now looked up "business model" to make sure I knew what it meant. I just really love to build cool stuff.

But I can say that Pintura is a web-based image editor that I've been working on since November, 2018. I sell subscriptions because it creates a more stable income. But the software license is still perpetual, so if a subscription expires, customers can keep using Pintura and download releases up until the point their subscription expired.

The subscriptions also allow customers to lock in their subscription price level, which I think is nice. I’ve experimented with lifetime licenses on Envato, but that just wasn’t sustainable.

I have other products too. There’s a spinoff product called CropGuide that uses Pintura. I’m working on it with a friend, and it's at $1K/month.

Another friend and I have just released BananaBin, a fun MacOS app that adds flies to the bin if it’s been full for a while. I think it’s around $1K/month, maybe a little less. The income is his, I’m just there for fun and to help him break into indie hacking.

Both BananaBin and CropGuide are outside of PQINA, separate entities so to speak. But all the rest of my products are under the umbrella of PQINA. None of those have any revenue, as I am fully committed to Pintura.

Standing out in a crowded market

Image editing is a pretty crowded market, but when I started out, I wasn’t aware of the competition; otherwise, I might’ve searched for another niche

The only way to stand out — and my core strategy — was and still is to focus on building an incredibly smooth and near-native user experience. That's my "Why".

According to "Start With Why" by Simon Sinek, the "WHY" of the company is what drives all its innovation and product development. For me, it boils down to, "Show that the web can rival the native experience."

So everything I do focuses on exactly that. And with this as my "Why", I'm able to differentiate my product, because I don’t think any other competing image editor offers that at this moment.

But with that said, even today, I don't know much about the competition. Keeping an eye on them just makes me anxious. I find it's healthier to just focus on my product.

Coding with AI will bite you

V1 of Pintura took me about six months to build, and I've been updating it frequently ever since.

Here's my stack:

• 11ty with Nunjucks for static sites

• NodeJS, ExpressJS, Prisma, and Postgres for backend

• Pintura is built with Svelte

• FilePond v5 is also being built with Svelte

It's worth noting that I think leaning on AI to write all your code is going to bite you.

When I look at the code I wrote six months ago, it already feels like someone else wrote it. But when I look at it long enough, everything clicks back into place. If you didn't write it, but copy pasted it from ChatGPT or your IDE generated it, you're going to struggle.

Yes, I use AI as well. But mostly to give me ideas on directions to take. I'm not using it to generate code, I'll type it and comment it so I know what's up.

Maybe that just confirms I'm a dinosaur, and perhaps I'm wrong. But so far my personal experience and everything I read on the subject confirms that you should be writing most, if not all, of your code.

Growing Pintura

Creating awareness

Launching a web component like Pintura is not about making lots of sales, it's about creating awareness.

So to gain some attention I created a nice promotion video and successfully it on Product Hunt — back then, it was called Doka. We got the "#2 product of the week" badge and my launch Tweet generated around 300,000 impressions. More than 30,000 people watched the promotion video.

This was a lot more than I expected, but it only led to two subscriptions. So after getting awareness, I still needed to get users.

Building complementary products

So I started sending traffic from an existing free product — FilePond — to Pintura. I set up a demo on the FilePond product page and added Pintura GIF animations on the FilePond GitHub repositories. Integrating FilePond with Pintura can be done in a heartbeat, so once a developer gets started with FilePond, they should also be aware of the existence of Pintura.

This all helps increase awareness and traffic towards the Pintura products page. I don’t track my visitors, so I don’t have a lot of data, but judging from support tickets and traffic coming from FilePond, I’d say maybe one in three of my customers come from there.

Since doing this with FilePond, I’ve also launched edit.photo, edit.video, redact.photo, and new.photo as free tools. All of them, particularly the first two, generate a lot of traffic for Pintura.

It works quite well. And aside from the customer acquisition, it’s also a great way to carve out my little spot on the internet. Those domains are now mine, no matter what happens to Pintura.

I feel it's important for indie hackers to create complementary products like this. But one caveat: Free works, but the trick is that it has to be good and free. You have to really offer value.

SEO

I publish articles on the PQINA blog about topics neighboring image editing, cropping, and/or uploading. I think this has mostly helped with domain ranking, causing the Pintura product page to rank higher.

Some people find Pintura via the PQINA blog. But judging by how I read tech articles — I’m hyper-focused on the content and, once I have my solution, I close the page without looking at anything else — I don't think it does much in that regard.

Still, not everyone browses the web in the same way, so I guess in the end, some people will click the links to Pintura or FilePond and opt for something in my ecosystem of products.

Finish something

Overall, here's my advice: Finish something.

Too many indie hackers build stuff and then don't publish. Get your creations out there. It doesn't have to be incredible.

Just look at BananaBin. All it does is add flies to your MacOS bin when it's full. But we launched it. And it's actually making some money.

That said, Pintura is never finished. I'm just going to keep trucking as long as I’m enjoying the work, which I don’t see ending very soon.

Our kids go to primary school, so what else am I going to do?

You can follow along on X and the PQINA blog. And check out Pintura.