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How to bootstrapp a graphics tool to $1M/ARR

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What if you didn’t need Photoshop to create professional grade graphics?

The idea could revolutionize the field of graphic design itself. This concept was the starting point for Snappa, an online graphic editor founded by Chris Gimmer and Marc Chouinard in 2015.

Completely bootstrapped, Snappa has been heralded by Zapier as a top social media image app. Part of its success comes down to its extensive template library which serves as both a practical resource for its users and as an SEO magnet for the site.

We had a chance to speak with Chris about his journey founding Snappa, the struggles of creating a design tool within a web browser, and scaling the project to $1M/ARR.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The Beginning

Chris: When we co-founded Snappa, my co-founder and I were still working full time at our day jobs. We also had this side project called BootstrapBay, which was a marketplace for bootstrapping templates. Now BootstrapBay had a blog, and one of the blog posts I had written was about where to get free stock photos. That post ended up going viral.

Once that happened, we started ranking on the first page of Google for free stock photos and getting tons of traffic. At the same time, it was always a pain for me to produce the graphics for my blog posts and since we had all of this traffic, we thought that it would be interesting if we could come up with our own free stock photo site.

We noticed that the really popular sites were posting 10 new photos every 10 days, but none of them had search functionality. We thought if we can get a lot of traffic to this free stock photo site, we could also potentially build out a SaaS app that integrated with the stock photo site. What we ended up doing was launching StockSnap.io, a free stock photo site that ended up becoming pretty popular. Then we used that platform to promote Snappa. Everything considered, it was a mix of spotting some opportunities in the market and scratching our own itch at the same time.

Early Marketing Strategies

Chris: The big thing for us was the free stock photo blog post. Within the blog post we added a call to action in the introduction saying, “we've incorporated some of these free stock photos into our graphic design tool, click here to check out Snappa.”

We also had our own free stock photo site with links in the navigation bar that led back to Snappa. From day one, we had a couple thousand email addresses just from people signing up from the landing page, and we had a consistent flow of new visitors from those two sources.

At least in the first year, that was the primary driver of traffic and leads. Once that started to get a little saturated, we really focused on content marketing and SEO. Then that became the catalyst for more growth and how we ended up getting past $1M/ARR.

Sometimes I wonder how successful we would have been had we not had that blog post to rely on from day one. It definitely would have made things much, much harder. Having that built out ahead of time was definitely key as we could use it to our advantage to springboard Snappa.

Biggest Fears While Building

Chris: Let's put it this way, web browsers aren't meant to be design tools. I remember a couple of months after we launched Snappa, we put the paywall up and realized that given the way that we had built the MVP, a couple features we wanted to build were essentially going to be impossible. We ended up having to rewrite a big part of the app, which took three to four months, if memory serves correct. When you're launching a new app you want to be obviously putting out new features and improving it, so it was a bit stressful to not be able to put out new features.

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Above is a photo of Snappa's UI

Doubling Down On What Works

Chris: SEO and content is part art and part science. In the beginning, it was a bit of trial and error in terms of what keywords we should be targeting, what type of long content is worth writing and resonates with our user base. But what we did was really double down on the things that were working for us.

For example, we found that people were searching for terms around Twitter header size. We then decided to write up a pretty comprehensive post about Twitter header sizing and dimensions, which naturally fits in really well with our tool, because people can create Twitter headers with Snappa. When that post did well, we doubled down and started writing more sizing guides for the different platforms.

A lot of people tend to just write a new post every week but we tried to really figure out what are the pieces of content that we should be writing? And really focus on those few posts and get traffic to those posts before we start ramping up our production schedule.

Distribution Methods For Blog Posts

Chris: We got really good about internal linking, which often goes overlooked from certain people. In terms of active promotion, we did very basic things like email outreach and tried to find people that genuinely would get value from the articles and would actually want to link them on their blogs.

The other thing we did was guest posting and we tried to add a lot of value to the blogs that we would guest post on. For example, if we wanted to build links to our blog posts about our Twitter header size, we would reach out to a couple of blogs, where we'd say, "Hey, we run this graphic design tool, we have a lot of knowledge and expertise around what makes a good Twitter header profile." Then we'd write a guest post on one of those blogs and perhaps one of the tips would be proper sizing and dimensions. This would give a chance to link back to our writing.

The Template Section Of Snappa’s Website

Chris: Our first alpha version of Snappa didn't actually have templates. But what we found was that marketers and small business owners weren’t really good at design. When we saw what people were creating, we decided we really needed to get templates into the system, because otherwise it's going to be really hard for people to stare at a blank canvas and come up with some designs.

The other goal of that page is purely for SEO benefit. We found that people were searching for Twitter header templates and Facebook cover templates and all the various use cases that we offer. Those template pages are intended to try to capture some of that search volume.

Learning SEO As A Bootstrapper

Chris: Most bootstrappers tend to get a lot of value out of SEO, which intuitively makes sense. When you don't have funding, you can't just go out and spend a bunch of money on paid marketing. For me, personally, SEO was the most valuable marketing skill in my toolbox.

SEO Tools You Recommend?

Chris: AHREFs is my go-to recommended tool. They have a keyword explorer, where you can figure out what people are searching for, how much search volume those key terms are getting, and how difficult it is to rank for those keywords. The other thing that's super useful is being able to plug in either direct competitors or related websites to see where they're getting traffic from, who's linking to them.

Snappas Freemium Offering

Chris: I would say our free plan is almost more of a free trial than a true free plan. We cap the number of downloads at 3 per month so you can get enough usage to trial the product and see if it's valuable, or if you just need it once in a while. However, if you use it regularly you'll bump up against a pay wall. As far as indie products are concerned, if you have a truly viral product, then I think you may want a freemium angle for it whereas if you don't have any virality embedded into your product, then I'd probably put a lot less focus on having a free plan.

Quitting Your Day Job

Chris: Before we launched Snappa, I had taken a year sabbatical off work. A little bit before I was supposed to go back, Snappa was at $5K/MRR and so I never went back to work. My business partner, Marc, fully quit around 10K MRR as well.

Lessons You Learned With Snappa

Chris: Two things stick out to me in terms of Snappa. The first one is the value of doubling down on things that are working. Early on I thought we were going to run out of blog posts to write about but it took many, many years before it felt like we were getting diminishing returns from content marketing. In short, keep doubling down on things that are working even well past the point that you think you're going to have diminishing returns.

The other thing that comes to mind is when you're at the beginning - doing 5K or 10K MRR - getting to a million dollars just seems so far away and difficult. But then when you're five years into it and you look back, it's like, "Holy shit." It is possible to get to the meaningful levels of revenue, as long as you just keep at it and keep being smart about your marketing and your product and doubling down on things that are working.

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