Founder Story: how #buildinpublic helped to reach $2000 MRR with a screenshot tool.

Hey Indie Hackers!

Every week, I send a marketing Case Study from a profitable Founder. Today I want to share with you a story about Rishi, who is building my favorite screenshot tool - Pika. I use it daily, and I'll never get tired of recommending it. P.S. This is not sponsored 😄

1. Explain your product to an 11-year-old

Pika helps you with beautifying raw screenshots into more appealing images. It also helps with design mockups: iPhone images for mobile apps, Macbook images for desktop apps, code screenshots, testimonial images, and more.

With Pika, I want to make creating better screenshots and mockups easy and quick. And Pika’s design and functionality are intended toward that goal.

2. Who’s your ideal customer, and how do you acquire them?

The scope is vast. Pika is already being used by startups, design teams, agencies, content creators, marketers, individuals, etc. And I think those are also ideal customers.

I haven’t figured out any user acquisition mechanism yet, but building it in public has worked the best. A lot of Pika’s users come from Twitter. People use it to create marketing images, and their followers ask about the tool they used.

This works really well, especially when users like Thomas Frank share about Pika.

3. Share your core metrics

Since Pika is a tool to generate images, I focus on growing the number of images exported per month. More screenshots exported = more users. Pika is currently generating 10K+ images every month.

Another metric that I focus on is revenue per month. Pika recently crossed $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue, 190 paid users, and is growing 5 to 10% on average every month.

4. How did you get your first 10 customers?

Pika had 10+ paid users in 1.5 months. Some of them have churned, but most of them continue using Pika.

Building in public helped me get my initial set of paid users. I built features based on user feedback and tweeted about every major feature.

The more I shared about what I work on, the more feedback I received, which is one of the best things about building in public. Also, some tweets get picked up and help in user acquisition and marketing.

5. What’s your Best marketing decision and why?

I suggest only what has worked for me, which is building in public. Tweet about experiments, new features, and achievements of your project. It’ll not only help you with marketing but also with getting feedback for your product. I mostly get such feedback as replies to my tweets and in DMs.

This also helps you build a connection with your users. The more users trust you, the more comfortable they will be with sharing feedback and bug reports.

6. If you could do 1 thing differently, what would it be?

I wish I had automated some things earlier. For example, email automation to get more details about canceled subscriptions so that I could offer a special deal, etc.

Here's an example. I emailed Leif to know if he would be up for a discount. Some conversations later, we settled on a price that worked well for Leif, and now he’s a paid user.

I’ve done this manually for a long time to understand users better, but I think it could’ve been automated since the beginning.

P.S. I share marketing case studies like that every week. Subscribe for free and don't miss the insights from profitable Founders ❤️