Hitting $60k MRR by building an SDK instead of an app

After years of building graphic design applications for big companies, Anton Lavrenov decided to build his own. But instead of going B2C and competing in a crowded market, he went B2B and built an SDK. Six years later, Polotno is bringing in $60k MRR.

Here's Anton on how he did it. 👇

Finding the opportunity in a crowded market

For years, I built graphic design applications — essentially Canva-like apps — for companies. I kept thinking, "Why am I building these apps for someone else, when I could build it for myself and launch my own product?"

As a software developer, I knew I could build a good product. The problem was that I knew the marketing side would be impossible. The market was already super crowded. So for a long time, I did nothing with the idea.

But I had been maintaining Konva.js — an open-source, 2D canvas library — for many years. While engaging with that community on Discord and answering questions on GitHub and Stack Overflow, I noticed a pattern: Companies still needed editors for their own audiences. So, instead of building a product for end users (B2C), I decided to build a product for businesses and developers (B2B). This is how Polotno SDK began.

Today, Polotno is a JavaScript SDK that lets any company embed a white-label design editor into their app. We also have an API that generates images and videos at scale. It is fully bootstrapped and profitable, with a team of three. We have 200+ paying customers, and the editor is loaded around 2M times per month. We're currently at $60k MRR.

Building the product

Polotno started in February 2020 as a true side project, which I built on evenings and weekends while working full-time. The first public website and docs went live that September.

I spent almost nothing, other than my own time. A full-time job paid the bills. Hosting and domain costs were minimal.

Konva.js provided the biggest help. After many years of maintaining it and building several editors for other companies using it, I already understood every canvas editor problem: text editing, transformations, export quality, and performance. Polotno was mostly me writing for myself what I had already written for other companies several times.

I used a simple stack: React, konva.js, mobx-state-tree for the store, and Blueprint.js for UI. These were all tools I already knew well. The code is entirely client-side JavaScript. Clients do their own hosting and deployment.

We built the first website using https://docusaurus.io/. It had almost no marketing pages, only docs. In 2023, my partner joined the project. As his main focus was marketing, we migrated the website to Framer. Then, we built the first server-side stack for cloud rendering of designs: Node.js, Puppeteer, and Supabase.

Open-source, documentation, and free products

My first paying customer came in November 2020 from the Konva.js community. They paid $186/mo. The second followed six months later. It was very slow, but the pattern was clear — there was demand. And the questions and bug reports of those early users shaped the product.

So, Konva.js was the first growth lever. Many developers already knew me from the library, so when they needed a design editor, Polotno was the natural next step.

The second lever was SEO. Our documentation attracts users. Developers search for a problem, land on a docs page, and try it.

And the third is Polotno Studio, which is our free editor that is built on our SDK. We don't know how many customers have actually come from Studio, but it's clear that people share it, and it grows the brand. It's also helpful because it is a live sandbox where developers quickly see the SDK's capabilities. And when I launched it on r/InternetIsBeautiful, it received 20k upvotes.

About three years passed before Polotno's revenue matched my main job's income of $8k/mo. In May 2023, I left my job to focus solely on Polotno. This resulted in a drop in my personal income, but I was confident that focusing full-time would restore it.

Moving up to enterprise

Our primary model is a monthly SDK subscription. Companies pay for a license and embed the editor in their product.

When Polotno started, we designed pricing for small companies and indie developers: simple monthly plans, self-serve, and no sales calls. But as the product and team matured, larger companies began to approach us, requiring different solutions. They sought not more features, but trust: a custom contract that undergoes procurement, security and compliance review, a defined support model with escalation and named contacts, version pinning, custom liability terms, and a source code license option. Therefore, we added an Enterprise license to include these elements and custom development when needed.

I started charging from day one; we never offered a free version of the SDK for commercial use. Revenue grows mostly from new customers and existing customers who expand their usage and upgrade to a larger plan.

Two unfair advantages and a challenge

My biggest advantage was open source. Years of answering strangers' questions on GitHub, Discord, and Stack Overflow taught me what people struggled with and built trust before Polotno existed. You can't buy this.

Another advantage was my low-risk setup. I had a job; the project cost nothing, so I could wait years. No pressure to make fast money is a big advantage, and in my case, it was necessary. I was not sure the market for this product existed. I did not know the customers; I did not know if anyone would pay. I had to be careful.

At the same time, the length of time it took to make this work was probably my biggest challenge. It required a lot of patience. The first paying client appeared nine months after the first commit, and the second followed six months later. For a very long time, it seemed like nothing was happening: I worked almost every evening, and the result was only a couple hundred dollars per month.

Focus on depth

In the past, my advice would have been to sell to businesses, not consumers. But we're entering the AI era now, and the SaaS apocalypse may be real, so I'm not sure that advice still works.

What I'm sure of: Start with what you already know deeply. My unfair advantage was ten years of canvas work. Yours is somewhere in your work history. And if you don't have that history yet, pick a domain and dive deep. AI makes learning faster than ever, but the depth is still on you.

What's next?

From here, I want to keep Polotno as a stable, long-term company. We are profitable and independent, with no investors and no exit plans, so customers who build on us can plan for years, not quarters. The goal is to be the obvious choice when a company needs a design editor inside their product.

The interesting part is AI. Everyone can generate images now, but somebody still needs to edit the result, add the logo, fix the text, export for print. An editor becomes the control surface for AI output, and I want Polotno to be that editor.

You can follow along on X. Or check out our free editor, Polotno Studio.