Bannerbear
Image and video generation API
My MRR is currently hovering around $8000 so it's a little early to call it - generally I wait until the mid 00s before I declare a new MRR milestone (because churn can bring you back under!) - but I had some time to write an update on IH today so here it is :)
It's been an awesome year but if you've been following my journey you'll know that it started slooowww. See bannerbear.com/open for more data on the trajectory.
And although my growth clearly picked up in March / April, all you can really see is the smoothed out growth line from one month to the next. You don't see all the ups and downs in between: the periods of no signups, the churn, the sudden bursts of payments (whoo!), the launching of new features that sort of fall flat... and so on.
It's a daily battle. The one thing I can say for sure is that I have learned a LOT over the last year. I've tried to share small learnings along the way in the milestones below, but I thought it would be useful to summarise the more impactful lessons for Indiehackers.
So here it is! These are the top 3 things that I think have been most impactful to my startup over the last year.
Understand your startup's "Job to be done"
Google "Jobs to be done". I'm not going to put any links as I don't think there was one single resource that helped me with this. It's just a concept you need to read up on. But once I understood this, it changed the way I marketed my SaaS and I think that has had a very positive impact.
In summary, it's another form of "talk about benefits not features" but in a way that is easier to grok and visualize. Imagine your customers are hiring your startup to do a certain job. What is that job? How do you position yourself as being the right startup for that job?
In the beginning I was talking about my product as an "image generation API" but that is too much in a feature-driven space. The job that my SaaS actually performs is something along the lines of "automating your marketing", which is the language I have begun to use more and more. This seems to be working well for me.
Another variation on this theme is the excellent We don't sell saddles here memo by Slack founder Stewart Butterfield.
The money-quote takeaway from that article is that nobody is out there looking for "group chat software" - Stewart plainly says none of their customers are searching for that. Slack sells "organizational efficiency". That is what their customers are buying. That is the "job to be done".
Create the best documentation you possibly can
If I could go back 6 months and change one thing about the way I was working it would be to build less features and spend more time writing better documentation and tutorials. The more time I invest in this area, the more conversions I get.
As founders we think that our UI is intuitive or that people fully understand what our apps can do, but they just don't. You need to show them, again and again, through blog posts, API portals, videos, etc - the more the better.
I think the pivotal moment for me was listening to the Indiehackers + Ahrefs podcast with Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs. I'm paraphrasing here, but I absolutely loved his point about a common misconception we have as SaaS founders. We wrongly believe that a signup is the start of the funnel, and then from that point onwards there is some magic combination of onboarding tricks and emails etc that will cause a customer to convert.
He thinks this is all wrong. The approach they take at Ahrefs is to provide a ton of information up front (their blog is a treasure trove of useful information on SEO, in addition to tutorials on the Ahref tool itself). Tim wants users to be so well informed before they sign up that by the time they are asked to convert, it's a total no-brainer. This philosophy makes so much sense to me, so I have adopted it for Bannerbear.
Raise your prices
I know, you're tired of hearing this. But it really works. It has the double-whammy effect of:
- Growing your MRR faster
- Positioning away from risky customers
"Risky" customers is a bit of a euphemism, I'm trying to be nice. But it's well-known startup lore that when you price your product low you tend to attract customers who demand way more than they are paying, churn faster, and incur other operational problems like higher rates of deliquent payments.
I know, I know. You are in an early stage and you can't mentally justify charging more than $9 per month. That's fine, I was once like you. But every time you improve your product or tweak your positioning, always reflect on "should the price increase?". Don't stay at $9 forever.
Happy Holidays everyone!
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oh and also: add confetti animations to your app 🎊
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Wow, I aspire to be like you Jon! The fact that you had a slow start and I'm in the same place right now, gives me hope. Keep sharing your journey - we really appreciate it!
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Congrats! Thank you for sharing your story, I really like your idea, your landing page, product page, good job!
You're pretty close to getting one triumph 1200 XE / month!
This brand makes such nice bikes, my favourite is the Thruxton RS.See you on the road!
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Great lessons.
Especially the one on maintaining good documentation.
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Your postings at IndieHackers about your experiences was the reason why I signup here... and it was the right decision!
This article remember me not to focus only at technical features and selling technical Functionality, but keep the user in focus... What issue can he solve, which benefit will he have and how can he easily archive this.I've at a very early point in my Project... means I'd like to finish some technical stuff here and will start with a small Product page to show users what kind of service they can expect from.
To read your article today (in front of generating my product page) is exactly the right moment and motivate me to set the focus at the right things.
Thanks Jon!
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Hey! I tested your tool literally yesterday!
I really enjoyed this reading, all useful tips.
The pricing advice is really great, it's hard to do, because there is always the fear of losing sales, but it's actually the right move!Are your subscribers all on the basic package? (looks like so by the subscribers/price ration)
Any plan to improve upsell? -
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This is such a quality packed post. "We dont sell saddles here" was a great read also. Respect Jon
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A good one.
However, I never search for "organizational efficiency". Usually I know what I need to be more efficient, and I'd search for a "group chat software". Some people follow your first advice blindly, and one can't really understand what the product is about from their landings.-
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Arguably, Slack is not interested in selling to you, an indiehacker.
Slack wants to sell to large companies, places with 100+ or 1000+ seats. And those companies are definitely looking for organizational efficiency.
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Oh, sorry. I thought your advises are for indie hackers like me. They are for the ones who are convinced they are building a next big thing for corporates, actually. You'd better state it clearly in the post.
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I think a well rounded entrepreneur should observe lessons from both the big business world and the bootstrapped world.
You are free to pick and choose the advice you want to be influenced by. No need to be sarcastic about it, really. Good luck on your journey 👍🏻
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I'm finding the first one (Understand your startup's "Job to be done") quite challenging.
How did you pick marketing automation between the different use cases?
Were you able to do it before you had a lot of paying customers who were giving you feedback and showing you market patterns and trends?
Marketing automation is pretty broad. Do you have highly specific target segments?In my case, data extraction and monitoring on the web has SO MANY different use cases that it's incredibly hard to pick one area, unless I have a large enough pool of paying customers that gives me reliable market insights. I ran dozens of discovery interviews but couldn't find one type of use case or market segment that would be much better than the others (this comparison is a challenge in itself, because there are a ton of factors I need to consider).
Any advice would be appreciated.
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a Job to Be Done is different from a use-case IMO.
Jobs to Be Done are in a more macro level space. Use cases are more micro level. You should probably be using both, which I do.
The Slack example is the easiest to understand. Imagine a CEO/COO of a big company with 1000 people, who has never heard of "group chat software". Their org is a mess as everyone is jumping on calls / meetings, not getting any work done. They are sitting in front of google looking for a solution - what do they search for? What's the job they need to get done?
Now think about your customers. They are sitting in front of google, what's the job they need to get done? Maybe a small fraction of them are cutting edge enough to know what a "no code web scraper" is... but that's a tiny, tiny amount of people. You will reach many more people if you know what the fundamental Job to Be Done is.
If the concept doesn't work for you then I would just park it for now and come back to it. I'm not an expert in it, I'm just saying that taking a step back and looking at things from a more macro perspective about what my customers are trying to achieve, has definitely helped me.
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I would 100% ask people for their email to use the Twitter to Instagram demo. I would have given it to you in a heartbeat to download the images (for example): https://www.bannerbear.com/demos/tweetagram/#generate
Great product Jon!
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Nah just enjoy using it. I’m not looking to harvest emails.
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Great post full of actionable insight!! Happy Holidays and Thanks for taking the time to write it!
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Thanks Jon for the quick share. It reminds us the good hard lessons!
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Very good real advice from someone facing SaaS problems.
Congrats! 🎉
Just hit $6k MRR roughly a year after launching.
In between the launch a year ago and now, there has been a pivot, a rebrand, and a whole bunch of new features.
But you know what? In the last few months, going from $3k to $6k MRR, there's much less of a dramatic "startup" story to tell. I've pretty much settled into a routine of:
- getting customer feedback (from paying customers)
- building new features
- blogging / tweeting / newslettering about new features
- improving the marketing site
And that's it.
It feels great. It feels almost like a job, but a really awesome job where there's a sense of stability but also a sense of ownership.
Being an indiehacker: 10/10 would recommend.
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Congrats for the nice growth.
I would like to ask you, before you started, did you knew about https://www.bannersnack.com/ ? It seems like they have a very similar product and offering, probably more features since they have been around longer. In case of yes, how did you reason about creating a new competitor, and how did that affect your business and product development plan?-
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Last I checked they didn’t have an API which is the core value prop of my product. So I never saw them as a competitor.
Now that I take another look today, it looks like they launched an API back in April (a month after I launched my API) but it is part of their “enterprise level” offering only.
So it looks like we are still aimed at different audience segments.
I don’t pay much attention to competitors or even products in an overlapping space.
I just forge my own path.
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Congrats, Jon! It's been fun watching Bannerbear grow! Keep up the great work!
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Congrats. What are your marketing channels and how did you discover the channels which work?
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I'm afraid that I never have a good answer to this. I just blog, tweet, write newsletters and make sure the marketing site does a good job of communicating the value prop.
Google is my biggest driver of traffic, followed by twitter.
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Congratulations Jon. When you mention the improved marketing site do you refer only to the design/aesthetics or also to the content?
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It's all of the above. Improving the marketing site includes:
- tweaking the design
- describing the product / new features better
- adding more demos
- writing tutorials / blog posts
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Really cool to see. I see things really start motoring from June onwards – is this when you started going hard on the above bullet points?
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I think it was a few things:
- increased pricing
- major new feature (API)
- and yes, settling into a rhythm which made my feature shipping and marketing activity much more consistent
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That's great to hear. And once the feature requests stop and the documentation is complete. Bannerbear will become a well oiled machine. Please write a book then. Been following you since your mojo days.
Congratulations... 👍👍 -
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huge congrats Jon!! the next 2x will hopefully become easier and easier!
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Congrats on your milestone. What does your process look like for systematically getting feedback and then turning it into product features?
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Congrats Jon! This is so inspiring. Thanks for sharing so much about your journey!
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Congratulations Jon!
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Hi Jon,
This is great, good work.
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Congrats Jon! The motorcycle is getting closer and closer :))
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Very inspiring Jon! Keep at it 📈
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Nice!
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Congrats Jon!
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Best thing about being indiehacker 👏 congratulations Jon
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Congrats
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You're at exactly the place I want to be! Past the point of "make or break" decisions, pivoting, bug fixing, etc. and on to just slow steady growth where the amount of work you put into it seems to have a direct effect on the bottom line. Congrats!
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I like your logo and your landing page, who made your website logo?
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Congrats, Jon :)
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Congratulations Jon!!
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Awesome! Keep it up 📈
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Inspiring @yongfook! Thanks for sharing your story
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Congratulations! Well done 👏
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Stoked for you man!
Feels good to reach this milestone especially in a traditionally slow month. But I had quite a few churned customers (including delinquent churn) in the last 30 days. So there's still a leaky bucket issue to fix.
My costs are also going up as I am strictly focusing my coding energy on building the core IP, which means if I need a SaaS service that's outside my core, I just buy it no questions asked. (whereas previously I might have duct-taped my own mini version together)
And here's my weekly bang-the-drum session on investing long term in your product 😅 off the back of some interesting analysis from another IH user @chr15m about the alarmingly small (as a proportion of total userbase) amount of verified solo founder products above $2k MRR on IH.
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Congrats man! Funny enough I had the same realization as you after I hit the $3,000 mark. I had hodgepodged together so many solutions to save cost, but they were never as good as the existing tools out there. I spent 80 hours building a CRM, that time would've 100X been better spent actually working on the project.
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Congrats! 🙌
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Congratulations!
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Well done!
At this point you can definitely afford buying existing tools rather than building them themselves.
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Congrats! I didn't see that tweet, but makes me feel a bit better at the $1,700 mark.
I didn't realize so few were over $2k (or at least not reporting it).
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Great work!
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That's crazy. I didn't know the numbers were so low. Only 1% above 2K MRR? I thought majority of people were making that... I was wrong!
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Congratulations!
I have been following BannerBear journey. its so inspiring!
I totally agree that it will be completely waste of time to try to replicate other people's results. -
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Interesting post. I like the focus on building core IP, as you call it, and investing long term into it.
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Pumped to see this update. Killing it.
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Congratulations!!
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Congrats!
Hope September will be better 👍
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Congratulations!!!
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Congrats Jon 👏
which means if I need a SaaS service that's outside my core, I just buy it no questions asked
Would you mind sharing some examples of things you recently opted to buy instead of build? Thanks!
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- affiliate program manager software
- financial dashboard software
- uptime monitoring software (I actually pay for TWO of these!)
- and imminently, changelog software
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Yep, excellent list.
I hadn't been doing this intentionally, but I'm now realizing that I've changed where I spend my time and am doing the same. This is probably driven by my lack of free time! And since it's such a precious commodity, I use it developing core aspects, and getting out the credit card to pay for everything else.
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Hey Jon, do you use any dashboard software for data other than financial? Monitoring the data in your database for instance
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Out of curiosity what financial metrics are the most important to you?
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Massive growth 🚀
Congratulations
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i think you can just take a look at previous milestones for some sense of that.
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Well that happened faster than I thought it would. I think there's a lot of truth to the adage that "the first X customers are the hardest to earn".
Insert whatever value for X you like - the point is that growth seems to get easier the more you grow. The first 20 customers took a few months to earn. The last 20 customers were all earned in a single month.
I'm not going to get complacent though, I know there are still tons of challenges to go, and growth can slow down at any time. But it was very nice to experience a few weeks of decent growth after a loooong time slogging it out.
While I'm on the topic of slogging it out... I posted this tweet which really highlights some of the realities of bootstrapping a product.
The last Quarter of Bannerbear growth has been really great. 500% growth.
But the story that you don't see is everything that has led up to this quarter. I started building SaaS products 2 years ago. They all failed. Everything began to change when (1) I focused on one thing, and (2) I chose a space I'm passionate about.
Focus, passion, and perseverance. Those are the 3 things you need to get your business off the ground.
I'm convinced more than ever that the primary advantages you can have as an indiehacker are simply a commitment to a long-term horizon and a personal, passionate fit with your product (also known as Founder-Market fit).
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Yo this is crazy a youtube channel I follow was showing open startups and he showed this product and your website as an example to motivate others, at the time this was early January. Congrats on your recent and upcoming success its amazing seeing how its grown now
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congratz maan, I agree on that founder market fit article 🙂
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First off—congrats! You only get that lucky by getting your hands dirty. Well deserved.
I really admire the level of craftsmanship your product and landing page has. That's where I want my own product to be in the future. Oh, and I'm planning to use Bannerbear for a pretty fun and different use-case in the not-so-distant future. Fingers crossed I get time for it sooner rather than later!
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Well done on that hard-earned cash flow. Your transparency at every step has has been inspiring. Enough so, that it's brought me to this community to share in the same vein for my next startup. Please do share your progress to the next $2k.
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This is so inspiring! Thanks for sharing and congrats on your success!!
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Thanks for sharing! I've been floundering going on and off on new product ideas for the past 3 years. I've finally worked on ForAPiece for a full year and I'm proud of what I've done but that is also coming to an end. I'm realizing although there may be a market for the product I'm not passionate enough to keep working on it.
I'm realizing the importance of "passion" to help me push forward even when the MMR is flat for a long time.
Keep growing!
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How did you get the first few customers?
I'm trying reaching out cold prospects with a "free sample" and got only 1 paying customer so far. I'm curious to hear how other folks like yourself did it.well. the paying customer I got was actually acquired not be reaching out cold but by shaming their CEO on twitter 🤣
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I wrote a post about that topic since it gets asked a lot. https://www.bannerbear.com/resources/how-to-get-your-first-25-saas-customers/
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thank you, sir!
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Awesome!
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Congrats on this great milestone @yongfook. Keep up the great work my man. I also came across BannerBean Tweetagram yesterday. Love the concept.
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This is inspiring. Thanks for sharing Jon
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Thanks Jon this is a beacon of light that I need. I’m early on, made a couple of sales and hoping confound effects is going to makes this easier as time goes on. Can you quantify why it got easier? Is it brand building and recognition?
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Congrats on the milestone! Perseverance is key 🙌
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I love the image. And your logo. :)
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Nice work!!
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Amazing, congrats!
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I love that image. Keep doing what you're doing!
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This is great news! Hoping to accomplish these milestones with Jemsplash.com
Thank you for the authentic information!!
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Congrats !!!it's very inspiring
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Congrats!!! That graph gives us all hope :)
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Congrats @yongfook!
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Great job @yongfook!
I really like your product. The landing page precisely describes what I can gain as a user. I am not surprised you achieved this milestone!
I would be very happy to see your tool and other milestones on my small side project
Good luck with Bannerbear! -
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
My product is an API service for generating images. A few days ago it blew past the 100k requests mark after about 4 months since launch.
It's kind of crazy to think that there are 100,000 images out there floating around on websites / social media that have been generated by Bannerbear.com!
Open metrics available as always:
https://www.bannerbear.com/open/
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So cool! I'd love to see a sort of technical/implementation roadmap from you. What technologies you used, big technical barriers you encountered, etc.
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It’s a vanilla Rails app!
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@MicroVert This should answer your questions: How learning by doing helped BannerBear grow to 500$ MRR
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Amazing milestone — congrats!!!
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Looks like a lovely service, really cool to see it become successsful. Did you design the layouts yourself?
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cool congrats
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I like the design, logo and colour scheme, and the little details like the section curves. What convinced you that there was a market for such a tool? How many months has it taken for you to get this far? Regarding the banner editor what technologies are you using here?
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who are the customers?
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This is a really good product - one of those “why can’t I think of stuff like that” ideas
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Nice! What's the next set of product milestone for you?
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Awesome milestone! By the way, your landing page + content is great.
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Congrats, that’s an awesome milestone!
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Bannerbear is awesome. Such a great idea for a product.
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Well done Jon! Congrats
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Congrats @yongfook. Great milestone to hit.
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Awesome product. Such niche. I love the conversion from tweet to insta image. Kudos and wish you good luck.
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Well done, how did you manage to get such good traction in such little time.
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I launched Bannerbear in January... it’s now 6 months later so I don’t think this is what I would call a “little time”. I’ve hustled hard over the last 6 months!
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Congrats! Could you give an example of your "hustle" that brought you some traction in user acquisition? A link to the viral blog article, Google Ads, whatever.
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Nice work, @yongfook - how is the API built? I mean language, platform, etc.?
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This is an amazing product....congrats..
if you don't mind me asking I am building a api based service as well... What tools did you use to limit users api request as per their pricing tier...right now I am implementing it on the application level...did you use any service ??
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Every API request is authenticated, so there's an application-level check whenever a user posts a request - it checks against the quota before allowing the request to continue.
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It wasn't distasteful! I've enjoyed seeing your posts about BB! I wish you luck also. Didn't mean to poke the bear :D !
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
I've reached the point now where I have to start looking deeper into user behaviour and try to optimize the trial-to-paid conversion rate.
I was conflicted as to whether this counts as a "milestone" but I think it is - I'm no longer in the early stages where I'm just looking to drive any traffic into the top of the funnel and hope for the best.
Now I care about my conversion rate! That means I want better qualified traffic and I need to start making improvements to the individual steps in the funnel.
Huge improvements to be made in terms of getting users from step 2 to step 3... but actually my core focus for now is optimizing the funnel from Step 4 to 5 to 6, it feels like those users are already highly qualified so I have a better chance of converting them given the right signposting / messaging.
And of course, since I'm an Open Startup I've added the conversion funnel chart to my /open page. Hopefully this helps other early-stage entrepreneurs understand what sort of data I'm looking at in order to make my decisions. I am not looking at any private dashboards - the /open page is all that I look at!
It is a little bittersweet, given everything that is going on in the world currently. But my SaaS product just reached $1000 MRR. Still not quite ramen profitable, but it's on the way there.
At around double this amount I'll be just barely ramen profitable, which is the next milestone I'm working towards ☺️
I'm continuing with the marketing activities that seem to be working so far - none of it is rocket science:
- writing tutorials on how to use my product to do cool things
- designing more templates for people to use
- increasing the footprint of the marketing site
More details at:
https://www.bannerbear.com/open/
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Congrats Jon! Following your journey is a great inspiration.
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Congrats @yongfook I have been following your journey with Bannerbear and it's inspiring to say the least. I guess your pivot to API only service paid off. Happy for you.
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Congratulations.
I wonder, as I think I haven't seen this before: is the "open startup" concept relatively common? Have you written something about it (i.e. the why, pros and cons) or do you know of a good place to get information about it?
Looking forward to seeing your 2k post pretty soon :-) (and celebrating with premium ramen).
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It's not that common, but I didn't invent it.
I think Buffer.com pioneered the concept. They were the first startup to have a completely open revenue dashboard on Baremetrics: https://baremetrics.com/open-startups
Their dashboard is now here, it seems: https://buffer.com/revenue
For Buffer, /open is part of their culture and over the years they have openly shared things like their employee salary levels, their product roadmap and more: https://open.buffer.com/revenue-dashboard/
Here's another list of open startups: https://www.openstartuplist.com
And of course, the Indiehackers product list is essentially a list of open startups when filtered for startups sharing their revenue via Stripe integration: https://www.indiehackers.com/products?revenueVerification=stripe
As for why I chose to go open, I talk a little bit about that in this interview: https://www.blog.openstartuplist.com/how-learning-by-doing-helped-bannerbear-grow-500-mrr
"My decision was decidedly un-strategic. I’ve received a lot of benefit from other startups operating transparently over the years e.g. Buffer. Those benefits have come in the form of tangible operational knowhow or ideas, or simply in the form of inspiration.
So I figured it’s important to keep that tradition going. Like I said above, sharing knowledge is almost universally a good thing. So perhaps my numbers currently don’t tell much of a story to most people, but there might be one or two out there who find the numbers useful for their own journey."
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Here is Another Set : https://oyestartups.com/open-startups
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Nice, I'll keep it in mind.
I think transparency is an improvement over "old school" companies, and I'm pretty sure it would also be a "marketing plus" to my target audience (journalists).
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Isn’t ramen profitable meaning to earn just a few bucks a month? 🤔
Anyway, great stuff man! Congratz!
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From http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html
"Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses."
So the number will differ for everyone. For me, living expenses would be around $2k per month factoring in all the basics.
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Oh, I was so wrong. Thanks for expalanation.
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hahahah I think you should find cheaper villa in Bali and not eat in overpriced keto resto in bali, and eat a lot of egg with your favorite sambal for your keto diet :)
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I can't tell if you're joking or not, but my monthly expenses are not just house + food. Those combined are about 50% of my monthly expenses, and not really something I would ever compromise on anyway.
I don't like discussions about expenditure. It just gets into weird-flex territory and everyone has different priorities / needs / bills to pay.
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I think its “pay your bills and enough money to eat ramen noodles 3x/day”
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Congrats Jon! Motorbike coming close 🔥
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haha... except my dream bikes are like 2x the EU RRP in Indonesia because of the import tax!
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Congrats! fml Bannerbear looks like such a good idea, I'm looking forward to using it!
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Absolutely excellent
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Congrats @yongfook
I see you are hosting on Netlify .
What CMS (and its theme ) do you se for bannerbear ?
Just curious, it is really nice design and seems almost no code-
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I use middleman (https://middlemanapp.com) as the static-site generator and apart from that the design and code is custom.
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Thanks 👍.
Theme and design is custom. Cool
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Congrats, that’s awesome!! I’m also working on an API product, and your design and resources are a huge inspiration! I definitely need to focus more on tutorials, examples, and marketing. I think this would make a big difference for me as well!
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That's great, congrats Jon!!
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Hey @yongfook, congrats on the milestone, huge achievement!
Can I ask what you meant by "increasing the footprint of the marketing site"?
Thanks!
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Congratulations. While you state your metrics are half of your next goal, I'd say you have 80% of the work done to get there. Sounds like you are at point where your marketing and other systems should produce more and more benefit for same amount of work as before. Good luck.
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Congrats @yongfook, great to hear of your progress! Your approach to tutorial/content writing seems to be generating more and more momentum. Just rewinding the clock back a bit on how you got here. I was fascinated by some of your comments on a previous post you made about your decision making on how you iterated Bannerbear:
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/mojosaas/reached-25-paying-subscribers--M7_ieu-YW-M3gOk-9MR?commentId=-M7eQS-n9tAIurP-58YIIt seems, from my read of it, that the product came from challenges you experienced yourself. And then you had a sense of types of use cases it would be valuable for.
My question is:
How have you balanced that tension between the use cases you really would like to see Bannerbear used for (for example you mentioned doing a case study on the first time an agency started using Bannerbear for social media automations), and where different customers seem to be pulling it?
Thanks.
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Hi Matt, that's a really interesting question - I hope I can do justice to it!
As indiehackers we wear many different hats and often those different roles mean that natural conflicts occur - sometimes what is good for one role is not so good for one of the other roles. This happens in larger organizations where (badly managed) teams might be practically working "against" each other as their value / success metrics form part of a zero sum game. But in the indiehacker world this happens in an exciting internal battleground inside one person's head :)
The Marketing / Product Hat
At a working level, if there's a disconnect between your product's intended (or desired) use case and the actual use cases of customers then that might mean there's a problem with your marketing or the product. Perhaps you aren't attracting customers from the right target segment, perhaps your onboarding isn't friendly to that segment and so on.
There are no agencies using Bannerbear right now most likely for this reason. I simply haven't marketed it to agencies at all - it's not popping up in their channels and there is no agency-flavoured positioning in the marketing site currently. The fact that I haven't corrected this probably means that, for now, I'm ok with it! Because... (next point)
The Early Stage Entrepreneur Hat
One of the best qualities of an API product is that users will use it for purposes you hadn't even thought of. Or similarly, you can suggest 5 ways to use it and the market will tell you which of those 5 is the most in-demand. From an early stage business perspective, this makes an API product somewhat "easier" to navigate in terms of user growth - as long as the API does something useful, and as long as you can demonstrate many use cases (and inspire other use cases) then you're almost guaranteed some level of customer acquisition.
For an early stage entrepreneur, this is great as it means building cash flow and getting feedback from real customers.
The Growth Hat
I think the tensions start to appear once you want to move into the next phase. So now you've seen one or two clear use cases that seem to be growing faster than the others, logically it would make sense to focus on those use cases. All sorts of new challenges appear:
- What if it moves the product in a fundamentally different direction?
- What if that direction conflicts with your vision / ideology?
- What if you start to alienate other use cases (which you still can and want to service)?
Personally I don't think I'm quite at this stage yet. But I think the answer to these tensions is to focus on where you're creating the most value for customers. That's sort of the undeniable truth-compass for any business.
If the growing use case is misaligned with your product vision but it's creating massive value for customers? Great! Your original hypothesis was wrong (or fuzzy), and you have been handed the map to success on a plate, now double down!
If the growing use case is misaligned with your product vision and it's creating questionable value for customers (factoring in things like LTV / churn)... well then you still have an argument for holding true to your original vision or exploring the 2nd / 3rd (etc) most popular use cases for growth.
Fundamentally we are all looking to create value for customers, so that in the end, those customers pay for our product and we can grow our business. I think looking through that simple lens will help to navigate those future tensions between product vision / popular use cases.
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Edited to add: one of the other benefits of an API product is that, with a proper versioning policy in place, you can continue to service all existing use cases even if you start to pivot the product towards a particular direction.
API products should be somewhat general-purpose in their technical nature anyway. So I actually don't really see a scenario where you'd "orphan" an existing customer, it would be very un-API-like for that to happen. When I talk about "pivot" in this context I'm talking more about how you market the API and what kind of use cases you target and attract. But by nature, the API would be usable for many, many other use cases - which makes them quite exciting to work on!
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I like this approach, it's like being water!
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This is such an interesting reply. Thanks for taking the time on this.
I relate to that “internal struggle” of the different hats, and I think you’re right, there are different incentives that are being traded off. That’s a helpful analogy. For me the biggest tension is the product vision vs growth tension. Part of this is, if the product that people want is quite different to the vision I had, will I have the passion to do the years of work to build the product?
An API product does sound it has distinct advantages here.
It’s interesting to think a bit more about a “portfolio of use cases” approach to how the early product gets traction.
Thanks again, this is really helpful.
Matt
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Congratulations! I've followed you for a while, and I'm so glad to hear you made it.
PS $1k/mo + some savings is ramen profitable, just some savings!
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Congratulations, Jon 🙌 That’s absolutely amazing progress, and I’m positive you’ll be at $2,000 MRR in no time!
Keep up the awesome work!
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Congratulations!
I'm curious if you make anything through your affiliate program, I always found it extremely hard to make an affiliate scheme pay off.-
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Not much has happened on the affiliate side of things. But that's mostly down to me - I have not promoted it or given it much attention.
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Congratulations, Great design work!
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Many many Congratulations!
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Just tried both demos and I'm super impressed. Looks f**king fantastic!
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Congratulations @yongfook. Another great milestone for Banner Bear. Keep up the great work!
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago
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Just on the product marketing site directly: https://www.bannerbear.com/resources/
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
2 months ago in March (which seems like 10 years ago now) I launched a major new product positioning, turning my product into an API.
In universal product language, my original product served one particular use-case. By turning it into an API it could not only serve that one particular use-case, but also serve a bunch of other use-cases... arguably turning it into a more valuable product.
In March I saw quite a bit of churn. I attribute this to the double-whammy of the COVID19 media peak putting lots of people into disaster-prevention mode, plus the effect of the API repositioning alienating some of my existing customers. (btw, the entire original product is still available to all previous customers, I haven't sunset it, it just lives under its own section of my app now)
The good news is, I made back the loss in MRR shortly after, and have been growing since. Bannerbear now has 25 monthly subscribers and has taken in 17 "one time payments" which is an option I introduced shortly after launching the API.
So I'm pretty happy. I think repositioning into an API has been a really positive move and it's also given me as the product owner a really clear path of where to take things going forward to provide the most value to customers.
What's been the most interesting in the last 2 months has been the response from the #nocode community. I launched a Zapier integration about a month ago and that has been quite successful, as not only are customers signing up and using that integration to automate parts of their business, but people are also out there writing tutorials and giving me a bit of free marketing, which I did not expect at all.
So that's definitely an area I'm going to explore going forwards.
Although 25 subscribers might seem small I've definitely noticed a positive mental boost from reaching this milestone. Honestly getting here was harder than I thought, but now I feel it's easier for me to rationalise the journey ahead - if I can get to 25 subscribers, I can get to 50. If I can get to 50, I can get to 100. And so on.
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Congratulations Jon!
How did you come up with the branding btw - I'm really digging the logo
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Hey Alex, thanks. I'm never sure how to respond to queries like this.
I've been designing for the web for 20+ years, so some of it just comes down to experience, trial and error, and developing personal likes and dislikes over time.
That said, I do think it's easy to replicate the emotional response you might get when you see the Bannerbear branding / site.
I think people like the branding because I've chosen a bold colour and adopted it as the brand identity, I've deliberately avoided "typical" SaaS design tropes like those abstract illustrations of people or isometric graphics etc, and there are design elements that communicate what Bannerbear is (e.g. the API console) and therefore feel purposeful instead of superfluous.
I think just using simple principles like that, you almost automatically end up with something that people see as unique and well thought-out.
The name also helps - when in doubt, try to get some alliteration in your brand name. It's another one of those "simple hacks" that just makes things feel more brandable.
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Thanks for taking the time to reply. The alliteration tips makes so much sense but I’ve never really thought about it before!
I have a personal vendetta against SaaS companies using abstract people as assets haha. When building and designing attio.com it was one of our number one starting points to guarantee no abstract characters and focus on selling the product.
Love the logo too by the way - super simple and very memorable!
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Congrats Jon, I've been following you for a long time now, it's really encouraging to see the improvements from the beginning.
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This is a great Milestone. Congrats @yongfook
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Jon, your product is awesome! Congratulations with first dozens of happy customers.
BannerBear is one rare example of tools I know for what I am really trying to convince some of my customers to approve use-case that would require BannerBear to give it a try.
So far we have identified 2 impediments to benefit from BannerBear:
- Instagram has no official API available for small businesses to fully automatically post images or stories, that would be a great benefit for e-commerce, recruitment business and few others with recurring patterns for posts. I understand this is not something you can change.
- Limited trial period. Your current offering is 100 free requests per account, that will be consumed during demo session for the customer. 100 requests are clearly not enough to configure & test the integration, and one can forget about piloting integration with such small limit. I understand you have your rationale behind this model, and also I found a pay-as-you-go plan that I liked most. However, let me please share few ideas that would (likely) motivate some of my clients and me to concider BannerBear:
a) larger amount of free API calls "in a sandbox" for testing purposes - say, 100 free calls per day; I would go with a "sandbox" that places a bold watermark brand on top of all generated images (similar how photostocks are doing it in their preview images, or free PDF convertors, or other tools) - so nobody will use them in real life (or if they dare to - you will get some free promotion :). This will help marketers, developers and technology brokers like me to build and test solution based on BannerBear;
b) start a free plan with very strict limits, like "1 template + 1 API call per day" to engage more developers and indie hackers working on their hobby projects and would like to make them more lovely. For instance, I can imagine of few use-cases when BannerBear will be a perfect fit for occasional bloggers: post image with current weather report, currency exchange rate, stock price or some other metric coming from their system, title of their new blog post, etc. I even would mind if a tiny BannerBear branding appears on images generated with this plan, if branding is descrete (like vertically placed URL in a small font). I believe this could engage more users into your product who could develop a habit and one day become true advocates of BannerBear when it comes to building commercial use-case.
Anyway, good luck, your are building an amazing tool!
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Congrats Jon, looks like a great project! I’m actually in the process of building something for generating image templates within my SaaS, so your solution could save me some time.
I’ll check it out and may well be interested in chatting about a couple of ideas.
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if you run into any issues or have questions while integrating the API, feel free to reach out any time jon@bannerbear.com
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Congrats Jon. It was only a matter of time. Now onto 100 🚀
Curious where did you find your customers? Were they following you on Twitter? DMs on LinkedIn? Cold outreach?
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Thanks :)
I haven't done any cold outreach.
The strategy that seems to have worked over the last month plus is to build an integration, write articles / record videos on how to use that integration, then promote that content on twitter, mailing list, etc. Actually quite basic stuff.
I like this strategy though because it compounds. The more articles I write the bigger the content war-chest gets, which I think is really valuable. It also means there's more to talk about with potential customers when/if I start doing cold outreach.
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Congrats Jon!
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Congrats Jon!
I would like to know more about marketing things. What channels work best for you? How do you find audiences to target? How do you test creatives? How much money already spent on marketing?
Ars
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I'm a bootstrapped indie hacker with 25 customers so I'm not using any paid marketing channels yet - there's just no budget for it ;)
I mentioned in another comment in this thread that my focus has mainly been on content marketing - writing tutorials. I think this is a good strategy for me because Bannerbear is an API and you kind of need to be "shown what's possible", if you know what I mean.
As for how do you find audiences: I'm still navigating this. But as I mentioned in the OP, the response from the #nocode community has been really positive so it's quite likely I'll focus more energy in this space. I guess what I'm saying is... I unfortunately have no strategic lessons to teach in pinpointing audiences and getting things right first time. My approach is much more like: try many things, see what works, double down.
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Nice! 👏
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Great to hear this, Jon. Keep going. 🙌🏻
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Yayyyyy!
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Hey @yongfook, it's great to hear about your progress.
I would love to know more about two things:
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What do you think of API-only companies? I started to find others like that such as
Scraper API, Holiday API, Flight API. They all seem to do really well, but I wonder if the business-critically is the key differentiator. -
How was the experience of adding a Zapier integration? Great job on leveraging the #nocode community to boost your product.
Thanks for sharing your journey :)
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- I think API-only products are a really good fit for Indiehackers for 3 reasons.
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(1) API products themselves are quite focused by nature which I think keeps things manageable for a solo developer. They just need to do a few things really, really well.
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(2) But at the same time, since they are APIs they afford you a lot of breadth and flexibility in terms of who you market to, the different use cases to focus on, and even provide you space to build on top of your own API to either demo different use cases or build your own tools. So there's a lot to explore, which keeps things interesting.
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(3) Finally I think boutique API services don't really fit well with the VC model. I can't imagine someone going to a VC, pitching the idea for Bannerbear and trying to convince someone that it can become a billion dollar business. But as a "lifestyle" business? I think they are perfect for that. I've seen API products grow into million-dollar ARR businesses.
So what I'm saying is I think the scale is there for indies and small businesses, but at the same time it's a level of scale that just isn't attractive to VCs so I don't lose sleep over the thought of someone with $50 million in funding swooping in and directly competing. (fingers crossed). I might have to compete with other indies, sure, but that's a more level playing field.
- Zapier integration went very smoothly.
If you have an API-based product to begin with then integrating with these tools like Zapier is just a case of wrestling a bit with their admin panel and learning some of their in-house terminology.
I didn't have to make any changes to my app to integrate with Zapier, it just uses the same API that any of my other users use (so that's another plus point for API products). Once I had it integrated, there was a visceral "aha!" moment after I realised just how many new things would be possible thanks to the integration. If you have an API-based product it really is a no-brainer to integrate with services like this as soon as possible.
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That's amazing. I love your perspective about how API products can be very effective in our Indie reality.
Also great to hear about the Zapier integration.
Thanks for sharing all that!
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Congrats Jon! Been watching you iterate on Bannerbear for while. Super impressed with the latest version, especially the editor interface. What’s the most common use-case you’re seeing? Is it mainly social share meta images or something else?
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I think that's one of the first things people think of, but I don't think that's the most valuable use-case. So I have to do a certain amount of "defensive positioning" to ensure that people don't think that's what the tool is (only) for.
Users who are getting the most value out of Bannerbear are the ones who are using it to perform frequent automations. Think multiple times a day, or even 1000s of times a day.
The most common use-cases so far that fit that description are:
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Tech startups who have integrated Bannerbear into their own apps, so that it handles the template management / image generation tech for them. This is what I thought would be the main use case but it's turning out to be a more niche segment in these early days. That said, I think this is an important segment, so I will continue to promote Bannerbear to this audience. If you are building an app and you want to do custom image generation (e.g. to generate assets for your users) there are actually a ton of annoying edge cases to solve, especially if you want to offer things like custom fonts, or be able to keep offering new designs etc. You'd end up creating a whole template management / image rendering product inside your product which my product helps you just skip entirely.
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Individual users who are automating their visual social media content using Bannerbear and then posting it via Zapier to Buffer. This is what I think is the flagship use-case right now but I want to nudge this slightly and market it to a different scale of user. I think the value proposition for this is definitely there if you're an individual as it can save you several hours per week. But I'd really like to market this use-case to social media managers - people who would set up these automations for their clients. Then I think the value proposition is rock-solid, if you're paying $39 a month for Bannerbear but it's enabling you to scale up your client portfolio and take on 5...10..20 automation clients all paying you say $100-200 per month? It becomes a total no brainer. So the moment I get a customer doing this, I'm going to do a big case study write up and promote it 😅
There's a 3rd use case that I would like to be common, but so far I don't have any users in this space - ecommerce. This was actually one of my founding pain-points - automating the creation of ecommerce banners, since I used to have a soul-crushing amount of work in a previous job years ago doing this.
One pattern that's really common nowadays is when a new product is added to your catalogue, you create tons of different types of media. Even just taking instagram stories as one media format, it's a ton of work. A single product with say 5 or 6 product photos can easily turn into 10 or 20 instagram stories with different tempalates that you can post over the course of a month or more. But shop owners don't do this because they are limited by the amount of manual work this involves. You could easily automate this all with Bannerbear and I'm really excited to see the first Bannerbear users who do this.
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Thanks for the insight! Dynamic open graph images is something I've needed in the past and wished there was a service like Bannerbear for. That said, it's probably not something I would have paid more than $10/month for.. You're probably right to focus on social media managers and startups that need to do custom image generation. I'm starting a thing soon where I whip up a new mini-product every weekend. Looking forward to doing one that uses the Bannerbear API in some creative way :)
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