Bannerium

Photoshop plugin for generating banners

Under 10 Employees
Founders Don't Code
Solo Founder
Advertising
B2B
B2C
Content
Design
E-Commerce
Marketing
Productivity
SaaS
Social Media

I was working for one e-shop, where marketing manager came to me and asked me to do 1500 banners ads - different products, different languages and lot of formats of the same banner. It was beginning of Bannerium.

August 12, 2020 My side project got acquired πŸŽ‰

My side project Bannerium got acquired.

TL: DR;

  • I got the lead from SaaS Place
  • I can't tell you the number, but it covered the costs and gave me some extra money to play with other things. No, I am not millionaire :-)
  • My personal goal of building the product from scratch was achieved, which is the biggest value for me.
  • Huge thanks to the Lunadio community, in which @tmvst @ctw helped me along the way. To be honest: It was my first online SaaS product.
  • I am currently building ThreeDee - Lovely 3D illustrations libraries for your projects

If you want to read the whole story, here it is

Sam

June 18, 2020 Launched on Product Hunt - a side freebie πŸ‘Œ

This is my first launch on PH πŸŽ‰

After months of getting knowledge from IH community, I finally got courage to post something on Product Hunt. I am so thankful for that.

What is my strategy?

Because I know that my customers are marketing/digital agencies, I was wondering what I can make for them different from my main product Bannerium.

I decided to create a freebie - H A N D Z - 3D illustration library.

I realized, that I want to do assets/products for designers and agencies so that they can be more creative and effective. But I also believe, this assets can be used by non-designers to make their work outstanding.

###My motto is: sharing is caring ❀️###

If you like the library, feel free to support us on Product Hunt.

Let me know, what I can improve to make it successful.

I am thankful for all invaluable advice I got from our smaller community of Indie Hackers Lunadio. I helped me overcome imposter syndrome and I finally launched something!

πŸ––πŸ––πŸ» πŸ––πŸΌ πŸ––πŸ½ πŸ––πŸΎ πŸ––πŸΏ

May 16, 2020 First paying customers

Last time I wrote that 0 people bought the product, which was kinda sad. I was frustrated over a week. But I realized that times, which things are not going as planned, will be more often. I would say, I am just getting used to that. A built product is truly just a starting line.

After this week, one user (who came from marketing area) bought yearly access to Bannerium for 69$ as early adopter package and another digital agency bought Bannerium for 3 months (27$).

This is not a lot of money, but... the feeling is great. It is like fuel for upcoming months.

And I am pushing product forward, e.g. on Adobe market, but I am little sceptical about that. We will see.

April 22, 2020 400+ signups

Today is the day when I reached 400 signups.

I realised that:

65% of people understand my native language (Slovak language)

Open rate of e-mail campaign (people who signed before beta was launched) - 65% (native language) vs. 12% (english language)

I got mostly people from specialised facebook groups. To be honest, people reacts positive on the demo.

I need to improve understanding of using my plugin in right way. There is hidden algorithm and it seems people need better explanation.

April 16, 2020 66 new accounts. Here is how β†’

2 days ago I wrote that the product Bannerium went life.

These 2 days I focused more on spreading the word about the product. And because my product has niche market and also it solves my past problem, I understand who is the potential user as well as customer.

I defined two main groups of users who can be interested: marketers (mostly PPC) and graphic designers (in product, digital agency, freelancers, ...)
Both of them have different motivation behind creating banners.

Graphic designers are mostly forced to do banners. This type of work is not their cup of tea. And in many agencies, there are juniors who generate banners (to reduce cost).

On the other hand, marketers who want to test as much different variations of visuals as they can. So that they can get better numbers in marketing and optimize the campaigns

So I was looking for groups who were specialised in graphic design, marketing (mostly PPC) and I tried to ask for feedback on plugin. And if they find it useful.

  1. I posted in Facebook groups specialised in Graphic design (), Marketing - PPC.
  2. I posted on Reddit
  3. I also send few people on Fiverr who are specialised in making banners (with plugin they can earn more, right? - there is value for them)

Of course I got some haters and few people questioned the value.

But I got 66 new leads who saw the value.

The thing is, that this type of plugin is not useful for people who do 10 banners in a month. They will not pay penny to automate their process and it is understandable. One person even used e-mail: "thisisuseless@..."

They are far from my focus

But I would love to learn how to post on Reddit? I see that people there are mostly negative on anything. And the community there is kinda unique.

Do you have any advice?

April 14, 2020 I was waiting 1 year for this day! Product is live

Today is a huge day!|

After all, we have our first version of the Photoshop plugin, which is generating ad banners.

AND WE GOT 100 NEW ACCOUNTS.

Throughout our alpha, beta programme, I got 250 e-mail addresses on designers which I reached.

Also I was active in facebook groups which helped me to get new people. My focus is to build good relationship with them, because I have some other ideas in my head. Ideas which can help other designers to be more productive.

Take a look - www.bannerium.com and give me your opinion.

Follow my story, because it will be a ride.

BTW: It will be interesting to see, how many of them will be willing to pay.

February 1, 2020 More than 50 designers in BETA!

I created video again, I faked ideal end to end flow from user perspective. I posted video on Facebook group and I got 50 people into Beta programme. With 10 of them I had call, with all of them I was writing on Messenger or via e-mails

Our beta was not working properly. There were some basic flaws, but I wanted to understand if even this beta is solving their problem. I wanted to understand their sentiment.

It was great!

So, let's move on!

January 10, 2020 Massive improvement of the algorithm!

I was lucky. I was showing my product to developer who is working as Senior developer in Linkedin. You can imagine, that his level of building algorithms were much higher than ours. He even discussed the algorithm with staff engineer in Google.

Google is all about algorithms. It is their daily bread.

Our algorithm was improved and we knew, that we can move to BETA

December 5, 2019 Are people still excited about the product?

It took us some time. It wasn't that straightforward as we thought it could be.

Reality was different than expectations. It took us few months of struggles to get here and I was curious if people still want us to develop the thing. Also me and developer were struggling with motivation to improve things. It was slow, we had other priorities which were better to do.

I asked on the Facebook forum again.

The answers from graphic designers were ... great! They still believed in our product. It gave us lot of courage to continue.

October 2019 Let's ideate how to improve algorithm

To be honest. We were stuck.
We couldn't do better algorithm with the ideas which we had.

We met with @tmvst and @ctw and we were ideate different version of algorithm. We came up with few pretty interesting ideas which were not doable.

BUT - we found some, which we wanted to try.
It was huge milestone, because there we defined, that algorithm should generate banners into 3 groups.

About

I was working for one e-shop, where marketing manager came to me and asked me to do 1500 banners ads - different products, different languages and lot of formats of the same banner. It was beginning of Bannerium.