Pintura Image Editor

A JavaScript Image Editor for your Website

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Image croppers and editors online don’t feel native, they all feel like websites, Doka Image Editor changes this and offers users an experience that might as well be native.

June 15, 2020 Calculated Churn for Past 6 Months

I calculated churn for the first six months of Doka Image Editor sales (end of 2018, start of 2019). While I posted a celebratory update at the end of 2019 somehow the numbers for the following months dropped considerably.

Dec 12 -> 11 -> 10%
Jan 14 -> 8 -> 42%
Feb 18 -> 11 -> 38%
Mar 14 -> 6 -> 57%
Apr 20 -> 12 -> 40%
May 28 -> 16 -> 42%

I'm not sad but I would've liked more retention ( obviously :D ).

Some thoughts:

  • The info is based on a very low number of sales, so it could be just the universe fucking with me.
  • The software license is perpetual so cancelling doesn't prevent devs from using the product, therefor it's easier to cancel and repurchase later.
  • Some customers decided to cancel and re-purchase a new license (license models are slightly different now).
  • Peak in March may be related to COVID-19, but then again, it's just so random with the low numbers.

End of June 2019 was when I changed up the license model from domain based to project based, also, sales really started to grow by that point. So I'm very curious to see what the numbers will be for the next couple months.

March 4, 2020 Hit $ 8,000 Monthly Revenue

After making changes to the Doka Image Editor license price tiers in December, more customers started purchasing the company license, this has caused a revenue increase of around $ 3,500 a month.

Sales December 2018 (around $ 1,500) to February 2020 (around $ 8,000)

In the mean time work has started on a complete rewrite of Doka, I've chosen Svelte to do this. It's a compiler so I can still build towards different other frameworks without having to include Svelte in (for example) a React component. The compiler can also export to a Web Component. The new version is going to offer undo/redo functionality, more customisation options (custom views / buttons), an even more native feel, smaller footprint, and better performance.

I'm planning to open source some of the Svelte components and actions I'm working on.

February 3, 2020 600% Increase in Company License Sales

Two months ago, around mid December, I tweaked the Doka Image Editor license model and price tiers, I wrote about the changes here

In short:

  • I renamed the "Developer" license to "Individual", better describing the customer group.
  • I renamed "Team" to "Company" for the same reason, will probably change this to "Small Business" later.
  • Limited the project amount from "unlimited" to "one" for the "Individual" tier.

These changes should trigger companies (web agencies) to purchase the company (unlimited usage) license and not the "Individual" license. At the same time it shouldn't have to big of an impact on the "Individual" license, if you're an individual you're probably using Doka for one product.

Normally I'd sell one maybe two Company licenses a month, but in January I've sold eight! 😱

Now, I suspect this is related to the license changes, if that's the case then I should be seeing an increase this month as well. If it's on the other hand an anomaly then I'd like to ask the universe to stop playing mind games.

Fingers crossed 😅

Edit: After submitting this I had some doubt about this being a Milestone or not. I've decided to leave it in place as I feel it is a Milestone because it's the desired result of better fitting the product pricing to the customer base.

December 30, 2019 87.5% of Customers Renewed License

This month, after a year of waiting, I finally got to find out if the subscription model I choose for Doka Image Editor was going to work. The software license I sell is perpetual which means if you cancel your license you can still use the product but you no longer receive new updates and support. This had me slightly worried about the amount of potential cancellations.

I wanted to make sure that customers don't accidentally renew their license and have enough time to cancel if they wish. The Gumroad store I use to sell my software automatically sends a reminder 1 day before the subscription is renewed. In my opinion that's a very short notice. I decided to send a heads-up email 2 weeks in advance. If the customer has any questions or concerns that gives us enough time to address/discuss them.

So this month the first 16 Doka customers had the option to cancel their yearly license and fallback to the perpetual one. The numbers are in and only 2 decided to cancel.

After looking at the cancellation details, one cancelled (no reason) and the other customer was forced to cancel because of financial reasons, he was happy with the product but simply couldn't afford renewing at this time.

I'm actually quite happy with the numbers so far and am very much looking forward to see what January brings.

Happy new year to you all, here's to a fantastic 2020 🥂

December 11, 2019 Attempt to Increase MRR With Price Tier Change

95% of my customers purchase the "cheap" developer license shown below.

Developer license (109/year)

  • 1 developer
  • unlimited projects
  • normal support

Team license (449/year)

  • 5 developers
  • unlimited projects
  • priority support

After doing some customer research I noticed about 10% are existing SaaS products, 15% are start-ups (assuming from gmail/hotmail accounts etc.), near ly 75% of customers are web agencies. BUT nearly all of the agencies purchased the developer license.

The price of a team license should be far from shocking for a web dev agency (certainly when building multiple sites which agencies mostly do). To get more agencies to purchase the team license I decided to remove the "unlimited projects" option from the developer license. The developer license is still very suiting for startups and team license price should be very reasonable for profitable SaaS products.

By changing the price tiers to ones below I hope to make it better fit to my customers and see a change in purchase behaviour in the near future.

Developer license (129/year)

  • 1 developer
  • 1 project
  • normal support

Team license (499/year)

  • 5 developers
  • unlimited projects
  • priority support

Learnings for me. Things were going fine but I wasn't keeping a close eye on what kind of customers were buying. By monitoring that more closely I gained valuable insights into how to better position my product and price points.

December 5, 2019 + $ 1,000 New Sales in a Day

I've been selling plugins for a couple years now but never have I sold more than $ 750 in a single day. Yesterday thanks to selling a double team license and a couple of developer licenses sales suddenly spiked to $ 1,067 in a single day.

I've been planning to finetune the Doka license model and I might have to move this forward. The difference between the developer and a team license isn't very big at the moment (it's basically priority support) so more differentiation might push companies to team licenses more often.

December 2, 2019 Passed $ 5,000 Monthly Revenue

This month I celebrate the one year anniversary of Doka by reaching a record $ 5,285.25 of sales.

Doka licenses are based on annual subscriptions, and the first four customers that bought Doka last year also renewed their subscriptions, including those renewals November netted $ 5,482.25 in sales.

In the mean time I soft-launched the Doka for WordPress plugin that replaces the default WordPress image editor with Doka.

Plus I finally got around to building a customer portal. This will allow customers to set up automatic updates for the WordPress version and give them easier access to the latest version of Doka.

🎉

November 28, 2019 First customer renewed subscription!

The very first customer that purchased a Doka.js subscription renewed yesterday afternoon. There's four more customers that purchased in the first week so very curious to see if they will renew as well.

I send out a renewal email two weeks in advance and would expect customers to instant-cancel if they were planning to not renew. Since no-one has yet, I've got high hopes :D

November 1, 2019 First Attempt at Content Marketing

Yesterday when searching for "javascript crop image aspect ratio" I noticed all the top hits were links to Stack Overflow.

Combining the page views of the first couple Stack Overflow links shown as Google results almost hit 100K. So I figure maybe if I write an article on cropping images with JavaScript to fit a certain aspect ratio it might just top the results? And offer a more straightforward solution for developers using that search query.

I wrote a quick 3 minute tutorial yesterday morning and posted it online mid afternoon. It outlines clearly how to crop images to fit a certain aspect ratio and the reader receives a nice ready to use code snippet and demo at the end.

Then I highlight the challenges awaiting the reader if they would want to extend this further and offer them Doka as a possible solution.

It's currently ranking #1 for those exact search terms 🎉

Now I'm not sure if this is temporary (because it's only been online for such a short while) or if it's permanent, but either way it should result in some very specific organic traffic.

You can find the article below: https://pqina.nl/blog/cropping-images-to-an-aspect-ratio-with-javascript/

September 16, 2019 Launch free online image editor based on Doka

Last Friday morning I figured I could use all the Doka functionality I build thus far to offer people a free online image editor.

The image editor can then be used as a way to make people aware of Doka and to send them to the product page if they want to use Doka on their website. So I uploaded the editor HTML page, added a small link at the top right, and made the world aware with a small tweet.

That's that. I was about to go make myself an espresso when Smashing Magazine (980K followers) retweeted my tweet. Uh oh. Let's postpone that espresso. Two hours and some bug fixes later it was time for a timeout and that espresso.

The tweet has now been viewed 154,000 times, 4,500 people clicked the link and played around with the editor, of those, 150 clicked through to the Doka landing page. It has already generated some new leads so that's great.

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Image croppers and editors online don’t feel native, they all feel like websites, Doka Image Editor changes this and offers users an experience that might as well be native.