Quick heads up - In a couple of week's time I'm going raise the pricing for my community.​

If you've been on the fence, this is the best time to join in and join 125+ solo founders supporting each other and growing together. You can lock in the current price forever!

I'll share more details next week, here's the landing page. ​

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Now, on to today's topic - BannerBear.

Jon Yongfook is one of the cooles independent, solo SaaS founders.

Just for being so open about his numbers and his journey with his product Bannerbear over the last few years.

The Bannerbear “open” page has so much startup wisdom we all can learn from.

Right now, Bannerbear is at $630K ARR, this it’s revenue chart from the “open” page -

(While he still used to share his revenue publicly, now he doesn't)

Early Days

Revenue looks great today, but the beginning wasn’t easy.

Jon quit his full time job with the hopes of building his own bootstrapped business. But didn’t have any validated ideas yet.

So he tried to do the “12 startups in 12 months” challenge.

He was able to launch 7, but didn’t make any money from them.

Pivoting and Positioning

Eventually, he decided to focus only on one idea - Dynamic generation of Open Graph Images.

It got some success, but not enough to say that the idea was validated. So Jon pivoted again to an API product.

A simple Rest API that marketing teams can use to automatically generate images for their social media posts.

He called the tool Bannerbear.

And it took off🚀

The product worked the same way, but it was positioned differently. It went from being a vitamin to a painkiller.

From being a simple OG image generator, to an API to generate marketing images for businesses.

By the time he reached $10K MRR 2 years after quitting his full time job, he knew exactly who his ideal audience is, and what pains his product solves for them.

And what jobs it does for them. JBTD is a powerful framework you can use to position your product.

Product-Founder Fit

Jon has extensively documented his journry over the last 4 years, going from 0 to $52K MRR.

But one insight that stands out, and is probably the most important to understand is his idea of “Product-Founder Fit”.

If you don’ have passion for the problem you’re solving, it’s very hard to stay in the game for long enough.

So aim for product-founder fit even before you aim for product market fit.

Top Lessons -

Top Lessons from the Bannerbear story -

• Take on challenges like 12 startups in 12 months to explore ideas and discover your own interests.
• Focus on one idea when you find something that works, and you like it as well.
• Aim for Product Founder Fit.
• Pivot and Reposition as you discover the core problems of your users.
• Find what jobs your product can do for the user. Apply the “Jobs to be done” framework.

Further Reading -

From the Bannerbear blog -

• ​A Bootstrapped SaaS Journey to $10K MRR​
• ​7 Lessons Growing a Bootstrapped SaaS to $50K MRR​
• ​Bannerbear Open Page​

I did a deep dive on Bannerbear couple of years ago -

• ​Living The Indie Hacker DreamJon Yongfook​

Also, make sure you follow Jon Yongfook on Twitter to learn from him every day.

Hope you found this useful.

Here's a web version of this post to bookmark and share.

New idea I’m researching right now -

• Boring non AI business
• Painkiller problem
• Evergreen niche

Low tech product - can be built with NoCode/LowCode

And this is the google trends graph for the primary search term -

Read my rationale behind why I'm trying this idea in this twitter post. ​

I'm doing the Ship30 writing challenge - which means I'm publishing 1 mini essay every day.

I am 13 days in, this was my most popular essay of the last week -

• ​First principles thinking - How I've used it in my life​

You can check out all my essays so far on this page -

• ​Ayush - Atomic essays​

From the vault -

3 random post from the Superframeworks archives -

• ​$700K a Year with SEO​
• ​$145K MRR - simple employee scheduling tool​
• ​0-$1M ARR in 7 months! | The AI Arbitrage​

🔗 Super Links

Useful links you don’t want to miss -

• ​Work life balance vs work life integration - Shaan Puri
• ​How to go from 0 to $5M ARR profitably (step by step) - David Park
• ​5 new types of apps that you can now build with GPT-4o - Indie Hackers
• ​Pick advice that matches your goals. - Jason Cohen
• ​How to Become a Top Performer (ft. Codie Sanchez) - Mark Manson podcast | YouTube

Last week's top link -

• ​Tally Landing Page breakdown - The Boring Marketer​

🤗 How can I help?

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you -

• ​Join the tiny community of for yoru big dreams -
  • Feedback sessions/Demo Days to get personalized feedback 📝
  • Co-working sessions and a peer accountability group with weekly checkins 💪
  • Courses, Tutorials, Workshops on topics like SEO, Copywriting, Landing Pages, and more so that you keep growing 🚀
  • And lots more!
• We support, inform, educate and inspire each other every day. We are a tight knit group of indie hackers and solopreneurs working on our projects. We would love to have you. Entrepreneurship is hard, don’t do it alone. Come join us!​

Thanks,

Ayush 🙏