When I quit my job in January 2019, I had a 2-year runway. For almost 1 year I made no money and burned through my savings. That's because I was doing the 12 startups in 12 months challenge - where you brainstorm, build, market, and ship a startup every month for 12 months.

The Origin of Bannerbear

I had previously worked in an Ecommerce company where they would manually create visual assets every day for all the new products being uploaded to the store. It was a tedious process that I would have loved to automate at the time, but there was no solution. My North Star became trying to create a product that would have solved that past problem.

The 50/50 Rule

Over 6 months, I divided my time into 50% coding and 50% marketing, shipping many new features and integrations. I would do one week of code, then spend the following week tweeting and blog posting about what I shipped — then repeat.

Repositioning

Inspired by Jobs to be Done, I repositioned Bannerbear around 2 jobs that it performs: automating and scaling marketing. The keywords "Automate" and "Scale" are everywhere on the marketing site, pricing plans, and tutorials.

The $10K MRR Post

In January 2021, Bannerbear hit $10K MRR. The "Journey to $10K MRR" post went sort of viral in the bootstrapped SaaS world, even making it onto the Hacker News front page.