Generating $200K monthly revenue with an online photo editor

Ivan is the founder of Photopea — an online photo editor — generating $200K/month with 3 million unique visitors monthly in his 10th year.

He started his project as a hobby and then started to earn money.

This is the short form of interview. For more details, check our website.

Question: Can you give us some information about your background?

I was born in Ukraine and moved to Czechia with my parents when I was 11. When I turned 18, I came to Prague to study at the university.

Question: What did you study in the university?

My major was in computer science.

Question: And at that time, I guess you were busy with flash games and other stuff, right?

Yes, that’s correct. I actually started making flash games even before going to university. I began playing with flash around when I was 15.

Question: Is it something related to your family, or was it your interest?

It was more of a personal interest. My two cousins, who are three years older than me, had a computer. I got really excited about it, which led me to want my own computer.

I got my first computer around 2013 or 14. When I got it, I immediately started learning things like how to make websites. It was the beginning of the internet era here in Czechia, and we had limited internet access initially.

Question: You were coding and developing flash games, and you started to earn money from those games, right?

Yes, that’s right. When I was in high school, around 15 or 16 years old, I began connecting with people who needed Flash games or animations. I started making some money before university by doing these freelance projects.

Question: What led you to focus on Photopea after flash games?

Well, during my high school years, Flash was owned by Macromedia, later bought by Adobe. I used Adobe Photoshop back then and was quite proficient with it. While I continued making some flash games for money during my first years at the university, my main focus was on my studies.

However, I got really excited about the web technologies emerging around then, like the Google Chrome browser, web games without Flash, web GL, and other new web technologies. I saw that web-based applications could be much more performant than they were five years ago with Internet Explorer. So, I transitioned from making Flash games to developing JavaScript games and monetized them with ads.

Question: You found the missing feature of Adobe and decided to create your own Photoshop service, right?

Yes, exactly. As I was working on these games and other projects, I came up with the idea to make a web-based viewer for PSD files.

I wasn’t aiming to create an editor at first; I just wanted a platform where one could open a PSD file, and the JavaScript would process and analyze the file to provide a preview of its content, like showing how many layers are there.

Question: Adobe didn’t offer any features like this at the time, right?

Correct. Back then, if you wanted to open a PSD file, you had to buy Photoshop. There was no other way. You could open PSD files in GIMP, but it would open them without any styles or adjustment layers, so it wasn’t accurate.

Question: Do you have any advice for bootstrappers?

One crucial piece of advice is to genuinely enjoy what you are doing. Your project should be something you’re passionate about, almost like a hobby. If you’re excited about your work, it will feel less like a task and more like something you’re eager to spend time on. For me, working on Photopea was akin to playing an instrument; it was something I did for enjoyment, not just as a job.

When starting out, don’t be intimidated by the idea of entering a crowded market or tackling complex tasks. Begin by focusing on the core, essential features of your product, the ones that are most important and useful. These don’t have to be numerous or complicated; even a simplified version of an existing product can be valuable if it addresses specific needs effectively. For example, I focused on essential features in Photopea that were either poorly implemented or missing in other software.

It’s also important to recognize that you don’t need to have everything figured out from the start. You can develop your product gradually. Start with the most important features and build from there. This approach reduces the risk of feeling overwhelmed and allows you to adapt and respond to user feedback.

For more details, check our website.

https://saastrappers.com/interviews/ivan-kutskir-photopea