$25k/Year: How One Expertimental App Pika.Style Turned into a Business Project. Interview with Rishi Mohan

Passive income is a dream for many people, and in their endeavors to create a stable source of profit, moneymakers often resort to SaaS platforms, where users pay for subscriptions on a monthly basis.

Then, there's a stereotype that SaaS platform development takes millions of dollars. Here we are, affiliate mythbuster, ready to debunk the myth and tell you about a project that generates $2,000 of profit at minimum cost.

General Info

Project: Pika.style is a web app designing beautiful screenshots and website mockups.

Launch Date: January 2022

Subscribers: ≈200

Net Income: ≈$2 000/month

Pika is a web app designing beautiful screenshots and website mockups created by Indian developer Rishi Mohan. He built the app to solve his own problem but quickly understood that other users might find it useful as well.

There are 10 templates at the moment: you can either design a website screenshot, make a mobile app presentation, or draw up a code snippet.

Designers, marketing specialists, SMM specialists, and other people who are often expected to share screenshots on social media or in chats certainly admire the app.

It's not that hard to create a screenshot using Pika: all you need is 2 or maybe 3 minutes and a built-in template. After you sign up for the app, you will be able to save presets to quickly update your screenshots.

Twitter users seem to like Pika, and the audience is constantly growing: thanks to the viral scope of the platform.

The History of the Development

Screenshot design appeared to have been burned out: other apps, such as Figma, Canva, or many other more or less intricate options, can do the work, but Pika gracefully outshined them, showing what perfection is.

We discussed the app with Rishi Mohan, also bringing up the subject of progress, competition, and future perspectives.

Hi! Tell us about yourself. Where do you come from? How old are you? When did you get interested in web development?

Hi, I’m Rishi Mohan, 28 years old design engineer from India currently living in Berlin. My interest for web, design and tech took over me right when I was in senior secondary school in 2009, but I started doing it professionally after I graduated from college in 2015

Can you explain what Pika.style is? What are the app's key features?

Pika is a tool to design appealing screenshots and mockups easily and quickly. While Pika has lots of unique and specific features, at its core its key features would be the ease of use and quick results.

How did you get the idea to create an app like this?

It was my own problem that I wanted to fix. I was spending decent enough time designing marketing images, the process was repetitive and time-consuming where you have to customize the background, position the screenshot etc.

So I made a quick app which lets me do the same set of things but more quickly and easily. That’s how Pika was born.

How much time did you spend creating Pika's working prototype? How expensive was it to host the app? Were there any other expenses?

It took me 4 to 5 days to release a basic version. I hosted it on Vercel’s free plan so didn’t have any expenses for releasing the app.

What about the front-end design of the app? Did you do it yourself, too?

Yes, Pika is built using my current favorite stack: Next.js, TailwindCSS, and RadixUI and hosted on Vercel.

Can you tell us how much time you spent developing Pika in total?

Technically it’s still being built, so there’s no such thing as time taken to develop. But if we talk about the initial version of Pika which I had launched on ProductHunt, that took me close 6 days to build.

Who is your target audience?

Designers, SaaS, marketing teams, bloggers and anyone who deals with screenshots or mockups. Considering Pika doesn’t just beautifies screenshots but also can design mockups increases the scope of it.

Are there any close competitors?

I don’t see it as competition. But year there are other apps like Xnapper, Brandbird etc. which do the same thing and have a good number of users.

Is it your first experience developing a SaaS project?

No, I had done a couple of small projects before and also had built Kizie.co, a Twitter client for the web. Kizie was a SaaS and had few paid users as well.

The Size of the Audience & Profits

In 25 days after the release, Pika became quite popular: the owner of the app was active on Twitter, and it did attract attention. People used the app to create beautiful screenshots and shared the results on their accounts.

Here are the first-month statistic readouts to pique your curiosity further.

• 6,5k exported screenshots;

• 20k page views;

• mentions on online media platforms.

A monthly subscription costs $12; if you choose the annual subscription option, you'll get two months for free. Six months after the premium subscription was released, Rishi reported a net income of $250, and in four months more, $1,000.

Pika makes money on paid subscriptions and in-app advertising. Ads do not interfere with the interface; no more than 2 slots are sold per month. The cost of one slot is $150.

So, you waited for 10 months to get a net income of $1,000, and 5 months more to get $2,000. Can you show us the MRR chart?

Sure, the currency in the screenshot is Indian Rupees (INR)

It means, you have more than 150+ paid subscribers?

Pika recently crossed 200 paid users.

What is the ratio for customers with a monthly subscription and payment for a year in advance?

Close to 25% of users are on annual plan, 75% are on monthly plan.

And how many customers per month refuse to renew their subscription?

Pika on average is seeing 10% churn rate.

Tell us about the main sources of customers. Do you invest in advertising? What causes your MRR to grow?

I am not spending any money on advertising or marketing. Main source of customer acquisition is Search traffic, Twitter and word of mouth.

Where do your clients come from?

Most Pika users are from USA, Germany and other European countries.

The monthly plan costs $12, but you previously raised it to $15. Why did you reduce the price?

The increase in pricing to $15 a month was an experiment, and surprisingly it did well. There were various reasons for reverting the pricing back to $12 a month, main reason was my intuition of how much a product with this value should be priced.

You once said on your Twitter account that the app makes money on both subscriptions and affiliate marketing. What is the ratio of the income?

That’s not correct. Pika still makes more revenue from subscriptions than ads. Ads contribute about 14% to 18%.

Who buys advertising links in the app?

Most of the advertisers are SaaS founders.

What are the traffic sources for the app? Can you share some statistical data?

Pika on average gets 50K to 60K impressions a month, ~50% bounce rate and 5m to 7m time on site.

Why do you need an affiliate program? Does it provide any profit? How many affiliates do you have?

Affiliate program is a marketing experiment to see if it can help grow Pika. Pika currently has 20+ affiliates. Having said that, it’s not converting much as of now.

How did you come up with the idea to add a team plan? How many teams are there in Pika already?

The idea was that a team plan could help grow Pika faster. Also because there were some requests for a team plan. Unfortunately team plan isn’t going as I had expected it to

Again, on your Twitter account you said that you had lost a customer who wanted to set up 65 accounts for the team members. Why did it happen? Obviously, Pika could generate $780 monthly.

That’s true. He was marketing head or something similar in a big telecast and publishing company and wanted to have a team account for his 65 members big team

I wish I had bandwidth to implement a team plan back then. I couldn’t and so he moved on. Later on after I implemented the team plan, I reached out to him via email to ask if he would be still interested, I didn’t get any reply 😅

I saw that you had a high rate of declined payments on India Stripe. What's the case?

It’s not the case now, but once was. It was due to my Stripe account being an Indian one, and I hadn’t submitted IEC code(Import export code) for my account which is needed for Indian Stripe accounts. Because of that all the AMEX card payments were being declined

I was able to fix that issue by simply getting an IEC code and submitting it in my Stripe account.

Is $2,000 enough to live in Berlin? Can you say that Pika covers your living expenses?

Cost of living in Berlin is more than what I make from Pika. It’s possible to have a life in Berlin with $2,000 a month in pocket, but it’s not going to be the kind of life I want to live

Also Pika is a side-project and I work on it alongside a full-time job as Frontend engineer. This helps me in lots of ways.

Would it be possible to live in India with this money?

$2,000 a month is good enough money to live a above average life in India.

Further Plans

How do you perfect your app? Do your user come up with ideas, or is it you who generates them? Do you have a roadmap?

Since the start of the Pika I’ve been getting regular feedback from both free and paid users, and I am really grateful for that. Credits for most of the new features, bug fixes and changes goes to Pika’s users.

Pika does have a roadmap but it’s more like internal one and private, which I might make public in future.

Do you set standards for income and audience size for the next six months, maybe a year?

Honestly, I see Pika as a project where I test my skills and learn, be it in design, development, marketing or customer support, the value of these learnings is more than the revenue I make from Pika. And so I don’t really keep a target of how much revenue or customers I want to acquire in the next 6 months or a year. I mostly keep my focus on the next month.

Are you planning to launch ad campaigns on Facebook and Google Ads?

Yes, I want to try ad campaigns in future and see how it converts.

Do you have any plans to test influence marketing or viral marketing?

No such plans like that as of now.

Can you give advice to those who want to build their own SaaS app?

Build in public. Talk to your users as much as possible and build for them, try to get their feedback and involve them more to build a better roadmap.

Every product is different, and it’s always better to experiment as much as possible. Without experimenting, you’ll never know what things can work for you

Conclusion

Pika is a great example of how a small SaaS can bring in money without spending millions on marketing. It is possible to repeat his success but to achieve that, you'll have to work hard in your niche.