This Guy Makes $1M+ per Year With 0 Employees

Hi guys,

Have you ever heard of Photopea, a FREE Photoshop-like image editor?

Yes the genius behind him is Ivan Kutskir. This project of his get:

• 13M monthly visits

• 1.5M monthly user hours

• $100K monthly ad revenue

Amazingly, he solo-handled 500K daily users and scaled Photopea to $1M+ in revenue and he spends only $700/year for maintenance and keeps all the profit for himself.

Let’s get into this amazing founder story.

How this all started

Born in a small village in western Ukraine, his family moved to the Czech Republic in 2001. At 11, Ivan got his first computer, and since then he has been fascinated with computer graphics. At 14, he built his first website and with time constructed 12 more.

But the journey Photopea started in 2009, while he was still an undergrad in computer science. He got fascinated with online games and kept creating new stuff.

At 20, he started working with JavaScript & built Flash games to earn some income. He monetized these games with banner ads and started to earn $100- $400 a month.

But this was just the beginning.

At one point in time, he was working on 20 ideas all at the same time. During his work, he used Photoshop a lot and became very familiar with it. However, he found two major problems with Photoshop:

1. You couldn’t buy Photoshop for a one-time fee because it was too expensive. So you’d have to pay $20/month for a subscription.

2. Photoshop demanded significant computing power which doesn’t work normally on slower computers. And it wasn’t available with the same features on web browsers.

   

   Left image — Photoshop subscription prices, Right image — Computing error if your setup is not suitable

Idea and its creation

Ivan saw these shortcomings as an opportunity. In 2012, he had an idea to create a website that would allow users to open Photoshop files on a browser WITHOUT having Photoshop installed. And so this was the birth of Photopea.

He started working on his idea, adding a feature like displaying a list of layers and allowing the user to hide/unhide some of them.

He created a simple web tool that allowed you to open .psd files in the browser and download all layers separately. And this was just another feature!

By the next year, he added features like create, delete, and save layers. He wanted his work to help others RIGHT AWAY while he kept adding features to it. After working for thousands of hours, it finally turned into a full-fledged editor.

Marketing idea and gaining traction

Ivan is the most underrated guy on the Internet. I like him because he is a strong observant and a marketing genius (without an MBA).

Starting from 2012 to 2016, he had no monetization plan for Photopea.

After graduation, he had made only $29K with it. But he didn’t want to leave working on Photopea because it had so much potential. So he pursued his post-graduation and kept working on Photopea.

In 2017, he watched his friends apply for good jobs and make enviable amounts of money. However, he didn’t follow his peers and continued working on Photopea — Chasing his dream.

Now that Photopea was his full-time thing, he needed users for his products but money wasn’t on his mind. For him, it was all about enjoying what he did.

So to market it, he went out commenting about Photoshop alternatives. He posted on Reddit, Hacker News, etc. But his stuff kept getting flagged for self-promotion. He tried asking YouTubers for reviews, but most ignored him. Some asked him for money but he did not have any.

As a one-person army, he

• Solved 400+ user issues

• Created open-source libraries

• Made Photopea into a full-fledged image editor.

His customer support was so good that 80% of his users joined GitHub just to request new features. He didn’t have a marketing degree or funds to promote Photopea so he had to innovate.

Every time he added new features, he would publish a blog on how to use it. Because of this, users loved him and became true fans.

Photopea was getting good feedback and its user base was rapidly expanding. Then it all clicked.

The same YouTubers who hesitated to review his app earlier started making Photopea tutorials to get 1000s of views.

How is Photopea going

In October 2018, Photopea hit an all-time high of 1.5M visits and Ivan capitalized on this feat and did his first AMA on Reddit. This went viral with more than 50K upvotes and 2.2K comments.

9 months later, his traffic doubled to 3M visits, and he did another AMA on Reddit and it went viral again. And in 2021, he decided to host another AMA on Hacker News. This one went viral too!

Today Photopea is up and running and generating profit more than ever, it has one huge active community that is supportive. There are hundreds of tutorials available online where you can master it easily.

His total expense in running his software

Photopea is web-based and is completely built using Javascript. His monthly expenses are:

• $50 for hosting

• $16 for domain

It only costs around ~$700/year to keep running a business that makes millions. With no paid marketing, Photopea found success through AMAs and community-driven word-of-mouth marketing.

Ivan has symbolized this — Make a BETTER and FREE alternative to an EXPENSIVE product and users will (eventually) use your product.

Ivan has now spent nearly 11 years on Photopea. And he has addressed over 5,000 GitHub requests and issues on his own.

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