- Company
- Photopea
- Founder
- Ivan Kuckir
- Revenue
- $250K a month
Ivan Kuckir built a free product for fun. A few years later, he monetized it with ads. And now, Photopea is making $3M+ per year.
Here's Ivan on how he did it. 👇
Accidentally starting a business
I never planned to start a business. I just wanted to create useful (or at least interesting) pieces of software. I started by making several web games and programming libraries (IvanK.js, K3D.js, PolyK.js), monetizing them with ads.
Then, in 2012, I had the idea to spend a week or two making a web-based viewer of Photoshop PSD files. I liked the result and kept developing it, working about 10 hours each month, as I was still a student.
I didn't monetize it until 2017 — I was driven purely by a positive response from random people, and enjoyed seeing my software grow (both in features and in users).
Now, after 13 years of work, what started as a hobby project is used by about 1 million people per day. It generated $3 million in revenue in 2024.
I have several other projects, such as www.vectorpea.com and some web games, but they have 200x to 1000x less traffic (and revenue) than Photopea.
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