How a Solo Founder Built a $1.2K/Month Photography Blog for Indian Beginners
Manthan Gajjar turned a side project into a photography blog earning $1.2K per month by targeting low-competition keywords, publishing consistently, and monetizing through ads and affiliate links.
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Business snapshot
Monthly revenue
≈₹1.1 lakh/mo
$1,200/mo · reported Jun 2023
- Business model
- Content website
- Started
- Aug 2019
- Team
- Solo founder + 1 staff
- Based in
- Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
- Monthly revenue
- $1.2K per month
- Domain and hosting cost
- under 10$
- First Facebook ad spend
- 15-20$ for a week
- Keyword campaign spend
- around 50-70$
- Adsense share of income
- 30-40%
Tools
- todoist
- Trello
- Mailchimp
- Adsense
- Amazon
- Google Trends
- Spotify
Founder-reported figures, not independently verified. ₹ amounts use the ECB reference rate rate of Oct 2026 (₹94.82/$).
Who built it, and what they built
Manthan Gajjar is the founder of pewdoc, a blogging platform aimed at beginner photographers in India. The site publishes tips, gear reviews, and guides on topics like selling photos online, helping newcomers learn photography and eventually earn from it.
He runs the business as a side hustle and reports earning $1.2K per month from it.
Where the idea came from
After finishing his engineering degree in 2018, Manthan worked as an intern at an IT company and became interested in how people earn money online. He first tried a YouTube channel with random videos, but copyright strikes ended that experiment.
Around the same time, he was taking macro shots with his Nokia Lumia 520 phone and posting them on Instagram, where friends and family responded well. He assumed photography was only a hobby unless someone owned a studio and shot weddings.
In March and April 2019, while trying to replicate shots from photographers he followed, he read around 10-12 blogs and noticed most of them carried advertisements. After researching how those ads worked, he realized he could teach photography through writing instead of video, which suited him because he was too shy for YouTube.
How they built the first version
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