A designer's side project for prettier screenshots, grown to ~$3.8K/month without quitting his job

Who built it, and what they built

Rishi Mohan is a design engineer by profession and by hobby. Alongside his full-time job he runs Pika, a profitable SaaS he launched as a side project in early 2022.

Pika started as a simple screenshot editor and mockup generator, and now serves creators, designers, startups, companies and agencies with three products:

• An API that generates images from templates
• A screenshot editor
• Pika Embed, which adds a full screenshot editor to any app

With monthly recurring revenue around $3,500, Pika is close to matching his salary.

Where the idea came from

As a designer, Rishi spent hours in Figma making marketing images for Twitter and Dribbble: take a screenshot, add a background, pick gradient colours, patterns and shadows. It was complex and repetitive, so he built a tool to do it in seconds.

The first app was simple: drop in a screenshot and style it with preset gradients, shadows and browser frames. The idea felt validated when it launched on Product Hunt, collected over 600 upvotes and finished second of the day.

Competition was low back then. And because Pika was a side project with no pressure to make money, he could focus on thoughtful features that users loved.