1 Year of Orshot! 700k+ Renders and 100+ Customers Later

Hi 👋 ! I'm Rishi, founder of Orshot

It's been 1 year now that I've been solo building this platform and within one year, not only the product has been validated, but with the help of customers it has grown from just a product, to a mature platform

Here's a quick recap:

• Grew from 0 to 4,000+ users and 100+ customers
• Rendered over 7,00,000+ visuals, each taking less than 3.5 seconds on average
• Users collectively have designed 7,000+ templates across all workspaces
• Less than 1% of error rate
• 98%+ service uptime

The business is running profitable at $5,000+ in monthly recurring revenue, and I want to thank all of the customers for giving Orshot a try and using it, and sharing their feedback. Without the feedback, it wouldn't have been possible to build and grow Orshot

All of these metrics are open at our Open Startup page

Learnings so far

• You have the right to your deeds, but never the fruits of outcome
• I couldn't have come this far if I wasn't passionate about solving the problem
• Talking to customers and solving their issues grows your business
• Learn to say no when you get customers whose use case don't align with your vision
• Experiment at all levels, product, marketing etc.
• Use AI to empower and outsource boring tasks
• Be close with family, friends, they'll indirectly help you being grounded and be sane
• Give yourself chances, take risks while you can
• Think big, no limits, universe meets you at the audacity of your thoughts

I'll also take this time to reflect on my vision for the product

Orshot Studio

It started as a very basic design editor, which now has grown to a multi-format full-fledged design platform. Orshot's Studio has most features from modern day design tools we use like Figma and Canva, and can help design beautiful marketing visuals to be rendered in Image, PDF or Video format

As a designer myself, I have moved designing from Figma to Orshot and use it primarily now. This switch helped building the Studio a lot because not only I implemented all the features from Figma, but I have made upgrades for improving UX specially because the Studio's main use to design for scale via API

Features like auto-scaling text, multiple styles in same text layer, animations etc. are tricky on the API side, but to give the control and creative freedom to the users, it was important to build these, and in a way that they get exactly what they design

I'm very happy with the growth of Studio

The goal now is to make it work really well with AI Agents. We already have Orshot's Design Agent which can be used to offload design work, it works really well already. I want to extend this and make it more useful, with a goal that for users it can design very personalized designs in seconds or minutes, ready to be integrated

I've already started working on it and might get it ready very soon :)

Posting to Socials

Connecting social accounts and directly posting to them from Orshot's API was an inevitable feature. It fit naturally

I want to grow this more and have more integrated solution. It already handles posting, scheduling and managing posts in a calendar format, but there's more control to give to users

This feature completes the full circle of creating and presenting, and hence very important

Scaling the API

Orshot's already handling thousands of requests every day and doing pretty fine. The infrastructure is setup for easy scaling, we're also already serving enterprise customers

The API is mostly in good place, I've recently improved the Orshot documentation pages for easy navigation, readability and organization of different areas

The next step for the API would be to be more faster, at least sub 2 second on average for Image and PDF formats, and specially for video generation which has lots of improvement areas

Business

From the start, Orshot is planned to be a long-term platform. It started small, still is small, but it has always been profitable

I've focussed mainly on talking with customers to help their use cases, and learn more from them so I could simplify their use case. It has worked well, and so I'll keep doing it

Will be expanding marketing efforts in other formats as well in coming months and see what works. The goal is to reach the ideal customers, provide them with a solution that works well for them, and help them growing their business

Thank you!

It's been a pleasure building Orshot so far! The whole of last year I have been very content and passionate with the direction of the platform. Have worked on it days and nights, weekdays and more on weekends, and out of passion and interest, and that's all I want from it