Immediately a small spoiler – you can :)
I recently read a very inspiring story by the Ukrainian Ivan Kutzkir. A few years ago, he launched the photopea.com service, which is essentially a web equivalent of Photoshop. And it is absolutely free!
He started developing it out of curiosity: would he be able to parse a psd file in a browser. As a result, he got a simple web application into which you can download a Photoshop file and lay it out in layers. From this, his work on this project began, and he worked on it in his free time, while simultaneously dealing with other tasks.
He launched the monetization of his project in 2016, a few years after the start of development. 90% of his income comes from advertising and a premium subscription so that there is no such advertising 😁
In 2018, he earned only $20,000 a year, and after 2 years, his income increased 25 times! In 2020, he already earned 500 thousand.. and if you take the last 12 months, then the income was 1 million dollars! Incomes are growing at a huge pace, and this is by no means the limit 🙂
Its product is now used by more than 300,000 users every day. Moreover, they spend many hours at work in its application!
And what is most incredible, he is alone!!! He does not have a team, offices, technical support, such as marketing and advertising.
All its costs are 45 bucks for server rent per year! He doesn’t even need a powerful server, since all rendering takes place in the user’s browser, and the server just gives a couple of static files and pictures.
All users come to him mainly on the recommendation of friends, the only thing he does is sometimes share updates in his project on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News.
In general, similar bootstrapping projects, without funding and a team, are very inspiring. The modern Internet gives opportunities to everyone! The main thing is to take and do. Just do it!
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