Photopea
Ivan Kutskir was born in Ukraine in 1990 and moved to Prague in 2009 to study computer science. During his bachelor's degree, he monetized browser games with ads, earning $100-$400 monthly—his primary income while studying. In 2012, he had a simple idea: create a website that could display PSD files and let users toggle layer visibility. This small concept would eventually consume thousands of hours and transform into something far more ambitious.
Ivan approached the project with remarkable naiveté and confidence. "I just took my laptop and started to code," he recalls. "I was not making or counting on any money; I did it for fun." He didn't analyze the market or validate the business idea. Instead, he was certain that "if you make a replacement for a popular commercial product, people will come sticking millions into your pocket, whether you want it or not." The first PSD viewer launched in 2013, and then Ivan methodically added feature after feature. By the time he finished his master's degree in 2017, Photopea had evolved from a viewer into a full graphics editor. He's been working on it full-time ever since.
Ivan's marketing approach was unconventional and often ineffective by conventional standards. He "spammed" comments about Photopea under articles about Photoshop alternatives. He posted on Reddit and Hacker News. He reached out to YouTubers asking them to review the product—90% ignored him, and 10% demanded payment he didn't have. Yet something remarkable happened: without direct outreach, various people spontaneously reviewed Photopea. These organic endorsements drew steady attention over eight years. The free product, combined with word-of-mouth discovery, became his growth engine.
Ivan's biggest win was his monetization strategy. Having already monetized games with ads since 2006, he applied the same model: "Almost all Photopea income comes from ads." With 10 million monthly visits and 1.5 million hours spent monthly on the platform, Ivan generates approximately 6 cents per user hour. The math is simple but powerful: $100,000/month in ad revenue, with hosting costs of just $50/year and a domain cost of $16/year. What didn't work: aggressive outreach to influencers and most self-promotion attempts were ignored or deleted as spam. What he learned: organic discovery and spontaneous reviews proved far more valuable than aggressive marketing.
Photopea is a solo operation that's become a quiet powerhouse. Ivan remains the only person building features, fixing bugs, and maintaining the product. He's begun collaborating with a few programmers over the last two years but still handles "everything" himself. His ambitions include building a team, creating a video editor, and advancing vector graphics capabilities. He's also working on personal goals—currently able to do one muscle-up and aiming for ten in a row.
- •Building something you genuinely enjoy solving problems with (not chasing trends) can drive 10x productivity and allow solo founders to compete with teams.
- •Free ad-supported models can generate substantial revenue at scale—Photopea proves that millions of engaged users paying via ads can outpace premium SaaS pricing.
- •Organic word-of-mouth and spontaneous third-party validation (reviews, mentions) are more powerful than aggressive self-promotion, especially for consumer-facing tools.
- •Extremely low operational costs ($66/year for hosting and domain) mean that even modest ad revenue becomes highly profitable and sustainable for a solo founder.
- •Patience and iterative feature development over years (not months) can turn a simple initial idea into a category-defining product that serves 10M users monthly.
- 1.Start building something you're passionate about without waiting for perfect market validation; focus on solving a real problem iteratively and ship early versions to get feedback.
- 2.Choose a monetization strategy aligned with your user base from day one (ads for consumer tools, subscriptions for B2B)—Photopea's early decision to use ads set the financial trajectory.
- 3.Publish content and participate authentically in communities (Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter) where your target users naturally congregate, but focus on genuine contribution over self-promotion.
- 4.Build a free or freemium product that creates natural word-of-mouth and organic discovery; this compounds over years and reduces customer acquisition costs to near-zero.
- 5.Ruthlessly optimize operational costs and keep the product lean—every dollar saved on infrastructure is pure margin when you reach scale, enabling solo founder sustainability.
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