🏔️ Images as a Service

Create better looking images of your work

Author

Vlad Oleksiienko
February 07, 2023

Hey everyone,

Welcome to the SaaS Hill, a weekly newsletter that tries to predict the future of SaaS.

Btw, this is the 20th issue of this weekly newsletter ⚡️.

I hope that you find our newsletter informative and useful, and I’d be grateful if you could share this email with your colleagues, friends, and SaaSy people. Your support and feedback are essential in helping me grow and reach more people 🙏

This year, I aim to bring you even more SaaS trends, insights, and predictions that will shape the future of the industry. For example, PLG, sales productivity, remote work, SaaS growth strategies, micro-SaaS, vertical SaaS, compound SaaS, creator economy ⚡️️

Finally, I would like to thank you for being a part of the community and for supporting me on this journey. I look forward to bringing you more valuable content in the future 🚀

This week we are covering Images and Screenshots 🖼️

⭐️️ Intro

The preview image for this report was generated using OpenAI's Dalle2 - an AI image and art generator that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence. I was thoroughly impressed with the beautiful output produced in just a minute. All I had to do was open Dalle2, input a prompt (geometric pattern with squares, triangles, and circles in shades of blue, including dark blue, white, midnight blue, delft blue, and royal blue), preview a few options, and select the one that I preferred before downloading it.

AI-generated image

Here’s what we will discuss today:

  • 6 predictions about Images

  • 27 products in this category

  • 4 revenue numbers

  • 8 stats about Images

  • 7 experts to follow

  • 2 useful links

  • 1 Twitter thread

  • How to

🤔 Predictions

  1. Content Creators: The rise of social media and demand for visually appealing content is making it easier for anyone to become a content creator, leading to a surge in their numbers.

  2. Creator Economy: SaaS founders are building products for content creators and solopreneurs to help them create, edit, and share their content with ease, boosting their reach and influence.

  3. Love for Visuals: People are becoming more visually oriented, and images and videos are more engaging and shareable than text-based content. This drives the need for tools to create and edit images.

  4. Era of AI Images: AI-generated images are becoming increasingly prevalent in various applications, such as product design and advertising, driving the need for more products in this space.

  5. There are a bunch of SaaS categories even in this niche:

    1. Image Editors > BrandBird and Canva

    2. Screenshots > Cleanshot and Xnapper

    3. Image Generation at Scale > Bannerbear and Hyperise

    4. Screenshot APIs > Screenshots.so and savepage

    5. AI-generated Images > DALLE2 and Jasper Art

    6. Profile Pictures > picofme.io

    7. Logo Makers > MakeLogoAI

    8. Gradients and Patterns > MagicPattern and Meshy

    9. Whiteboards and Diagrams > Excalidraw and Miro

🏢 Products

🌠 Screenshots and Image Editors

  1. Cleanshot > Capture your Mac’s screen like a pro

  2. Xnapper > Snap beautiful screenshots instantly

  3. BrandBird > An image editor for busy SaaS founders, who build in public

  4. Wrap > Capture and edit beautiful, shareable screenshots

  5. Pika > Pika gives you tools to design great mockups and screenshots easily

  6. tinykiwi > Create better looking images of your work

  7. MagicShot > Screenshot editor for busy indie makers

  8. Screely > Instantly turn a screenshot into a browser mockup

  9. TweetPics > Make beautiful images for your tweets & threads

  10. Supershots > Create beautiful screenshots

  11. snappify > Easily explain your code and share your knowledge

🖼️ Personalized Images at Scale

  1. Bannerbear > helps generate images at scale with API and integrations

  2. picMachine > A flexible image generation API for startups

  3. Hyperise > Double your outreach engagement with personalized images

💻️ Screenshot APIs

  1. Screenshots.so > Powerful website screenshots via a simple API

  2. savepage > Screenshot any website with our powerful API

  3. ScreenshotOne > Turn websites into screenshots via API

  4. API Flash > Simple and powerful Screenshot API

🌄 Other

  1. DALLE2 by OpenAI > AI system that can create realistic images and art

  2. poet.so > Capture and share Twitter and LinkedIn posts as beautiful images

  3. Excalidraw > whiteboard tool that lets sketch diagrams

  4. MagicPattern > Create unique graphics in a few clicks

  5. Meshy > Generate custom beautiful mesh gradients

  6. linkder > Visually inspect hundreds of websites in minutes

👶 Avatars & Profile Pictures

  1. picofme.io > Just AI profile picture maker

  2. Profile Picture Maker > Make a rounded profile picture

🏢 Logo

  1. MakeLogoAI > Unique logos, for less than a coffee

  2. logology > Get a designer-quality logo for your startup. In 5 minutes

Revenues

  1. BannerBear > $50K MRR (Source: CEO’s Twitter)

  2. BrandBird > close to $5K MRR (Source: CEO’s Twitter)

  3. Xnapper > hit $8K in July 2022 (Source: Indie Hackers)

  4. Pika > 150 paid customers; apx $2-3K MRR. (Source, website)

📈 Trend Chart

New photos stats

📊 Statistics

  1. 90% of the information processed by the brain is visual (Source: ifvp)

  2. The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text (Source: ifvp)

  3. The human brain is able to recognise a familiar object within 100 milliseconds (Source: Science Daily)

  4. Posts that include visual content (images or videos) get 65% higher engagement. Newer research, however, showed that Facebook posts with images get 2.3x more engagement than those without images (Source: Photutorial)

  5. Similarly, tweets with images receive 35% more retweets than tweets with no visual content (Source: Twitter)

  6. The average user has around 2,100 photos on the smartphone in 2023 (Source: Photutorial)

  7. The global pandemic reduced the number of images taken by 25% in 2020 and 20% in 2021 (Source: Photutorial)

  8. 12.4 trillion photos have been taken throughout history. By 2030, this number will increase to 28.6 trillion (Source: Photutorial)

📖 Experts to Follow

  1. Jon Yongfook > building BannerBear

  2. Simon Høiberg > building FeedHive

  3. Dagobert Renouf > building logology

  4. Jim Raptis > building BrandBird

  5. Sai Krishna > building Superblog.ai

  6. Tony Dinh > building Xnapper

  7. Yossi Segev > built tinykiwi, sold it and building picMachine

🔗 Useful Links

  1. Bannerbear has hit $10K MRR — this page documents the decisions and pivots that got me to this milestone

  2. Bannerbear > Bootstrapping a SaaS Product to $36k MRR

🐦️ Twitter Thread

Yossi Segev on TinyKiwi acquisition

TinyKiwi acquired by FeedHive

🤝 Related SaaS Trends

  1. 🏔️ Building In Public > Sharing journey leads to growth opportunities

  2. 🏔️ Creator Economy > Raise of small businesses built by self-employed creators

  3. 🏔️ Micro SaaS > The future of niche software

Thanks for reading. See you next time 👋

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