In 2019, Jon Yongfook was tired of making the same visual assets over and over again: open graph images, banners, and social posts. It was repetitive, boring work, and as someone who had already run “12 Startups in 12 Months”, he saw an opportunity to automate the pain. That idea became Bannerbear, a bootstrapped SaaS now earning more than $600,000 ARR.

Starting Small and Building in Public

Bannerbear did not start as the polished product it is today. The first version was lean: just a handful of templates plus a simple REST API for generating images. Jon rebranded it from earlier side projects like Previewmojo as he sharpened his focus, and he set himself a rhythm of spending half his time coding and the other half marketing. That balance kept him shipping and telling his story consistently.

Growth and Revenue Milestones

The journey was not an overnight success. Growth happened in distinct phases:

• 2018–2019: Early experiments and prototypes. No real revenue.
• 2019–2020: Shifted focus to the API. This brought recurring revenue and by 2021 Bannerbear had crossed $10K MRR.
• 2022–2023: Scaling up with more integrations, a tighter product, and steady customer growth. Revenue climbed to around $45K to $50K MRR.
• 2024–2025: The current stage. Bannerbear has reached roughly $630K ARR, or about $52K to $53K MRR.

What Drove the Growth

A few key factors stand out in Bannerbear’s journey:

• Founder and product fit: Jon’s background in both design and development made him the ideal person to solve this problem.
• Bootstrapping: By self-funding and reinvesting profits, he kept ownership and independence.
• Transparency: Sharing revenue numbers, lessons, and metrics publicly built trust and visibility.
• Consistency: A steady rhythm of building and marketing ensured the product kept evolving while the audience kept growing.
• Expanding the niche: Starting with images and later branching into new formats, integrations, and even video opened up more opportunities.

Fixing Conversions and Finding Real Growth

In mid-2022, Bannerbear faced what looked like a serious problem. Conversion rates from signup to paying customer had fallen to just 1%. For a bootstrapped founder, that number was unsettling.

At first, Jon assumed onboarding was to blame. After all, the same onboarding flow had taken Bannerbear from zero to $50K MRR. But when he dug deeper into the data, he discovered something surprising: many signups were fake. They used throwaway emails, never created projects, and showed no real activity.

The culprit was low-level “list bombing,” where bad actors use signup forms to flood inboxes. These bot accounts had been inflating signup numbers and dragging the apparent conversion rate down.

The fix was simple. Jon added a country-specific captcha to the signup form. Overnight, the inflated signup numbers collapsed, and Bannerbear’s true conversion rate jumped to 7 to 8 percent.

Jon also made a few changes to attract higher-quality signups:

• Mandatory plan choice before signup, making it clear Bannerbear is a paid product
• Exit intent modals on blog posts and tools, funneling more visitors into the product
• Google Ads experiments to bring in high-intent traffic

The results were clear. In August 2023, Bannerbear recorded 754 signups and 64 new customers, one of its best months ever.

The lesson was powerful: what looked like a conversion crisis was really a data quality issue. By fixing the basics and focusing on qualified distribution, growth looked much healthier.

Lessons for Solo Founders

Bannerbear’s story offers a roadmap for independent founders:

• Solve a problem you have personally felt.
• Share your journey; transparency is powerful marketing.
• Do not underprice; the right customers will value your work.
• Stay lean and iterate quickly; measure what matters most.
• Be disciplined; balancing features, marketing, and content is hard, but it pays off.

Closing Thoughts

Bannerbear shows how a solo founder can take a small, scrappy idea and grow it into a profitable, sustainable business. The playbook is not glamorous: build what you know, share openly, and keep showing up. But as Jon Yongfook’s journey proves, it works.