Jim Raptis Turned Repetitive Design Work into Small Products

Jim Raptis is a Greece-based developer who built the graphic pattern tool MagicPattern and the screenshot editing tool BrandBird. In an Indie Bites interview published on April 4, 2022, the two products were described as making about $1,500 each and about $3,000 combined in monthly recurring revenue (MRR). These are the two products' recurring revenue at the time, and they do not mean current revenue or his personal net profit.

From a Funded Startup to a Business He Owns Himself

Raptis was not a founder who had made small services on his own from the start. He worked on both UI design and frontend development, and he had co-founded VisualEyes, an AI-based design analysis service. By his own account he built the frontend foundation at that company and managed the product team, so when he started an independent product he already had hands-on experience on both the design and implementation sides.

One trigger for switching to an independent business was the difficulty of the funding process. According to a 2021 Product Hunt interview, his previous startup was seeking additional funding when it ran into COVID-19 and a shortage of money, and the co-founders stopped raising funds and began spending time on their own side projects. Raptis said he was more interested in building products himself than in the pressure to grow metrics in a short time.

The experience of turning small products into cash also supported his independence. He sold three tools, Wireframer, DesignValley, and CopyPalette, together for $5,000, and in his own retrospective he said that money extended the period he could try the business to about 6 months. He sold small outputs to secure time to build the next product.

MagicPattern: The First Payment and Recurring Revenue Were Different

The starting point for MagicPattern was the hassle of creating geometric patterns by hand. While watching the pattern graphics in a Shopify Reunite event video, Raptis thought that even a complex-looking image could be generated in code if it were broken into small components. In a 2021 interview he said he built an early prototype that worked in about two days. He automated the single task of placing and combining patterns.

But building a working program did not immediately confirm that it was a business. He considered giving up the project before launch or releasing it as open source, but he decided to put it on Product Hunt within a week and see whether people would pay. On launch day in August 2020 he got about 50 lifetime-deal buyers. The actual payments became the basis for continuing development.

It took time between the early sales and stable subscription income. In a post published in April 2021, Raptis said MagicPattern's MRR reached $1,000 about 8 months after launch. Getting money for the first time by selling lifetime deals and creating revenue that came in repeatedly every month were different stages. He saw the latter as the important point at which he could cover minimum living costs with his product.

MagicPattern later expanded from geometric patterns into a suite of tools for making repeating patterns and various forms of gradients. Users can adjust colors and shapes to create background graphics and, depending on the tool, take the result out as an image, SVG, or CSS. That way the same output can be used in social media images and also used in a website implementation. It is a tool that reduces production time for designers and a tool that gives developers visual elements without drawing them by hand.

The customer base was not limited to professional designers. Raptis said he could offer more value to people who need good graphics but struggle to make them than to people who can do design themselves. In fact, he said that on Dribbble, a site for sharing design work, posts reached 50,000 views but did not convert many customers. The people who showed interest in attractive outputs and the people who paid to reduce the work of producing them were not necessarily the same.

BrandBird: Turning His Own Promotional Work into a Product

BrandBird also came out of work he repeated himself. While posting design and SaaS content on Twitter, Raptis was spending too much time making the images to attach to his posts. He judged that if it was a hassle even for a professional designer like himself, it would be harder for non-designers. According to a 2022 IdeaMensch interview, it was first a tool to help create graphics for Twitter and later expanded into an editor used on other social media too.

In a Product Hunt interview he said he built the early version of BrandBird in a day. The product ranked 2nd for the day on Product Hunt on May 9, 2021, and that same month it also received a $5,000 Maker Grant. This grant has to be distinguished from revenue earned by selling the product to customers. Fast building and launching became the starting point for getting an external response, but that in itself did not mean recurring revenue was complete.

BrandBird's core task is turning a screenshot that already exists into an image suitable for promotion. By putting in a screenshot and applying a background, shadow, device frame, three-dimensional tilt, callout labels, and the like, a graphic to post is created. It gathers the manipulations needed to present a screenshot attractively. The value it sells is closer to the convenience of finishing a repeated editing process quickly.

Features for repeated use were added too. In a team feature announcement published in January 2022, it was designed so that members could share templates, watermarks, and brand settings, and the team owner would manage payment. The price given at the time was $15 per user per month or $120 per year. He widened the scope of use from decorating an image once to the work of continuously producing content for the same brand.

An important sales base for BrandBird was Raptis's own online following. In a 2024 interview he said about 60% of BrandBird's revenue came from his own online readers and followers. The people who read about development progress and SaaS design tips were also potential customers who needed to make images to promote their products. It mattered that the topic of his content and the customers of his product overlapped.

Free users' outputs carried a BrandBird watermark. When a user posted a finished image on social media, the structure let other people recognize the tool that had made it. In a 2021 interview Raptis described this as a main strategy for using word of mouth. A user's normal use of the product became an opportunity to show the product to the next user.

In MagicPattern he also used the approach of making free tools that led to the paid product. Raptis wrote on his blog that after he released a CSS background pattern tool in October 2020, that launch brought about 20,000 unique visitors and 10 MagicPattern sales. The free tool was an entrance that brought in potential customers in the same field. He explained the purpose of the experiment as using his development ability for marketing.

Building Several Products Without Leaving Post-Launch Work Undone

The habit Raptis fixed along the way was being absorbed only in feature development. He recalled that early on he thought users would come if he just made a good product, and that he spent a lot of time on unnecessary features and technical refactoring. Later he began acquiring customers by investing in public building, content for search traffic, and email marketing. After customers came in, the flow continued of improving the product by reflecting their feedback.

He set boundaries of time for moving between several products. In a 2021 interview he said he divided the day into two-hour blocks and in each block handled work for only one product. In 2022 he said his productivity was best when he did three or four things a day and worked about up to eight hours. Running several products did not mean handling all of their work at the same time.

His own disposition also played a part in multi-product operation. Raptis said that focusing on just one product makes him lose interest easily, and that switching work between products helps him stay interested and get new ideas. So his way is better seen as a case of finding a work structure sustainable for his own disposition than as a growth formula that applies to every founder.

The business later expanded to SuperMotion, which turns images into short videos. A June 2024 interview introduced the performance of the three-product portfolio as "$6,500 MRR," but in the same piece it explained that SuperMotion is a one-time purchase model. Because the basis for the combined figure is not clear, this number should not be carried over as the pure subscription revenue of the two products BrandBird and MagicPattern.

What stands out in Raptis's case is that a product made small and a business ended small are different. MagicPattern and BrandBird started from narrow tasks, but the process of validating payment, gathering customers, and adding the features needed for repeated use continued. His achievement lies less in the speed of building a product in a day or two than in the fact that he kept refining the reasons to use and the reasons to buy and ran several products.