thelifeofrishi

i’m working on Canva like app for automated image/pdf/video via API, also connects with n8n, zapier, make, airtable, pipedream etc.

it’s https://orshot.com

it’s being used by agencies and teams to automate pdf invoice/reports, instagram/tiktok/pinterest posts etc.

basically design a template, autofill the layers with your data from anywhere and generate visual content for marketing at scale

hehe

Hi, I'm a solo-founder, went full-time in April on solving two problems with Orshot(bootstrapped):

1: Help non-designers design beautiful visuals(Canva solves this nicely)

2: Also help same users and teams/agencies to automate their designs and produce visual content at scale(easily), via Rest API/Integrations etc. This is something that Canva doesn't solve, and I'm pretty sure this is the future of designs and templates

Currently Orshot handles images and pdfs easily, you design a template in a Canva-like editor(some more work is needed to make it more useful for non-designers)

For each template you get a Rest API with template ID, which you can use in your backend to generate images/pdfs from your data. There are 10+ integrations and I'm looking to work on more(Hubspot, Shopify etc.)

If you give it a try, I would love your feedback, because I'm only as good as the bounds of my thoughts. Help me cover a bigger space :)

PS: I know Canva has API in enterprise plan, I want to bring it to consumers and small teams

Built this quick extension to create tweet screenshots

Features: - one-click tweet screenshots for free - no signup required - shows original tweet if you screenshot a reply tweet - shows quoted tweet - one-click download/copy to clipboard

How to use: - after installing the extension, you'll start seeing a camera icon on bottom-right of each tweet - all you need to do is click on that Camera icon() and it'll give you the tweet screenshot right away

being a designer, i share my experiments in UI and design on Twitter and some other sites. to present designs, i used to beautify them in Figma. this was a routine process where i would open Figma, create a gradient background for my design, add shadows, rounded corners etc. and export the image in correct size, so if i’m to share it on Dribbble I would export it in Dribbble size, for Twitter the size is different

this whole process used to take like 20 to 30 minutes easily. so i built an app https://pika.style to do all of that for me quickly

it started as a hobby, open-source and free to use project which i was building in public on my twitter(@thelifeofrishi). in a matter of time i started getting DMs on Twitter for feature requests

i remember a founder of a company wanted to have a certain feature, we discussed that and in the end i asked whether he would be happy paying for that feature, to which he said yes. i added the requested feature in 2 days and got back to him, he instantly purchased annual subscription and started using Pika. that was in February, 2022

fast forward to today, almost an year later, Pika now has 150+ paid users and makes $1,500+ in revenue each month. i’ve turned it from just a screenshot beautifying tool to a tool to design very customisable mockups and images. you can use it to generate images for your website, app, code, tweet etc. and to keep it more accessible, it has a free tier which doesn’t even require registration to use

i’ve also added a plan just for students and teachers so they can use Pika’s paid fearures at a very discounted subscription fee

if you’re a programmer, marketer, designer, no coder or work in the tech industry, i think you’ll definitely find Pika useful :)

I think you're right. There needs to be an option to try the app with some demo image. I've noted and will add it :)

I missed it, will keep it in mind. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the suggestions, I've updated the repo with paid features and license :)

Thanks Dmytro, and welcome to HN :)

:)

Thanks Fayaz :)

Hola hackers! I’m Rishi(https://twitter.com/thelifeofrishi) and I’ve been building Pika(https://pika.style), a screenshot beautifier app to quickly generate images for marketing, blog posts, social sharing and more.

Pika is a result of me spending too much time in designing screenshots in Figma, choosing the gradients, shadows, backgrounds etc. I thought I could quicken this process through a simple app.

With Pika, you can:

- add background gradient/images to your screenshot

- add browser frame/wrapper

- add rounded corners

- add overlay text

- add custom watermark

- control padding

How is Pika fast:

Whenever you change the settings, Pika saves those settings locally on your device. So when you come back again, Pika already has your last set of preferred settings and you won’t need to tweak much. On top of that, Pika has shortcuts: Ctrl/Cmd+V to paste image to canvas, Ctrl/Cmd+S to save output image and Ctrl/Cmd+C to copy output image. With these shortcuts and pre-saved settings, you can literally generate a beautiful screenshot in just 4 keystrokes.

Pika is absolutely free to use and requires no signup. There’s a Pro plan for those who want to customise screenshots even more. Pika is also an open-source app, code can be found here(https://github.com/rishimohan/pika).

Some stats:

- Pika has generated over 15000 screenshots in last month

- Pika already has $90 MRR and have been receiving lots of feature requests

- On Github, Pika has over 200 stars and 40 forks

Let me know what you think of Pika :)

Thanks, appreciate it :)

Signed in users use user's keys so each user has it's own rate-limit separate from the app context.

And yes, you're right, there are rate-limits for endpoints in Twitter API, I've optimized the app to be in rate-limits and still be able to make the most of it.

For ex. I recently added Messages in Kizie. Twitter API's Messages endpoint has a rate-limit of 15 requests per 15 min window. Really really low for something like messages. On top of that each request returns at most 50 messages(not conversations).

How Kizie handles it is it makes 3 requests on initial load and then checks for new messages every 2.5 minutes. It was kinda tricky to do all of it reliably and I'm still trying optimise it more for better experience :)

That's exactly how I fixed the rate-limit issue on landing page :)

Right now nothing, but there will be engagement insights based on this data

I know it's not as good as nitter(didn't know about it)

But I'm trying :), I see nitter has 22 contributors, Kizie has only one person working, give me some time I'll make it as better as I can

Since I haven't dived fully into it I am not sure how it'll turn out, my idea with engagement context is to show users what's working for them and whats' not so they know how to do it

This will include maths and lots of data processing but it'll eventually be there in Kizie at some point

Yes, solo founder.

I am also a designer :), all custom components based on Tailwind

Actually it was an issue where I was making API request for the homepage for rendering some tweets, huge traffic caused the reach to limit, bad decision, it's fixed now :)

I was prepared for that even before I started work on Kizie, nothing to lose :)

That's one of the best things I've heard about Kizie :)

uBlock and some other adblockers might block twitter URLs, I had issue with 1Blocker app as well which I discussed with their team and is now fixed.

Firefox strict privacy setting completely blocks twitter CDN urls, no way to fix it I suppose.

Thanks for taking the extra effort, appreciated :)

Makes sense :)

You're absolutely right :)

The thought of creating Kizie iOS app has crossed my mind like 23 times :D, someday

Yeah that's a known issue and happens on any app that used Twitter API when Firefox enhanced protection is enabled, it would work on balanced settings.

Kizie doesn't edit your existing tweets, even Twitter doesn't/can't do that :D

Kizie just makes it easier to discard/redo your last sent tweet within 10 seconds of posting it, before implementing I thought it wouldn't be useful but I've personally used it plenty of times. It does help, try it out and let me know maybe

Thanks!

Kizie isn't intending to compete with any other app, it's intended to be user's Twitter app with flawless experience, if there's any feature that could possibly uplift your Twitter experience then I want to add that in Kizie, possibly on multiple platforms too :)

I'm an indie dev. who built this on weekends, 200 active visitors gets me excited, taking users data and selling it to someone doesn't :)