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add: pika interview #93

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---
title: 'Pika.style'
description: 'Image Generation SaaS making $3.5K MRR'
---

# Pika

## 1. What's your startups name, what does it do, how long have you been working on it and (optional) your MRR?
[Pika](https://pika.style), it's a Image generation API and tool with tons of templates to generate images from

## 2. What's your name and what were you doing before?
I'm [Rishi Mohan](https://twitter.com/thelifeofrishi). I was working as a designer and frontend engineer before I started SaaS products

## 3. How did you come up with your startup and it's name?
I built to reduce time and make it super easy to design beautiful and appealing screenshots and mockups for my own use cases. Regarding domain name, it was a random name that was short and easy to remember

## 4. Are you a programmer, if so, how did you learn and how long did it take?
Yes, I'm a Design engineer. I learnt it mostly by trial and error and by following tutorials and articles. It took me couple years to confidently write frontend and backend tech. But learning is an ever going process so there's no finish point

## 5. How long did it take you to build a mvp, did you do any validation?
7 days for building and soft launching on Twitter. The soft launch helped gain good traction and also validated the idea

## 6. What was your launch like, what did you do, was it a success?
After couple of weeks of soft launch on Twitter, I launched Pika on ProductHunt. The launch received 600+ upvotes and Pika ranked #2 that day. I received a lot of feedback and appreciate, which I definitely see as a successful launch

## 7. How long did it take to get your first customer?
3 days. A customer DMed for a feature request which he was willing to pay, I implemented that feature in 3 days and he subscribed to annual paid plan

## 8. What's your top marketing methods and how can others start doing them?
Tweeting and building in public is what worked for me best. I got my initial set of customers from Twitter and then word of mouth. It's also very easy to do to just update your users about new features on Twitter, doing this not only markets your product but you also get feedback from users

## 9. Whats the top 5 tools you use to run your startup?
- [Pirsch](https://el.pika.style/analytics) for analytics
- [Posthog](https://posthog.com/) for session recordings
- [Dub.co](https://dub.co/) for link tracking
- [Screen.studio](https://el.pika.style/screen-studio) for recording videos
- [Render](https://render.com/) for hosting Pika API

## 10. What would you do differently if starting over?
I would've launched [Pika's API for Image Generation](https://pika.style/image-generation-api) earlier and made it the primary service coupled with the screenshot editor and templates. That wouldn't made it one single product with simple pricing which would've been easier to promote. Next would be to focus more on content and marketing