Rishi's Newsletter: Pika crosses $250 MRR, Arc browser and Framer Motion experiments
Hi 👋, this is Rishi!
This is my first newsletter on Revue and I’m very excited about it. To introduce you with it, this newsletter is going to be about two things:
Updates of my personal ventures, side-projects, experiments and learnings
All the cool and aesthetic apps, designs and tech
The newsletter doesn’t have a a strict and specific frequency. Though I’m planning to write it each month.
Updates
Pika.style did pretty nice in June as compared to previous months. Here are some key metrics from June:
Close to $250 MRR
Pageviews → 89.4K
Sessions → 54.4K
Screenshots exported → 21K 🤯 (most in one month)
I’m hoping it gets couple more paid users before June ends, so I can actually say it has crossed $250 MRR 😅(because churns). Overall June was pretty good, more users converted and there was also temporary rise in traffic, probably due to Pika being mentioned in a viral Instagram reel. Also it would be great to see it cross 100K page views this month, seems unlikely though.
A lot of new features and improvements were added: custom presets, new browser frames, canvas sizes, gradients, background images and more. Pika is now also powering the screenshot design tool in tweethunter.io.
Goals for July:
I want to try email marketing, right now there’s no email marketing as such, maybe I’ll setup a proper changelog channel which will be sent to users in their email, this will help them be updated about new features
I also want to setup roadmap for Pika, I’ve been asked about it and it’s time I do it. I’m looking at Github’s board thingy to host the roadmap, but not settled on it yet. If you know any service for hosting roadmaps, please share by replying to this email ⬇️
For monetising, I’ve been reaching out some relevant sites which can sponsor Pika, maybe through ads. This will help Pika running and support the free features
I haven’t worked on Kizie.co lately, my other project which I had started in 2020. Kizie aims to be a beautiful, clean and feature-full Twitter client. There were couple minor changes and bug fixes in Kizie this month but that was it. I’ve been planning to rewrite Kizie with adding value in mind, but waiting for somethings to sort out. Kizie is doing okay-ish in terms of traffic and paid subscriptions, but it’s not much yet 🤓
Experiments
I recently switched to Arc, a new browser and I didn’t like its icon. I feel it’s too funky for a beautiful app. So I created my own version of the icon, you can get it for free here. More about the browser below ↓
I’ve also been playing with Framer motion for animations. I feel writing animations with Framer motion is easy and few lines.
Twitter Write / Web
Twitter announced a full-fledged blogging platform as a part Twitter. I think it’s a great addition to already great social platform. I wonder though what can be built on top of it from a developer’s perspective 🤔
Arc / macOS app
Let’s get you started with telling you about this amazing new browser called Arc from The Browser Company. I’ve recently tweeted a thread about how good this browser looks and that it also comes with great utility features like music control, ad-blocking(even audio ads in Spotify), built-in screenshot taking, notes and diagrams(easel).
Arc is currently invite only, you can request for an invite.
A tweet to like
A quote to like
A GIF to like
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That’s it for June. If you liked the read you can follow me on Twitter for more frequent of such updates.