Jon Yongfook Cockle was the Asian Head of Digital Product Design at Aviva, the British insurance giant, earning $20,000 a month in Singapore. In July 2018, he quit. He had saved over $200,000 in cash and liquidable assets. Enough runway for two years without changing his lifestyle.
A year later, in July 2019, Jon started the "12 Startups in 12 Months" challenge, inspired by Pieter Levels. He built and launched seven products in seven months: Zipsell, Promomatic, Montage, and others. Combined MRR across all of them: $0. He stopped due to burnout. But the challenge taught him something invaluable: how to time-box and ship fast.
During his e-commerce work, Jon had experienced the pain of manually creating marketing visuals every day. He built PreviewMojo, a tool that auto-generated Open Graph images. It got to about $400 MRR by late 2019, but the niche was too small. In January 2020, he rebranded it as Bannerbear with a broader positioning: an API for automated image and video generation. The fresh name and yellow bear branding sparked more interest, though sales were still slow.
Jon made a critical early mistake: he priced Bannerbear at $9 per month. At that price, he would need 2,000+ customers to match reasonable revenue. Worse, the $9 customers were his most demanding. "The person paying you $9 a month is often the person who will send you 15 support tickets a day." He raised the entry price to $49 when he repositioned around business automation use cases.
The growth engine was content marketing. Jon followed a strict 50/50 framework: one week building features, the next week writing blog posts and promoting. He published technical tutorials on ffmpeg, Puppeteer, and webhooks. He built free tools like certificate generators that ranked on Google and drove trial signups. He wrote comparison pages against competitors. "The more documentation I wrote, the more conversions I got."
His "Journey to $10K MRR" blog post hit the Hacker News front page and went viral. He shared all revenue numbers publicly on Bannerbear's /open page. This transparency built trust and visibility in the indie hacker community. By January 2021, he had crossed $10K MRR.
Bannerbear has hit $10K MRR! For many SaaS bootstrappers, this is a major milestone!
Growth continued steadily. Jon hired two customer support specialists and a content writer in late 2021 (receiving 1,000+ applications for the support role). By the end of 2022, MRR had doubled to $27K. By July 2023, it hit $50K. In September 2025, Bannerbear officially crossed $1M ARR.
The tech stack is deliberately boring: Ruby on Rails 6, jQuery, PostgreSQL, hosted on Heroku. No React, no Vue, no Node. Jon chose Rails because he had used it on and off for ten years. "Other products might use some fancy new tech, but we use boring and battle-tested Ruby on Rails. You're safe with us." Even at $1M ARR, the stack hasn't changed. Four people total run the entire operation, fully remote from Singapore.
Bannerbear got to $1 million ARR on Rails 6 and jQuery. You don't need to be on the cutting edge of tech all the time.