Adam Pietrasiak is a self-taught coder from Krakow, Poland who started building websites at age 11. Before Screen Studio, he spent years building Timpler, a TODO and habits app. It maintained a 4.7+ rating but retention dropped to near zero after two months. He described the experience as devastating: "I lost literally years creating it without a solid plan, listening to the users or having any idea about making money out of it."
After Timpler, Adam took a two-year break from creating products. When he came back, he set strict rules. The next product had to have a small MVP scope, had to make money in an obvious way, and had to save users time. No more passion projects that went nowhere.
The spark came while working at startups. They constantly needed demo videos for landing pages, changelogs, and help docs. Outsourcing was expensive, and the UI changed so fast that videos became outdated within months. Then one day Adam visited Stripe's Twitter profile and saw their polished product videos. He started analyzing them frame by frame, asking himself: "How much of this can be automated without sacrificing quality?"
I wrote the first Screen Studio line of code on September 13, 2022. I hope it'll allow many of you to promote your digital content easily and in a way you'll be proud of. I also hope it'll be a success for me, whatever it will mean.
He grabbed the domain screen.studio and started building. Development took roughly two months. Adam tweeted daily progress with the #buildinpublic hashtag, initially getting 0-2 likes per tweet. Then one day, a well-known CEO liked one of his tweets and it went viral. Before the product was even ready, he put up a payment page with a banner reading "This website is not ready yet" and got 3 sales from people who just wanted to support the project.
On November 9, 2022, Screen Studio launched on Product Hunt. It earned 849 upvotes and 170 comments. The first full month of sales (December 2022) brought in $30,000. On January 4, 2023, Adam posted that it was the best sales day ever, surpassing even the Product Hunt launch day. Five months in: 5,000+ licenses sold, 80%+ one-month retention, 30K monthly website visitors.
Today was the best Screen Studio sales day ever (excluding the 50% off promo day in December). Even on product hunt release day, it did not have such revenue. I often think the market will get saturated and it'll get way worse eventually, but then I think the world is quite big
The core innovation is automatic cinematic zoom and motion. Screen Studio records your full screen at full resolution, then in post-processing, tracks mouse position and click events to generate smooth zoom and pan keyframes automatically. Every click triggers a cinematic zoom toward the click location. Raw mouse movements are smoothed. Motion blur is applied. Beautiful backgrounds are added. What previously required After Effects-level skill happens with one click.
The product is its own marketing. Every video made with Screen Studio serves as a demo of the tool's capabilities. When users post their polished recordings on social media, viewers ask "what did you use to make this?" That organic loop drove the vast majority of growth. Adam identified a direct correlation: tweet frequency and popularity drove sales. Twitter was the primary channel.
By nine months after launch, Screen Studio had 8,000 customers. The team grew to three people: Adam (all product development), Maciej Gawinek (marketing and sales), and Dawid Wilewski (customer success). The entire product is built with Electron, React, and TypeScript. Adam chose Electron over native Swift because he had a decade of JavaScript experience. "It's way easier in Electron to make slow and ugly apps. But that doesn't mean you can't create an amazing app with great UX in Electron."