I'm pretty sure I've built the perfect side project
For a while, I've wanted to write down the story of how I came up with the idea for OG Kit (my SaaS for adding dynamic OG images to your website) and turned it into what I'm pretty sure is the perfect SaaS side project.
OG Kit is roughly half a year old, and with its 40 paying customers, it's doing about $250 in monthly recurring revenue. And while that doesn't sound like much, I'm convinced I'm still onto something here. It's some of the most fun I've had building a product for as long as I can remember. Let's dive into it.
OG Kit the product
OG Kit the product is pretty clever (enough that people have already taken inspiration from it several times). In short, I came up with an idea for how to keep the designs for your Open Graph images in an HTML template next to the rest of the page content and let OG Kit capture it as an image.
Here's the launch video I put out last fall:
(Yeah, I know, pretty clever.)
I clearly remember having the idea while being on a road trip with my family (as the driver) and I just couldn't stop thinking about it. When everyone was asleep in the cabin at night, I pulled out my laptop and started tinkering. It was the kind of idea where I really didn't know if it was going to work, like if I had missed something obvious, but it totally worked.
My last side project before OG Kit started as a VC-backed startup that didn't end up working out as a venture-backed business (Reform), and for a while after realizing that, I turned it into a side project while working for Tailwind Labs on the side. But I quickly realized that a form builder was the worst kind of business to run as a side project. It requires 100% uptime, has lots of spikes, and it's just a complex product with tons of features, integrations, etc. But the spikes were the worst part. Like, people will sign up and send out some crazy long, complicated form to tens of thousands of people RIGHT as you sit down to have dinner with your family.
So in the back of my mind I knew I wasn't going to do that again.
Which leads me to OG Kit:
- The entire product is a single API endpoint
- It's hosting, but it's not critical (like, it sucks if your OG images don't work, but it's not the end of the world most likely + if they've already been generated, they'll be cached forever)
- Spikes don't matter, images are generated once and cached forever
And then there's one more thing that I've realized recently that's more specific to me: I love developer tools and almost everything I've ever worked on (except Reform which was actually pretty popular with developers, I wonder why) is in the developer tool space.
But Claude could just build this for me! Yes. But there's some annoying hosting and orchestration related things when it comes to stuff like Puppeteer, rendering HTML, fonts, etc. So absolutely you could, but I think most people would rather use a cheap service like OG Kit to do it for them (there's even a free plan). At least enough will.
One question I asked myself early on when I had the idea for OG Kit was: If I go to bed and OG Kit goes down right after I put away my phone, am I OK with not knowing until the next morning? And the answer was yes (fair warning if you plan on using OG Kit). So in theory, OG Kit could have some downtime. But in reality, existing images would still work because they are heavily cached with Cloudflare, so it would really only apply to new images.
OG Kit the business
I gave it away at the beginning: OG Kit is "only" doing $250 in MRR and has about 40 paying customers. While that's not a ton, OG Kit doesn't cause me any stress or anxiety. It doesn't stress me out to go to a family thing for the day without my laptop and there are weeks and months where I don't touch it... and it's fine! Actually it's awesome.
Let's dive into some of the business stuff.
So far, the most difficult challenge has been to figure out how the pricing should work. I don't think I've fully nailed it yet, but I'm pretty happy with the model overall. This is what the pricing looks like currently:
It's hard to explain, but OG Kit is really difficult to price. The expensive thing is image generations. Once the image is generated, it's cached using Cloudflare (love Cloudflare!), so it's pretty easy to offer unlimited traffic. But the challenge is that image generations happen on the fly by default. So if an OG image is never requested, we never generate it. So even though you might have 10,000 pages, you might only ever generate 87 OG images. So should I charge based on the 10,000 or the 87? It's tricky, because even though I'm technically only hosting 87 images, you still want me to be ready to serve one of the 9913 other images at any moment in time.
The unlock here was to realize OG Kit is not an OG image generation service. It's an OG image hosting service. The generation is an implementation detail, the hosting is the real service. You set up OG Kit on your site and no longer need to think about how your OG images get served. With this realization in mind, I ended up pricing based on how many pages you use OG Kit on. Now, I don't actually know until an image is generated, so currently I look at how many unique pages I've served an image for within the past year and that's how many pages someone is using OG Kit on... I expect that to evolve over time, but it's good enough for now.
And being a hosting business is really awesome! Hosting has low churn and generally feels more AI proof than a lot of SaaS. We'll see about that, but for now it feels like a good mindset.
Related to this, I'm only offering an annual plan. For side projects, I'm a big fan of just charging annually. You pull forward a bunch of revenue and it's just simpler. It also forces a bit more commitment from early customers.
Now, will OG Kit work out as a business? I don't know, but even as just a side project, I wouldn't be surprised if it paid for my mortgage in a year or two. Frankly it's not been hard to get the first 40 customers, and I think if I pushed harder, OG Kit could actually be a nice little one-person business. I already have a lot of other things going on, so I'm very happy with it just being a side project that grows slowly, but if I had to and went all in, I think I could make it grow much faster. Put differently, if all my other sources of income went away, I'd try going all in on OG Kit for a while and see how far I could push it. This is what they call "side project insurance" my friends! (I think Aaron Francis calls it that at least?)
Finally, the thing that I've most gotten right about OG Kit is to accept it's a side project. When I launched the redesigned OG Kit website in December, I said that I wanted OG Kit to feel more like an open source project where I am the maintainer rather than a full-blown SaaS where I'm the founder. SaaS is heavy, projects are lightweight. This mindset is helping me a lot when I try to fit OG Kit into my life. Sometimes I fall into the trap and start to set up processes and shit for how I should do this and that with OG Kit, but then I try to get back into this mindset of me as the OG Kit maintainer, not a startup founder hustling to make it.
OG Kit is the perfect playground for me. It's a fun technical product to build. It lets me test out all the new cool AI tools, and it even makes a bit of money too. Hopefully more over time. Making money is part of the fun too, don't get me wrong. We love MRR. But OG Kit is lightweight, and I love it. It's something I can do for a long time, it's not burning me out. In fact, it's the opposite! It's something fun and challenging to work on when I have some extra time.
Congratulations to me lol! 🥳
Thanks for reading this far. Now tell a friend about OG Kit.
— Peter
