Jon Yongfook

Jon Yongfook is a designer-turned-programmer based in Singapore and one of the most transparent solo SaaS founders on the internet. After years of startups that never stuck, including an earlier SaaS he ran while living as a digital nomad, and a stint in a corporate digital role, he quit in 2018 to rebuild his shipping habit with a 12 startups in 12 months challenge.

The challenge stopped at product number seven because one idea started to work: an API for auto-generating marketing images, which became Bannerbear. The product lets businesses generate social media visuals, banners and videos from templates via API, no-code integrations and Zapier. Jon documented its slow early climb in detail, showing that it took more than a year to reach $10K MRR and then accelerated as positioning sharpened around marketing automation.

Bannerbear has since grown to about $81K MRR while remaining bootstrapped and run by a very small team. Jon shares MRR charts, pricing experiments and lessons on X and the Bannerbear blog, and recently launched Redacted, a set of free in-browser tools for redacting sensitive data.