Startup #2 - Promomatic
TL;DR, Today I am launching Promomatic
Update: this product was acquired in 2019
It's been quite a challenge to launch this month as I enjoyed most of the month in Bali and, if I'm honest with myself, slacked off a bit in the middle. Bali is such a beautiful place to be that it's hard to stay productive! Also, this startup was a lot more technical than my first…
The customer problem
Whenever launching a new product or an update to an existing product, there are always promotional graphics that need to be made. At a minimum, if you're building a mobile app you'll need to create "assets" for the app store.
The best ones have a caption along with a screenshot.
They generally look something like this:
In order to make something like that, you'll need to be a designer and have special software.
These days though, that's not all you need to make. You'll probably also want to make promo assets for Product Hunt, for an email you'll send to a mailing list, for blog hero and open graph images - and more! All of this work is really tedious, especially when you've just spent ages working up towards a launch and now you realise there's so much more work to do just to publicise your app.
There must be a better way!
The solution
Promomatic helps you easily generate app store assets in various sizes - with no special software or design skills needed!
Simply upload your app screenshots and you're good to go. There are thousands of possible template combinations once you start playing with the customizable device frames, backgrounds, fonts and more.
Right now it supports generation of iOS App Store, Google Play Store and Product Hunt-friendly image sizes, like this:
The business model
I'm keeping things really simple with this MVP launch. There's no subscriptions or variable pricing. It's just a flat fee of $2 per design that you want to render and download.
The technology
Amazon S3 is used as the file store.
Bulma is used as the css framework.
Ruby on Rails is used as the web application framework.
Stripe is used as the payment processor.
Next steps
If you have used Promomatic and have feedback, do let me know via Twitter! I'd also be interested in hearing of other potential use-cases you might have for Promomatic that aren't currently supported.
I'm really interested in the automatic / assisted design space. Helping people do design faster or helping people with no design skills to create great-looking designs. It's quite likely I'll continue exploring this space in my 12 startups challenge.
Long term, it would be super interesting to apply to ML to this space!
I don't update this personal blog very often these days, I'm busy working on my business Bannerbear 🐻