From Side Hustles to $6.2K MRR: How Rishi Mohan Built Orshot

Meet Rishi Mohan.

Rishi is 32, from India and living in Berlin, Germany.

Rishi has worked as a designer and front-end engineer for almost ten years, at places like Instahyre, BigBinary and Borg. The whole time he was quietly building his own things on the side. Eventually one of them worked, and he went all in on building for himself.

These days he runs his company DaSkrad on his own and splits his focus between Pika and Orshot.

In the following Rishi will share how he built and grew Orshot.

A big part of how I even got here is building in public on X.

I've been sharing what I make over at @thelifeofrishi for years, posting revenue numbers, features, wins and failures, and that habit changed my life more than once. It's honestly what got me my job in Berlin and my move from India in the first place, because people in the startup world already knew my work from X. The same audience is what later gave Pika its first users, and then Orshot.

Orshot is an AI-driven content automation platform for marketing and product teams.

The core idea is simple: you design a template once, mark the parts you want to change as dynamic (text, images, videos, whatever), and then generate as many versions of it as you need, as images, PDFs or videos.

You can trigger it through a REST API if you're a developer, or through no-code tools like Zapier, Make and n8n if you're not.

If you've already built something in Canva or Figma you can import it instead of redoing the work, and you can auto-publish whatever you generate to 15+ social platforms.

People use it for things like personalised social posts, ad creatives at scale, certificates, invoices and dynamic banners. It started as a plain image-generation API and has slowly grown into a full platform.

I started building Orshot in February 2025. Around that time, it felt like a nudge to go full on building my own stuff without the cushion of a full-time job. So I put everything into Orshot, registered DaSkrad and launched it the same month.

The thing that helped me a lot in the beginning was that I wasn't really starting from scratch. I'd already spent a few years building Pika, my screenshots and mockups tool, which had crossed $100k in earnings just from SEO, building in public (examples below) and word of mouth.

Examples of me posting about Orshot on X:

So when Orshot went live, a lot of those same people, mostly developers and indie makers who already followed me from years of building in public, were the first ones to try it. A good chunk of my initial customers came from the Pika crowd.

The rest came slowly, the boring way.

I write long comparison posts (the most converting and highest traffic intent), how-to guides and tool roundups that slowly climb the rankings and keep bringing in people who are actively looking for something like Orshot.

I also build small free tools that pull people in such as Instant Polaroid, and word of mouth does the rest.

None of it is fast, but it stacks up.

Orshot is basically a factory for marketing visuals. You build a template once, then it churns out images, PDFs, and videos through an API and you pay by the usage.

That means the bill tracks how much you actually use the tool. It's free to start, $39 a month once you're serious, $349 if you're really cranking (I’d love to see that happen more!) and if you blow past your credits the renders keep running (not get blocked since they are important to our customers), and you just get billed for the extra (cheaper per credit the bigger your plan).

In addition to API based rendering, it also enables people to automate their social posts at $12/mo per social account and that basically makes it a fit all-in-one package for our ICP.

The hardest part for me has been marketing, mostly figuring out who exactly to go after.

Orshot works just as well for a solo dev as it does for an agency with thousands of clients, and that range makes targeting tricky.

I used to think a strong Product Hunt launch or a viral post would be the thing that changed everything, but for me those never really moved the needle in a lasting way. The spikes come and go in a day.

What actually built this was patient, unglamorous SEO, showing up consistently while building in public, and slowly earning a bit of a reputation, so that's where I put my energy now.

And the biggest of all, talking to customers and iterating over their feedback is non-negotiable.

It took roughly a year to get past 100 customers, and some of them are names I'm pretty proud of, like Incubeta and Brendi (they handle marketing for over 5,000 restaurants).

Right now Orshot is still just me, doing around 5,000 users, about $6.2K MRR and 760k+ renders so far. I keep all the numbers public on orshot.com/open.

It started as a simple API and has slowly turned into a proper content automation platform.

If you’re interested you can see the visitor stats for the Orshot website below.