How Mark Landed His First 100 Users in Just 14 Days

Meet Mark Jivko.

Mark is currently based in Tenerife (the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands).

He has been a software engineer for the past 17+ years and has led teams as CTO for more than a decade. He has accumulated more than 30k hours of work on personal and open-sourced projects.

Over the past few years he built and sold multiple small SaaS products including a game engine for WordPress and an automated Google indexing service called GoIndex. Actually Mark has previously shared the GoIndex startup story in Fake Mayo.

These days Mark is putting most of his energy into Draw on Screen, an app to elevate your video presentations with screen annotation. More on that below.

As I was working on my latest SaaS I thought it would be a good idea to document my progress with a dev log series on YouTube. I didn’t want to spend too much time editing, so I thought I’d just use some screen annotation tool to present difficult or interesting portions of my code. In these AI-flooded times, I’m betting people prefer authenticity over polish.

So I browsed around for a tool that would allow me to annotate my screen. After more than a week of research I found a couple of paid options, and a few open-sourced projects. But none of them had what I needed. They all looked like they were copying each other both in terms of user experience, and features.

I needed a screen annotation tool that would simply get out of the way. One that wouldn’t force me to remember any weird shortcuts. A tool that was both completely transparent, and really intuitive to use. And I needed a tool that would give me a webcam overlay in real time. It’s so frustrating to explain something for 5 minutes only to find out that your webcam was masking the things you were pointing at this whole time.

I decided to build what would turn out to be Draw on Screen.

Draw on Screen is a free app, and I my opinion the best screen annotation tool ever created 🙂

I started working on Draw on Screen on January 15th 2026, and released it less than one month later.

Maybe some would say “one month is too much” or “I can vibe-code that in 10 minutes”.
But the reality is that in order to make a product that feels invisible yet powerful you need a lot more than a few nice prompts.

I iterated on this product relentlessly. I use it daily to try to discover remaining product and UX issues. And let me tell you. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

This simple product has 3 projects under the hood:

Remember, kids - lines of code are a very bad metric! Your favorite LLM can vomit a lot more than that in an hour, I’m sure. But every single one of those lines was written by a human based on first-principles reasoning. So maybe there’s some insight there, or maybe not. You decide.

The tool got to 100 users in less than 2 weeks - most of them on the free plan, and most without ads. I only launched on BetaList and all current growth is based on word-of-mouth.

But here’s the thing. I made this tool to scratch my own itch. To allow me to create better videos for my YouTube channel as I’m documenting my progress on my current SaaS. Even though my focus was never to turn this tool into a business, it needs to prove itself.

That’s my philosophy. Anyone can make something and say “it’s good, trust me”. But I’ll believe it’s good only when the market tells me it’s good. And the market chooses a winner with sales. If the product sells itself, then it’s good. Otherwise, it’s not - no matter how much you praise it.

I don’t watch the numbers right now. I don’t care how many visitors it gets or how many downloads because this tool was never the end goal, and it needs to prove itself. This tool is a means to an end. If it helps me make better videos, then it serves its purpose. If it helps other people (so it’s objectively good), then my bank account will reflect that. No need to hit the refresh button or obsess about the stats for that.

I strongly believe that products, much like art, take a life of their own. Once you create something and you release it into the world, it’s no longer yours. And no matter how much you try to prop it up - if the world rejects it, then it’s done. I’m not saying “if you build it, they will come”. I’m not naive. But what I’m saying is that you don’t need to push too hard.

So I’m not watching the stats, but I have not moved away from the product either. I use it daily. And when something bothers me, I fix it. No friction, no board of directors, no “yada-yada”. Git push - then the CI/CD pipeline takes over -, then it’s live.

If you want to try it out use this discount code: SAVE10. It’s 10% off all purchases.

You’ll find Mark on these platforms:

Btw, Mark is also working on Uindow, a tool for UI testing and web automation. He is building it because he really dislikes the fact that Selenium is basically dead at this point.

Uindow is source-available on GitHub.