He Skipped the App and Sold the Toolkit Instead, Now at $60K a Month

For years, Anton Lavrenov built graphic design applications for other companies while maintaining Konva.js, a popular open-source 2D canvas library, on the side. Eventually he asked himself a simple question: why was he building these tools for someone else, when he could build the underlying toolkit and let other companies build on top of it?

That question became Polotno, a JavaScript SDK that lets companies embed a white-label design editor directly into their own products, along with an API for generating images and videos at scale. Today it brings in $60,000 a month, with a team of three, more than 200 paying customers, and roughly 2 million editor loads every month.

The consumer design tool market was already crowded, and Lavrenov recognized the marketing barrier there was close to insurmountable for a small team. But he noticed something else: companies still needed editors for their own audiences, and almost none of them wanted to build one from scratch.

Building an SDK instead of a consumer app flipped the problem. Instead of competing for end users, Polotno let other companies embed the editor into products that already had those users. He never had to win the attention war at all.

Polotno started in February 2020 as an evening and weekend project, built on a stack Lavrenov already knew deeply: React, Konva.js, Mobx-state-tree, and Blueprint.js. The public website and documentation did not go live until September of that year.

The first paying customer did not arrive until November 2020, nine months after the project began, paying $186 a month. A second customer took another six months to show up. Lavrenov is candid about how slow that stretch felt: "I worked almost every evening, and the result was only a couple hundred dollars per month."

Lavrenov did not leave his full-time job until May 2023, three years after starting Polotno, once its income had matched his salary for long enough to trust it. Keeping the job during those early years removed any pressure to force fast revenue.

That patience let him validate real market demand instead of chasing it. A founder racing to replace their income in six months would likely have given up well before the second customer ever showed up.

Lavrenov's years maintaining Konva.js were not separate from Polotno's growth, they were the foundation of it. The open-source community around that library became a natural, low-cost pipeline of exactly the kind of developers who would need an embeddable editor.

He also treated documentation as a growth channel rather than an afterthought. Questions answered on GitHub and Discord compounded into permanent, searchable assets that kept attracting developers through search long after the original answer was posted.

A free sandbox product, Polotno Studio, built on top of the same SDK, reached 20,000 upvotes on Reddit. It cost nothing to give away, demonstrated exactly what the paid SDK could do, and built brand awareness that no amount of direct advertising could have matched at that budget.

Lavrenov's advice centers on using what you already know rather than chasing a fresh idea with no head start. His unfair advantage was ten years of canvas work, not a flash of inspiration.

Polotno now supports enterprise customers with custom contracts, security reviews, compliance requirements, liability terms, and source code licensing, on top of the same core SDK that started as a side project five years ago.

You can follow Anton Lavrenov's work directly at polotno.com or on X.

If this was useful, pass it on to someone who keeps rebuilding the same tool for every client instead of selling the tool itself. Sometimes the real business was never the app, it was the thing underneath it.