For a while, when Jon Yongfook explained what he was building, he almost always added: “Uh… do you know what Open Graph images are?”

Blank faces, often.

The idea itself was simple: the preview image beside a title when a page is shared on social networks. His product, Previewmojo, auto-generated those images. The catch was that most people never ranked the job high enough to pay for—many did not know the protocol, and fewer treated it as urgent. Pitching became a mini-class; when the class failed, the conversation died. He later said those blank looks felt like nails hammered into a startup coffin.

Product Hunt was noisy at launch. After the noise, he was left in an awkward spot: everyone praised the tech demo; almost no one had a clean reason to pay.

This is not a growth ledger for an image tool. It follows one line—a designer-programmer of about twenty years, obsessed with making design happen automatically, shifting from “I can ship many cool things fast” to “I do one thing that hurts often enough, and that I can say in plain speech.”

To understand those blank faces, go back to how he spread himself thin.

After quitting, he trusted speed as the way out

After leaving a full-time job, Jon burned nearly a year of savings trying Pieter Levels’ “12 startups in 12 months.” The pace fit him: he could build, he liked speed, he liked logging progress in public. Products shipped one after another, as if to prove he could live by craft outside a company.

He did not finish twelve. An Indie Hackers write-up says seven products in seven months, burnout, no revenue. The challenge stopped halfway. Speed was trained. Focus was not.

The missing focus had a shape. Under the Mojosaas brand he wanted several tools, each with its own marketing and blog, all documented in public. Over the holidays he had to admit: he was not superhuman. Energy dripped across Mojosaas, Votemojo, and Previewmojo—updates everywhere, depth nowhere. In his Pivot post, the line is almost a self-roast: try to do everything, and you achieve nothing.

He is not someone who preaches focus first. He thins himself out, hurts enough, then pulls back.

Then Previewmojo: cool, but not often painful

Of the seven, Previewmojo was the one he was most likely to love: a page in, an Open Graph preview out—a small magic trick of design automation. It launched around November 2019. That was the space that interested him.

Those blank faces at the opening of this story belong here.

After the first month’s heat, he wrote of “horror”: nearly committing the cardinal sin of solving a problem that does not exist. Next sentence he softens: maybe too hard on himself; the pain is real, just not big enough. Unless you run a large site, you do not make those images every day; many people do not even know the protocol. Cool enough for a demo. Not enough for a subscription.

Customers yanked him out of self-regard: “I don’t need Open Graph—can it make other sizes?” The direction was off, not the craft. Startup class says niche down; he was already down to one size and one protocol. Narrow did not become product-market fit. It locked him in a room few people re-enter weekly to pay—and forced him to teach terminology before he could pitch.

Early users still gave feedback. It did not prove “Open Graph only” would win. It proved automatic image generation was worth keeping. The next cut should not be another brand. It should be: attach the same capability to a bigger, more frequent pain—and say it in one human sentence.

Bannerbear: say it plainly, then pull focus in

In January 2020 he launched Bannerbear as Previewmojo’s successor. No Christmas, no New Year break—a solid month on product and marketing site. He described himself as proud, excited, a bit nervous.

On the product, he widened: Instagram Stories, Pinterest Pins, square posts, and Open Graph. Plugged into his own site, multiple sizes appeared at once—“I can ship visuals” felt better than explaining a protocol. The pitch changed. He could finally say: my app designs banners for you. No quiz on Open Graph. The blank faces from the opening land here: not that he could not build, but that he had framed the product as a room only the initiated could enter.

On the business, he narrowed: Previewmojo forwarded to Bannerbear, the multi-product illusion dropped, and he publicly committed to doing one thing well in 2020. The rename had some of his temper—more playful branding, and a new name to stop straddling several boats.

In the weeks before the pivot he estimated marketing site and app took about half his time each. That was not a later-packaged methodology. It was a builder who falls into feature holes, forced to admit: cool alone neither explains nor converts.

After betting the API, he said work became enjoyable

Early Bannerbear still felt like “social images for sites.” In Journey to $10k MRR he writes of going all-in on the API—template editor, REST—and leaving a Shopify app store with little traction. Buyers shifted from people who occasionally needed previews to people who needed volume and workflow embeds.

He wrote something private: from then on, work became truly enjoyable; the north star finally felt touchable. For someone who had run seven zero-revenue experiments, “enjoyable” is not fluff. It is a signal—he had stopped using parallel products to dodge choice, and stopped using unnecessary narrowness to protect a demo.

Only later came the widely copied rhythm: roughly half coding, half tweets, posts, docs; Zapier handing the same capability to non-coders. Public milestones show a wobble after the API repositioning, then a climb to about $10K MRR; later tellings cite figures near $20K and $50K. Numbers move. The human tone holds: willing to write “I panicked,” and also “maybe I was too hard on myself.”