Fillyr started because of rage bait. A friend came to me about rage-baiting our coursemate. There was this "face of the week" thing and we didn't want to pay for it. The fee was literally ₦500. Five hundred naira. But chill we are not broke, just felt like the ₦500 was too much. Like man, it could buy garri, sugar and some groundnut. You know what I mean na. Wait... were we actually that broke??? 😭
Okay okay let's be serious.
So instead of paying, I sat down to build a tool that could take a flyer template and fill it with dynamic data. Should have taken two days. Took four. The first two days were actual progress. The last two were me fighting Fabric.js. That library was placing images at the edge of the canvas and only showing a fraction of it. I'm sitting there debugging render offsets like a madman before I finally said forget this, time to migrate.
Now here's where I have to pour one out for the fallen. 🕯️
Fable (rest in peace, banned by the US government) saved my life here. I pointed it at the file locations for a project I built that dealt heavily with PDF annotations and canvas rendering. "Ecadoc." What an annoying project that was, but all that canvas pain paid off because I fed Fable the context and told it to migrate the whole thing from Fabric.js to Konva. Clean swap. Fabric was out, Konva was in, everything just worked.
We'll talk about Ecadoc another day. That one needs its own post and probably therapy. 😂
No auth, no plan, rough as hell. A canvas, some text fields, export to image. Done.
The problem was it actually worked. And once something works, it's very hard to leave it alone.
The part nobody tells you about solo products
When you're building for a client, the brief exists. Someone already decided what the thing should do. Your job is execution. There's clarity in that, even when the client is stressing your life.
When you're building your own thing? You are the brief. You're also the one who has to question it, throw it out, rewrite it at 1am, and still ship something by morning. Nobody to pass the decision to. Every call is on you.
I spent more time deciding what Fillyr shouldn't do than what it should. The features that died in my head before touching code are way more than the features that shipped. Bulk CSV fill, yes eventually, but not now. Multiple canvas sizes, yes, but only when someone actually asks. Animation export, no. Collaboration, absolutely not. Every "not yet" was discipline.
The trap with solo products is that building feels like progress. It's not always. Sometimes you're just moving complexity around, making the thing harder to explain without making it more useful.
What the free tier taught me
I capped free users at 5 flyers. Not because of server cost (negligible at that scale) but because I needed a ceiling that gave people a reason to eventually upgrade.
Here's what I didn't expect though: the free tier told me everything about who was actually using the product.
People were making flyers for church announcements. Small business promos. Events happening this weekend. Nobody was using it for some elaborate brand campaign. They needed something fast, something that looked okay, something they could hand to someone without first explaining Canva.
That's a completely different user than I had in my head. I was imagining small agencies, freelancers, people with design taste who wanted to save time. The actual user was someone who had never opened a design tool in their life and just needed a flyer by Saturday 😭
That changed how I thought about everything. The value isn't the canvas. The value is that you don't have to think.
Shipping before you're ready
Fillyr launched before I had a Pro tier. Before I had a proper landing page. Before I even had more than one template. It's still completely free right now, no watermark, nothing. I just wanted people to use it first.
I launched it because waiting for it to be "ready" is how products die in private.
There's an alternate universe where I spend three more months polishing UI, writing onboarding flows, integrating billing. And by the time I launch, I've built something for a user I imagined six months ago. Market has moved. Assumptions never tested. Real time sunk into something that might be solving the wrong problem entirely.
Shipping early is uncomfortable. You see every rough edge. You know exactly what's missing. But feedback from a real person doing a real task in five minutes is worth more than a month of building alone.
The first person who used Fillyr and came back the next day to make another flyer? That told me more than any amount of "user research" would have. 🫡
What's next
Pro tier. Paystack inline. Watermark on free exports. More flyers on Pro, CSV bulk fill for people who need to generate the same flyer for fifty vendors.
Right now you can try it at fillyr.app and it's up on Product Hunt too.
After that I don't know yet. I have opinions about where it could go but I've learned to hold them loosely until the product tells me what it actually needs to become.
That's the thing about shipping something real. It stops being your idea and starts being its own thing. You just tend it. 🌱