🪴 Pranav Mandhare

Shall I build a File Conversion tool?

3 min read

I was thinking of building something really quick like a single day build. And hence looking for an idea which has existing variants proving that it’s a market fit.

This does not have to be a startup, it’s just a product capitalising on a specific consumer behaviour.

I explored the File Conversion Product market hunting for such opportunity, the biggest TAM comes from,

  1. Conversions related to PDF: something into PDF or PDF into something → This is such a big market that there are niche websites like ilovepdf dot com which get 100 million unique monthly visitors.
  2. General all purpose conversions: websites like cloud convert which offer all types of conversions have 30 million monthly visitors
  3. Niche products for images: like png2jpg dot com have over million monthly visitors. Outliers exist like iloveimg has 30 million monthly visits.

Observations

  1. The paid conversion funnel is only 0.02%
  2. More than 60% traffic comes from organic google searches - very SEO dependant
  3. 70% visitors are on desktop and remaining quarter on mobile phones
  4. India contributes at-least 15% traffic on all these websites, but the payment collection methods does not include UPI (cloud convert only allows card payments while it gets 4 million monthly Indian visitors)
  5. No major site focuses on security or on device conversions: Vert sh is free opensource AGPL licensed product that allows conversions but only has 100k in monthly traffic. Which means SEO plays a big role for such product.
  6. No provider promoted quality and speed as a differentiator. Might be that these sites are getting a lot of one time users - more likely that those who convert in batches do it for professional reasons and hence care above quality and speed

Opportunities

If I have to build something here, I would have to tackle the niche of: Security, Speed and Quality. The User Persona might only be the professionals users doing bulk conversions - they might want APIs or auto-Queuing and Notification features.

Downside: Heavy SEO dependent, SEO itself is a long term game. In that case a different GTM like: Chrome Extension, Mobile Apps, LLM Tools seem like better approaches to explore.

Success Stories

Jake Manger started building a desktop file conversion app in Feb 2025 - howtoconvert dot co - he is doing 5k MRR as per his X profile.

His GTM,

  1. Reddit
  2. Posts like these targeting a specific community: https://www.production-expert.com/production-expert-1/we-found-this-cool-machine-based-audio-file-converter

Decision

I am gonna skip this idea for now - maybe I’ll return later exploring the other GTM approaches.

Graph View