How My Friends and I Grew Our Side Project Into a $17,000/Month Business
As a full-stack developer, I‘ve worked on all kinds of web projects, from simple marketing sites to complex SaaS platforms. One thing I noticed across almost every project was how much time my team spent rebuilding the same basic UI components and layouts. Things like navigation bars, form elements, modals, etc.
Sure there were UI frameworks like Bootstrap out there, but none of them quite met our standards for design quality and customization. We always ended up overriding a bunch of CSS and wrangling with JS plugins to get the exact look and functionality the client wanted.
So in 2014, I had an idea: what if we built our own library of professionally designed, plug-and-play UI components and templates? A "Swiss Army Knife" for developers that we could drop into any project to turbocharge the frontend. No more reinventing the wheel or fighting with third-party code.
My friends Alex and David, both fellow full-stack devs, loved the concept. So we decided to build it as a side project on nights and weekends. We called it the "Get Shit Done Kit" (GSDKit for short).
Engineering The Initial Product
From a technical standpoint, we leveraged our deep experience with the latest frontend technologies and best practices:
- Sass for CSS preprocessing, variables, mixins, etc. Clean, DRY stylesheets are a must.
- Flexbox & CSS Grid for modern, responsive layouts without the need for clunky frameworks
- BEM methodology for well-structured, maintainable CSS
- jQuery sparingly for simple DOM manipulation (this was before the rise of React)
- Gulp for an automated build process, compiling and minifying assets, etc.
- Git for version control and coordinating code changes as a remote team
- npm to manage dependencies and libraries
We also established some core design principles the UI kit would embody:
- Minimal, modern aesthetics
- Obsessive attention to detail in the design and code
- Easy to customize and integrate into any site or app
- Solve 80% of common UI use cases so devs can focus on the other 20%
In terms of visual design, we took heavy inspiration from the clean, flat aesthetics of Swiss Style. Lots of whitespace, simple geometric forms, bold typography. The kind of timeless look that wouldn‘t go out of style with the next design trend.
I can‘t tell you how many nights we stayed up late tweaking pixels, arguing over color schemes, and refactoring Sass mixins until everything was perfect. But that‘s just the level of craftsmanship we held ourselves to.
After about 3 months of hard work, we had built the essential components – buttons, form elements, navbars, cards, modals, etc. We also designed 60+ example layout templates demonstrating how to combine the components into full pages.
We felt we had an MVP that could provide real value to developers and save them tons of time and headaches. Now we needed to start getting it in front of people.
Finding Our First 10,000 Users
To be honest, marketing and promotion didn‘t come naturally to us as a group of introverted geeks who preferred to stay behind the scenes coding. But we knew that to turn GSDKit into a real business, we‘d have to get outside our comfort zones.
Our first traction came from simply sharing links to the UI kit on design/dev forums like Designer News, Reddit Web Dev and HackerNews. These were communities we already participated in, so it was an easy way to get some eyeballs.
To our amazement, our post on Designer News hit #1 within hours and drove over 11K unique visitors to our site over the next few days. It was the top post for the whole week! On Reddit and HN we saw similar buzz, making it to the top 10 on the frontend and web dev subreddits.
We realized we had struck a chord. Developers from all over were checking out GSDKit and leaving glowing feedback. Many told us how it was going to save them hours of tedious frontend grunt work.
Shortly after the initial forum posts, we submitted GSDKit to Product Hunt, the popular site for surfacing new tech products and startups. In our wildest dreams we didn‘t imagine it would get featured on the homepage. But that‘s exactly what happened, netting us another 5K user signups in one day.
Between these big spikes and the normal day-to-day signups trickling in from organic search, word-of-mouth, etc., we hit 10,000 users within the first 2 months of launching. Most were using the free version, but some had already upgraded to the $19 premium version for access to source Sass files, Sketch files, and premium support.
Content Marketing & SEO
Riding the high of the launch buzz, we knew the next challenge was to keep the momentum going and build a sustainable source of new signups for the long term. Our strategy was content marketing – create genuinely useful resources for frontend developers and let them naturally lead people to discover GSDKit.
We started publishing in-depth tutorials and guides on our blog teaching frontend concepts and techniques, with GSDKit woven in as part of the examples. Things like:
- "How to Build a Responsive Navbar With Flexbox"
- "Creating a Full Page Animated Slider With GSDKit"
- "5 Common UI Patterns Every Web Dev Should Know"
Since these topics matched common search keywords, our posts started ranking well in Google and driving steady organic traffic. We also shared them on social media and in our email newsletter to get the word out to our existing audience.
The content strategy became a flywheel – the more we published, the more inbound links and SEO authority we accumulated, leading to more organic traffic and signups.
Sponsorships & Partnerships
As GSDKit started to gain traction and recognition in the dev community, we pursued sponsorships and partnerships as another growth channel.
We started sponsoring hackathons at universities and tech conferences, providing GSDKit for free to all participants. We did this at over 20 hackathons globally, from Barcelona to Boston to Bangalore. Developers loved having a bag of ready-made UI components to help them build their projects faster.
Some of the hackathon projects using GSDKit were incredibly inspiring:
- A real-time sign language translator app
- An AR app for visualizing construction blueprints on site
- A blockchain carbon credit trading marketplace
Sponsoring these events got our brand in front of thousands of developers, generated awesome case studies and testimonials, and drove more product awareness.
We also struck up partnerships with other dev tools and services that complemented GSDKit. For example, we teamed up with the folks behind the popular Bootstrap Material Design library, doing joint content and integrating GSDKit templates with their components. Their community loved it and we saw a big bump in traffic and signups.
Optimizing Pricing & Packaging
As we grew, we kept a close eye on our revenue metrics and experimented with different pricing and packaging to optimize monetization.
Initially we had a super simple model – a free version of GSDKit, and a $19 upgrade to "GSDKit Pro" with source files and premium support. It was easy for users to understand and captured revenue from the power users who needed those extra assets.
We started to notice though that some users would download literally every single new free UI kit we released (we put out a lot!). We had unintentionally trained them to expect an endless stream of freebies.
So we decided to flip the script and launch an all-access "Mega Bundle" that included ALL current and future premium UI kits, for a single annual price of $249. To our surprise, sales took off! Turns out many of our users wanted the simplicity and value of getting everything for one price. The Mega Bundle quickly became our best selling SKU.
The Power of User Feedback
Through all these growth experiments and initiatives, the one constant was that we never stopped listening to our users. We read every tweet, forum comment, and support email. Positive or negative, their input shaped our product decisions.
Some of our most successful UI kits came directly from user requests. For example, we had a dev write in saying:
"Hey guys, I love GSDKit but I‘m working on an app geared toward lawyers and accountants. I really need some more ‘corporate‘ looking UI elements. Any chance you could put something like that together?"
So we created a UI kit specifically with business/corporate use cases in mind, and it became one of our most popular. We even named it Pitch Pro as a nod to the user who suggested it!
Over and over, we saw how being genuinely engaged with the people using our products and shaping the roadmap around their needs was the ultimate growth "hack". No amount of advertising or content can make up for a product that doesn‘t serve the customer.
Scaling Pains As a Small Team
I want to acknowledge that it wasn‘t all smooth sailing to $17K MRR. We had some real challenges scaling the business as a scrappy team of 3 with no outside funding.
On the technical side, we had to get smart about optimizing site performance as traffic grew. This meant:
- Ruthlessly auditing and cutting back on unnecessary JS/CSS
- Implementing caching at the server and CDN level
- Lazy loading images and non-critical resources
- Minifying and compression all assets
- Upgrading to beefier hosting infrastructure
We also invested heavily in SEO, knowing it was key to our content-driven growth model. I became religious about page speed, structured data, internal linking, and all the other ranking factors. We even hired an SEO consultant to help dial in our strategy.
Another challenge was providing responsive customer support as our user base grew. In the early days it was easy to personally answer every question. But as we scaled to thousands of users, we needed to streamline things.
We set up a knowledge base with FAQs and product docs so users could help themselves. We also started using a support ticket system to triage and assign conversations, rather than everyone jumping into the shared inbox.
These systems allowed us to keep providing the speedy, personal support we were known for, even as the business grew. And trust me, developers appreciate quick answers and fixes to their technical issues!
You Can Do It Too
Looking back on the journey from humble side project to generating over $200K per year, I‘m amazed and grateful. It took a lot of hard work, late nights, and trial and error. But it was so worth it to build something that helps developers create better software, faster.
The key lessons I hope other indies and bootstrappers can take away are:
- Build something you would actually use yourself, that solves a real pain point.
- Engage with your users early and often. Their feedback is your ultimate guide.
- Double down on what‘s working, cut what‘s not. Be relentless about measuring and optimizing.
- Focus on creating real value, not just chasing the latest trends or "growth hacks".
- It won‘t be easy but it‘s absolutely possible. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
If we could go from coding UI elements in coffee shops to profitably serving Google and Uber, I truly believe you can do the same in your niche.
The indie hacker dream is real and within reach. You just have to be willing to learn, work hard, and keep pushing forward when things get tough.
So what are you waiting for? Get out there and start building something awesome! And feel free to hit me up if you ever want to chat shop. I‘m always down to help a fellow dev-turned-founder.
Happy hacking!
Further reading and resources:
- The Lean Startup – the bible of validated learning and MVP development. A must-read.
- Scaling CSS – great course on writing modular, maintainable CSS at scale
- Bootstrapping Indie Products – awesome guide on funding and growing a product biz without outside capital
- Marketing for Developers – no-BS breakdown of how to get your product in front of the right people