We made $1,052,000 in 2018 selling UI Tools. Here is what we learned.
Five years ago, my co-founders and I started Creative Tim, a business selling UI tools and templates for web developers. In 2018, we crossed $1 million in annual revenue for the first time. Getting to this point has been an incredible journey with many lessons learned along the way.
In this post, I‘ll share an inside look at how we‘ve grown the business and the most valuable insights we‘ve picked up. Whether you‘re running your own online business or looking to start one, I think you‘ll find some useful nuggets below. Let‘s dive in!
Start with a Standout Product
The foundation of any successful business is having a high-quality product that solves a real need for customers. For us, that means delivering UI tools with top-notch design, solid code, and excellent documentation.
In the early days, we spent countless hours obsessing over every detail to make our templates pixel-perfect and easy to implement. This turned out to be one of the best investments we made. Superior quality became a key differentiator for us in a crowded market.
It‘s also enabled us to charge premium prices compared to competitors. By my estimation, the average Creative Tim template sells for around 2-3X the price of a typical template on other marketplaces. And customers are happy to pay it because they know they‘re getting the best.
Great products lead to happy customers, strong word-of-mouth and more sales. Don‘t underestimate the power of quality. It‘s brought us a long way.
Pursue Partnerships Relentlessly
Partnerships have been another huge growth driver over the years. But landing the right ones is often a lengthy process that requires patience and persistence.
One of our biggest breakthroughs was partnering with the creators of Bootstrap back in 2017. As luck would have it, they were fans of our work and agreed to feature us as one of a small handful of companies on their official themes marketplace.
This single partnership likely doubled our revenue that year. It gave us a stamp of approval from one of the most trusted names in front-end development.
But it didn‘t happen overnight. In fact, it took months of conversations to pull everything together. There were times I wasn‘t sure if it would pan out.
The lesson: Don‘t be afraid to aim high and partner with the big players in your space. Even if you get ignored at first, keep at it. The upside of a great partnership can be game-changing.
Another example is our partnership with Themeisle in the WordPress space. By letting them handle the technical challenges of porting our designs to themes, we‘ve been able to reach a massive new audience. Our themes have racked up 100,000+ installs and are consistently among the most popular on the platform.
Learn from the Best
We‘re big believers in studying great companies and applying their lessons to our own business. Over the years, we‘ve taken inspiration from exceptional brands like Apple, Stripe, Airbnb and Invision.
One of our most successful product lines was directly inspired by Invision‘s beloved "Now" UI kit. We took the core design principles and built them into a suite of developer templates and themes.
Customers instantly resonated with the familiar aesthetic and the numbers showed it. Our "Now UI Kit" has been one of our best sellers for several years running, with thousands of copies sold.
Of course, we always put our own unique spin on things. But there‘s no need to reinvent the wheel. Learn from the best and then find ways to build on their success.
Double Down on Growth Channels
Like many startups, a lot of our initial traction came from being featured on Product Hunt. We launched several of our early templates there and saw 500-1500 upvotes each time.
So we decided to double down and make Product Hunt a core part of every product launch. We‘ve developed a playbook that includes multiple strategies:
- Creating a standalone landing page that‘s optimized for conversions
- Teasing the launch to our social followers and email list in advance
- Launching at the 12:01 AM PST "reset" to maximize visibility that day
- Offering exclusive discounts to PH members
- Following up with everyone who upvotes and engaging in the comments
Using this approach, our "Now UI Kit" ended up getting over 1500 upvotes and 20,000 visitors. We‘ll definitely keep riding the Product Hunt wave for future launches.
Another repeatable growth tactic has been trending on Github. A while back, we open-sourced some of our most popular templates, which led to thousands of developers discovering us for the first time.
We took a page from the Froala playbook by optimizing our repos for visibility. This included refining the docs, adding compelling graphics, and of course, emailing our list to announce the new repos.
The result? We trended in the top 5 on Github for several days, beating out projects from Google and Microsoft. And got a nice write-up on Hacker News to boot. The buzz led to thousands of new stars, followers and email subscribers.
Differentiate from Competitors
Web development templates are an uber-competitive market with tons of players. But we‘ve managed to carve out a lucrative niche by zagging where others have zigged.
For example, instead of pumping out hundreds of bloated, generic themes, we‘ve focused on releasing a small number of premium templates. Every component is carefully designed and coded for performance.
While competitors like Envato churn out 30+ new templates per week to keep up with trends, we‘ve averaged less than one per month. And we‘ve still grown faster than nearly all of them.
We‘ve also prioritized building our own distribution channels vs. being at the mercy of third-party marketplaces. By selling exclusively through our own site, we‘re able to control the customer experience and improve our margins.
These are just a couple ways we‘ve differentiated over time. The key is to intimately understand your market and then make strategic choices to set yourself apart.
Give as Much as You Get
Finally, we‘ve learned that giving back to the community is one of the most satisfying and effective ways to drive long-term growth. Some of the ways we pay it forward:
- Sponsoring hackathons, workshops, and meetups
- Releasing free educational content like tutorials and case studies
- Contributing financially to open source projects we rely on
- Speaking at conferences to share what we‘ve learned
None of these directly generate revenue for us. But they‘re all part of a valuable cycle of helping and teaching others.
We recently published a tutorial on how to use React with Webpack and Material Design that got over 3800 claps on Medium. Not only did that help establish our expertise, but I‘m sure it led to sales down the road as well.
To date, Creative Tim has sponsored over 150 events worldwide. And this year, we gave back over $70,000 to OSS tools through Open Collective. Generosity is a growth strategy all its own.
The Journey Continues…
We‘re still very much in growth mode with big plans for the future. In addition to pumping out more top-notch UI assets, we‘re expanding into promising new areas:
- Backend: We recently launched our first NodeJS and Laravel kits to help developers go full-stack with Creative Tim
- Mobile: React Native is another focus, with several bestselling app templates already released
- Design Assets: Our new Ira Design site offers high-quality illustrations for developers and designers to level up their projects
I‘m really excited about the potential for each of these to drive the next phase of growth. We‘ll keep pushing ourselves to deliver outstanding products that make developers‘ lives easier.
If you take only one thing away from this post, let it be this: Building a successful business is a marathon, not a sprint. Stay focused on providing real value to customers and be willing to experiment, learn, and evolve.
I hope this glimpse behind the scenes has given you some ideas for your own entrepreneurial journey. Feel free to reach out on Twitter if you‘d like to jam more. Happy building!