We made $1,052,000 in 2018 selling UI Tools. Here is what we learned.
By: Alexandru Paduraru
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Startup, Web Design, Web Development, Tech

It sounds cliché, but having a great product is crucial. I said this many times, and we’ve been following this rule since the beginning of Creative Tim. For us, a Great Product = Great Design + Great Customer Support + Great User Experience.

If you want to learn more about how we started everything 5 years ago, from a Starbucks, please check this article: How my friends and I grew our side project into a $17.000/month business. That article was written exactly 2 years ago, and I would recommend you to read it before proceeding to this one so you can better understand the whole journey.

A lot of the strategies that we will present here can be applied to other online businesses, and you will see an example of how somebody created a successful startup based on the other article that we published.

Why do we share “all these secrets”?

Everything that we built was based on free information and free resources that were found on the web and I think it is in our responsibility to give back. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who want to start a business or want to scale one, but they don’t know how to acquire new users without using a paid channel. We want to help these people so they can apply some of the techniques and spend less time doing experiments.

In this case study, I will present how we grew monthly revenue ~5x, from $17.000 to $106.000 while being in a very crowded market (Themes and Templates). Here is an overview of the article:

Partnership strategies (The moment you quit is the moment you lose) If you want to be great, stay near great companies Growth Hacking: from trending on Github’s front page to continuous launches on Product Hunt How different we are from our competitors and why this worked for us Give Back: Education, Sponsorships, and Tutorials Can people apply our strategies to different businesses? What’s next?

Let’s begin! :-)

Image from giphy: https://giphy.com/gifs/chris-pratt-jimmy-kimmel-rVbAzUUSUC6dO

1. Partnership strategies

If you’ve read the other article, you know that after some trial and error in different fields, from giving design components to our users and some growth hacking, we finally found the Product Market Fit. We had around 226.000 visits made by 77.000 people, and we were grossing $22.000 from about 400 paying customers. While we continued to launch new products, we realized that there is a limited amount of money that those people can spend.

That means that if you have 10 premium products with an average value of $55 there will be 400 people who will buy. But if you push 10 more premium products those 400 people will still buy only 1 product as they need 1 product for their project, not 2 or 3. It’s the same thing as going to a supermarket with $10 to buy 1 bottle of milk, it doesn’t matter if the supermarket brings in 25 more types of milk, you will not spend $30 to buy 3 bottles of milk just because there is a lot of milk there.

It was painful for us to find this, as we were thinking like “ahh…the business it’s pretty simple, we launch more, we make more”. So the next thing that we had to do, while we were launching new products, was to find new partners that wanted to join us and help with the delivery of our free and paid products to a bigger audience.

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars.”

We started to look for websites that had 3–10–20 or even 100x the traffic that we had. Since we based all our business on the most popular framework for front end, Bootstrap, we started looking for all the websites that were related to Bootstrap. After a lot of emails and requests and rejection we though it was cool and crazy enough to try to do a partnership with the creators of Bootstrap. Most of the time people think like this: “There were a lot of people who ignored us, I will not ask them because they are too big and they will ignore us. It’s better to stay in my corner.”

So on 7 June 2017, we contacted the creators of Bootstrap and presented them with what we were doing, what we wanted to achieve with the Bootstrap Templates, and what was our mission.

We’ve got pretty shocked when we got their response. Why?

It was a positive response saying that something would happen in the future and they would come back with some ideas. We were thrilled that they considered our business. There were basically thousands of other companies/people doing Bootstrap Templates. They actually came back. Usually, 99% of people will not respond to your proposals.

Later that year, they contacted us and told us that they would launch an official Bootstrap Marketplace and they wanted to have us in the first batch of 5–7 companies.

The most important part here wasn’t the fact that we would start making more money and would deliver to more people with this partnership. It was the fact that we began to talk directly with the creators of Bootstrap and we got feedback about how we should improve and work on top of Bootstrap. That’s way more valuable than money and came as another validation for us, that we were providing high-quality products.

“The creators of a framework are the most qualified to give you the best feedback about how you should work with their product.”

Next partnership: WordPress. During the years we knew that WordPress is powering around 30% of all the websites around the world, but we never did anything on this side. We have in our target range developers and web agencies who know how to code. When you do something for WordPress you know that it is possible to have somebody who is not technical who will try to “1-Click install” your product and it will have problems. Then they’ll come to your support being angry about his experience.

Since we never did anything for WordPress but wanted to see our design on WordPress themes we were looking for a solid partner in this field. We found ThemeIsle, the company who built one of the most the popular WordPress themes, Zerif. They are from the same country as we are so we started to talk about ways of collaborating.

We realized that a great combo would be to migrate our most popular UI Kit, Material Kit, to WordPress. In this way, we created Hestia, a WordPress Theme that was using our design.

Hestia was a great success. It was downloaded hundred of thousands of times and currently it has 100,000+ active installs. More, it is in the top 10 most popular WordPress themes of all time. We also made another product, Orfeo, which was built on top of Paper Kit 2 and is in the top 50 most popular themes for WordPress. Having this partner was really important for us as we entered a new world that we couldn’t do on our own.

The next partnership we created was something that we’ve been working on for around two years. Unfortunately, it’s an exclusive partnership, so we cannot give details about who is behind this. I will show you why it took us two years to build it. If you look at the first email that I sent you will notice some mistakes that I made:

I only talked about my company and me, and I never told him what he could achieve from this partnership (exposure, money, experience, etc.) I didn’t give any details, like “we expect to have 10.000 downloads from your source” or “we think your users will download 2x more products because of the high quality” etc. I didn’t tell anything about what we could do for him to help in his business

So it took me 26 emails over 21 months to understand that I had to change my messages to give something to a possible partner before getting something from it. Sometimes you have to learn it the hard way. 🤷🏽‍♂️

In the end, our partner was pleased with the new collaboration, and I’m feeling good that I continued to “spam him” and never gave up.

“We learnt an important lesson here, that you have to give something before you get something!”

2. If you want to be great, stay close to great companies

We always had the philosophy of learning and getting inspired by other more prominent companies that have tens of years of experience in a field. In the past, we’ve got inspiration from Apple, Rolls Royce, Heroku, Invision, Airbnb, Stripe, Dribbble, etc. I think that if you learn from these companies, you can create a rock-solid foundation. Then when you have all the skills and knowledge, you can start playing with them and create something new and unique, as Pablo Picasso said.

We wrote more about how we build a product and how is the strategy and implementation in this article: “The Anatomy of a Bootstrap Dashboard.”

Looking for sources of inspiration and then following InVision for many years, we decided to take inspiration from one of their most popular UI Kits called Now UI, which was launched in 2015 and was available only for designers. We wanted to use it as the core foundation for a new UI Kit made for developers.

We’ve got Invision’s approval, and we were allowed to build the coded version for developers on 8 November 2016. After 4–5 months of researching, planning based on Invision’s principles, and developing, we released the HTML version based on Bootstrap.

The result and the way our developers received the new product was incredibly good. The design was great because Invision made it, and the code was very well structured and followed the Bootstrap 4 principles. That was a great combo in terms of Design + Code + Documentation. Later we found out that the success of this product was because we took one of the best UI Kits that was available and made it better by coming with the coded version and new elements/pages.

“Take the best that exists and make it better.” — Henry Royce (co-founder of Rolls Royce)

3. Growth Hacking: from continuous launches on Product Hunt to trending on Github’s front page or features in our country press

Since the initial boost for creative-tim.com came from Product Hunt, we decided to continue to launch products there. The difference between launching in 2014–2015 and launching in 2018 was pretty big as the community grew a lot and there are a lot of new products launches daily. That makes it really hard to stand out of the crowd.

The strategy of launching on Product Hunt became really complicated, and we work for around one week before doing an actual post there. Everything needs to be set and a lot of people have to be involved. Some things that you have to think of:

You need to prepare all the images, product descriptions, links, and social profiles before actually starting the post. That will save you a lot of time. Here we usually do a draft of the future post and then discuss internally with the whole team the text and images. You have to make sure your website will not break as there will be a boost in traffic. We usually send people to static generated content, so fewer server resources are needed. Try to post at the beginning of the Week (Monday) around 10:15 AM GMT+2, that is 00:15 AM San Francisco time, basically when the Product Hunt Servers start a new day. In this way, you make sure you have 24hours full exposure and get as many upvotes as you can. If you already have a base of people that are using your product, make sure you send them an email to let them know that you are on Product Hunt and if they enjoyed using the product they can upvote it. Make sure you let your social fans (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) know that you are on Product Hunt. If you are posting a paid product, make sure you create some coupons that can be used by the Product Hunt community. They love them :D

Using these steps we successfully launched some products that were well received by the community:

While we were looking for new ways of showing our products to a bigger audience, we found this article written by Diana Neculai from Froala: How to get up to 3500+ GitHub stars in one week. It was pretty exciting, and we were thinking that if they did that, maybe we can also be trending on GitHub, as we already have open source products and the developer community loves them.

We followed all the steps that were written in the article and also applied the strategies that we used on Product Hunt. We prepared a friendly Readme page for Material Dashboard and added all the technologies that were available for Material Dashboard (Bootstrap, React, Vuejs, Angular). We posted on social media and then sent a newsletter to 90.000 developers who were using Material Dashboard. After this initial boost, we were trending in All Languages for one day.

Since we boosted it to top 5 for a day, we started to announce to our audience that we are trending on Github, and that helped us get more people involved. We added a Banner on our website which was viewed by over 50,000 people, and then we posted that repo on Hacker News where the magic happened. It was featured on the first page, upvoted by around 430 people, and 9,800 people came to the GitHub where they gave us around 2,000 stars.

So we were in front of Facebook, Google, and Microsoft for that week.

Launching on Product Hunt, Hacker News, or being on local Press is not a sustainable growth channel, as Product Hunt’s founder Ryan said, but it’s an excellent strategy to employ at the beginning of your business.

4. How different we are from our competitors and why this worked for us

We are running our business in a very competitive space: themes & templates. Most of the entrepreneurs that I’ve met thought that this was a dead place and that we couldn’t create something relevant. We wanted to prove that things can be done in any space, no matter how crowded it is, if you have your secret weapon. If you read the first article, you know that our secret weapon is to deliver great products combined with great user experience and great customer support.

Let’s have a look at most of our competitors who sell their products in different marketplaces. Of course, there are some exceptions, as we are not unique in our field, but let’s have a look at 95% of the companies who create similar products with ours.