Monetizing the design: what I learned after a year of non-stop UI grinding
By: Roman Kamushken
Tags: UX Design, Figma, UI, Product Design, Entrepreneurship

Results of the year for the UI designer, who didn`t have any interesting projects in his portfolio and decided to create his own product for the now popular Figma design platform.

Previously, I've always been skeptical of such posts. But after the year 2018, which gave me experience and wisdom for 10 years, I realized: I just had nothing to say before.

I haven’t worked in large companies, haven’t arranged design sprints and haven’t sat side by side with the cool guys in co-workings. I’ve been in design for at least 16 years now, I am self-taught, and once I turned out to have not even one interesting project in my portfolio that would work cool and look modern. All my recent years of stable freelancing were the clients with regular orders. They come and go. And 80% of them throw away all your creativity in the furnace later on. As, according to the laws of the market, this number fails after the project launch.

So I really wanted to have my own product. The one that would benefit people who will face similar challenges in the future and would save their time. The one that could be quickly given the desired shape and optimized over time.

I almost didn’t notice how the year flew away. The year when I released 7 design assets for Figma, received a lot of positive feedback, collected useful tips and suggestions, realized where I can direct my product further on and eventually got to the website of this design tool…

And that’s what I`ve come to realize:

Keep an eye on what’s happening in the industry

New tools, frameworks, and web applications appear every day. And along with them there is a demand for something that will help people to be more effective. The design market is developing tremendously and today it is even more interesting than, for example, two years ago. Investment comes and giants with serious technologies fight for the large shares. And if you follow the market where you work and understand it well enough, sooner or later you will find an idea that can be tested for validity and you will be charged well enough to have the right amount of motivation to go really far. I constantly monitor key western design resources to build my own forecasts: DN, Webdesignernews, Reddit, Producthunt. What do people discuss in the comments? What posts get the most upvotes? All that matters.

You don’t have to be a team

We live in an amazing time, when anyone being in any remote part of the planet with a laptop creates something necessary, which people are willing to pay money for. He does it alone, taking advantage of ready-made solutions that are available to everyone. Now there’s a global trend on the side-projects, which are launched by individual designers and developers. People create projects that are of concern to them, gather an audience that becomes loyal and then smoothly implement premium services for $ subscription. That’s the way successful projects are born. And only then they turn into teams, moving to the next level. But much can be done alone now, thanks to the cool tools, many of which are made by just one person.

Hitch on the leaving train

If there is a new product on the market that is of interest in the communities, you may be able to earn with it. For small teams or solo-preneurs like me, that’s the most implementable way to the product that makes a profit. This is just my case with Figma: I just understood that it was convenient for me to work in it and I became more effective. I assumed most designers would think the same way and they would need ready-made components to avoid wasting time on pixels. And this idea turned out to be valid. The designer’s workflow has evolved a lot, thanks to a new approach. You just build your own library of components and templates and create new templates for each client quickly and effectively, just adding a new style and color. Over time, your database will have all the elements of the world and you`ll be able to work with a cup of coffee in the second hand :) And my products are just about it.

You will need all your previous experience

If anyone ever asks me, that’s the first thing I’ll say. You must be good at your job. To create a product, you need to understand the tasks that people will solve with it. You will be able to better understand them, if you have solved a lot of such problems once. This is your experience. And it will be difficult to create a universal design asset (or insert here whatever is closer to your activities) without it. Over the past 5 years, I’ve done a lot of production interfaces and various mobile concepts on my regular job. Unfortunately, no project has shot to the stars, but without this experience I wouldn’t have been able to do such work in a year.

If the product isn’t being sold, you need even more experience

My boss once said, “It’s not enough to create a good product. You need to sell it somehow…”. This is the harsh reality. Even if you have drawn the best design kit in this galaxy, now only you know about it. And it will take a lot of analytics, experiments and attempts to explain it to people. This year I have sold several thousand licenses, updated and modified my website 10 times and I still don`t stop experimenting with the content presentation. If one day you say “Oh! Now it looks cool” and then in a month or two you don`t think “Oh my God, who has written/drawn this rubbish”, most likely you are marking time and need to change something. And if your cool product doesn’t sell, you need even more experience to get past that dead point.

Sell in your own space

The market of digital design products is developing rapidly and today more and more designers are trying to create something useful for their colleagues. Most of them try to sell their products using only popular platforms, but that’s not enough. Almost all known UI marketplaces are full of monotonous color screens inserted into the same phone mockups and in 80% your product will be lost among them. Designers copy each other and look for ideas not where they should. If you plan to go far, think beforehand about making your own resource the main source of sales. This will at least eliminate the difficulties of choice for visitors because they will choose only among your products inside your space.

Sometimes, it is easier to make the next product

You may come to this unless your patience expires ahead of time. 20% of products give 80% of profit. If you have already made several products, it is likely that a small part of them will generate the lion’s share of profits. All the rest are the products, after which you made another attempt, because there is no point in trying to revive the dead. If after several attempts, you don1t see the figures that suit you, this direction should be paused and a new one should be explored. You may be the only one in front of the monitor, but nobody forbids you to do business like you’re a big company.

Make it look like you’re an organization

Schedule tasks, manage them in the tracker, explore hypotheses, collect analytics and make optimizations. For a solo developer, self-management should probably be in the first place, because it is very easy to lose your way or get buried in the routine just because you have chosen the wrong sequence of actions before the development. For example, I was able to understand that reusing my own ideas gives efficiency gains only after a few months of practice. And now, creating the next shot in Dribbble, I will use this picture in other social networks, or as an advertising banner, or even make it the website title, as I see a positive reaction of the audience.