Journey of a Pixel
Tags: startup, bootstrap, webdev, css
Published: 2019-07-24 08:14:14

It all started from a bar in a city from western Romania where two fresh students have met up for some beers. Neither one of them was very experienced when it came to building websites, let alone create beautiful and practical UI/UX.

Nonetheless, they were young and hungry to show the world what they can do. And we did. Four times. Three times we failed and the fourth time we launched. Let me share our story.

So there are websites on the internet. What you're reading this story on is a website. A website usually has components, such as buttons, navigation bars, footers, cards and all sorts of elements that users can interact with.

Then there are the web developers, which make all these things possible. They work on websites, sometimes they get paid for it, sometimes they make it for free. But one thing is clear: the components are always there. And that's where Pixel comes in.

So we thought, wouldn't it be cool to create a User Interface Kit for developers to use this vast amount of components and save them a lot of time developing? We could use some cool technologies to make their development much easier, such as BrowserSync for automatic browser reloading or Sass to empower the configurability of the website.

So we started working on it. We choose Bootstrap 4 as a main dependency since we love the way the classes are named and besides: it's just very used, it's made by Twitter and it has a huge community.

It was very important to us that the custom classes we would write would match the ones from Bootstrap 4. It's called Object Oriented CSS. It's like instead of having a single class which does all the styling for a specific button, you have a class for every style change, such as .btn-round which makes it rounded or .btn-primary coloring it according to your primary color.

After months of hard work, we were almost ready. We were super excited, we got some very good feedback from designers and developers so we were ready to launch. We thought it would be great to do it on Themeforest. We submit Pixel and after 3 days it gets hard rejected. Then again.

We were thinking: dude, did we just work 3 months on this and it's not worth jack shit? Something is off. But we got angry and we created our own marketplace: Themesberg. Then we created Pixel Lite, which is a free version of Pixel. Then we submitted to almost every website featuring free products and in just a few days we got more than 1000 visitors with currently 68 registered users on our marketplace. After a few days we got accepted on codecanyon (https://codecanyon.net/item/pixel-pro-premium-bootstrap-4-ui-kit/24138043).

Hey, we know what you're thinking. This is an advertisement article. You're right, it is. But we need to get the word out because we believe it is one of the highest quality UI Kits out there. Even our own website, themesberg is created with it. Our next products will be created with it. We use it and we like it.

If you don't want to spend money on the PRO version, you can get our free version if you create an account for free on themesberg.com.

I'll drop by some useful links:

Themesberg Marketplace: https://themesberg.com
Pixel PRO preview: https://themesberg.com/preview/pixel-pro
Pixel Lite (free) preview: https://themesberg.com/preview/pixel-lite

Stay awesome,

Zoltan Szogyenyi, Co-Founder @ Themesberg