Arif Hossain's Journey with RetroUI
Jakob here 🖐
In my newsletter Fake Mayo I share stories (interviews) of how founders got their first customers.
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Software developer and indie hacker Arif Hossain began his journey in early 2024, experimenting with side projects and documenting his technical process on YouTube. Seeking unique user interfaces, he discovered and fell in love with the neo-brutalism design style. Unable to find a suitable library, he started building his own open-source project, RetroUI, in September 2024.
He publicly announced RetroUI a month later, and the unexpected positive response validated his work. By early 2025, the project had garnered over 300 GitHub stars. Seeing potential for monetization, he launched RetroUI Pro in April 2025, offering premium UI blocks for a $99 lifetime fee. Initial sales were slow, leading him to focus entirely on RetroUI, publicly challenging himself to reach $100K in revenue and document the process weekly on YouTube.
This dedicated focus accelerated growth through organic marketing strategies: maintaining an open-source core, consistent content creation, building in public, and active community engagement on platforms like X and Reddit. As of October 2025, RetroUI has achieved approximately 1,000 GitHub stars and 28 Pro customers, generating around $2.7K in total sales.
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https://www.fakemayo.com/p/how-arif-finds-customers-for-his-neobrutalism-styled-component-library
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