Obra Icons indie report: how I launched - how it’s going. 2 sales, but powering on.
I launched a project called Obra Icons on October 1st. The initial version took me about 7 days of work total + around 3 days of external freelancer’s work to work out the initial version.
What is it? It’s a set of 750+ vector icons, both in stroke and filled variants, that you can use for UI designs. The website has all the icons downloadable for free, and there is also a free Svelte package.
The commercial aspect is a $15 license to get the Figma source files and original vectors.
Like many of you I am a freelancer that still does client work. Given evenings and weekend work I managed to put around 3 more days into the project after launch myself and paid for 2 more days of freelance work to improve the project over the past month.
For the initial iteration, I designed and developed the site for https://icons.obra.studio , put the icon set up for sale at $20, developed the Svelte package with a freelance developer and launched on Product Hunt (albeit poorly).
The design of the marketing website has since received several small copy and UX tweaks but more or less stayed the same.
For the initial iteration I dove into the setup to be able to sell the source files and quickly compared SendOwl, LemonSqueezy and Paddle with each other. In the end I chose SendOwl connected to Stripe for now.
SendOwl works but I don’t love it though. Since I only have 2 sales so far, I am not going to spend time finding the right merchant of record.
I released Obra Icons as Obra Icons 1.0.0 with 350 icons. I quickly followed up with 10 more releases, which goes fast if you count adding icons as a release. Together with the team I grew the icon count from 350 (initial release) to 750+. I personally believe the icons are always getting better and we are reaching a great quality level.
I am also dogfooding my own work the whole time, using Obra icons in my design projects. When I discover flaws I go in and fix them.
One thing that really annoyed me was the search engine on the website icons page. In a previous project I made a manual keywords file to solve this problem. A design goal of Obra Icons was to be able to update the set easily, so this was not really an option.
In the first iteration of Obra Icons we chose to generate the keywords by the OpenAI API using a custom prompt.
This worked OK, but I quickly discovered that some icons have multiple meanings. For example, a typical refresh icon might as well pose as a redo icon. An icon that depicts sparkles is often used for “ai” these days.
We improved the search engine adding additional logic to the scripts that parses the layer name in Figma (e.g. sparkles[ai]) into a manual keywords file which should get priority in the search.
The search is not perfect yet but it’s kind of fun how it can generate interesting results you wouldn’t think of yourself some times. We use Orama in the background.
What do I think after one month and “only” 2 sales? To be honest, it’s pretty thrilling to receive a sale from an indie project. I am infinitely happier with an indie sale than another billable hour on a client project.
I created a discount code to give the set away to some friends. I am getting some real positive reactions. Since it’s a digital product, I can give it away for free to my designer friends, hoping they can help promote it - because I am sure anyone following me on X is already annoyed by my promotional tweets.
I have lots of blog post ideas, on the planning:
- Create a blog
- Create a React dev package
- Blog about the process
- Keep improving the set!
- Maybe some SEO blog posts (Christmas icons! Halloween icons!) but it's not really my style to dirty up the internet
I lowered the price to $15 and I am planning a sale in December for $10 to experiment with pricing.
My heart is in it more than with client work, and I am constantly thinking about how to improve things.
I went as far as starting the design of a first font, to be able to support icons with letters and numbers in them. I drew it in Figma. I started to learn Glyphs, too. People on the glyphs forum say this is not a great vector tool but I know my way around Figma and with the scripting capabilities it has, I am able to work at a scale that I’ve never been able to work before.
To support the working at scale, I created a custom devtools plugin to handle all kinds of manual actions to be able to maintain the consistency of the set while scaling it up with hundred of icons. hrough this I got better at creating Figma plugins, which helps with another project I have.
It's funny how working on this project is affecting my outside behavior. I take photos on the streets of icons I see in real-life and I've never looked more closely at any graphic design around me as before.
I am wondering what other indie hackers think about this project. All feedback is welcome.
