Archetype

Since launching the pro membership back in May we haven't done much promotion of Archetype but have had a steady little stream of Pro users signing up regardless. On the 5th August we hit our 7th! This is really promising because the whole purpose of the pro test was to see whether the core functionality was something people would be willing to pay for. We were debating whether to spend more time developing Archetype and decided we could only do so if there was a way to monetise it. Hopefully this initial test combined with the fact we still regularly get 2-3K people using the site every month shows that we have the kernel of something. I've started to draw up designs for a new and improved version of Archetype based on all the feedback we've had so fingers crossed we can kick on from this promising start.

Archetype has been online now for over 2 years as a free product. In that time we've built up 4000 users in the database and an extra 500 or so in Mailchimp.

We launched it in 2017 as a side project to help web designers and developers (like ourselves) create typography designs in the browser using best practices, and then export those designs to Sketch or CSS.

It had a good reception on product hunt and from the design/dev community, it was shared by Sketch, Google fonts, Chris Coyier and other well known industry people on Twitter - envato tuts+ even made a video about how to use it in your workflow!

We've had a lot of feedback over the years but ultimately didn't think it worthwhile putting in the effort to integrate payments - I'm not sure Stripe checkout was around then to make it so easy.

We both worked away on other side projects and then thought we'd come back and try payments as we're getting about 2500 users every month organically.

What a feeling when on the very first day after integrating we had our first payment of $59/year! 🥳

Let's see if we have any more interest over the coming weeks...