Cruip

After months of hard work and long hours coding/designing every little detail, today, we are very thrilled to show you our first template based on Tailwind CSS.

Open PRO 👉️ https://cruip.com/demos/open-pro/

This release is a huge milestone for us and marks the transition for Cruip from being just a niche gallery of landing pages to a marketplace of rich/various high-quality coded resources.

If you're interested in why we switched to Tailwind CSS, and why we believe it can help us with the new mission, you can read our previous milestone here.

We’re very excited to announce that after 1-year of using our custom CSS framework, we recently decided to switch to Tailwind CSS as the new front-end base for all Cruip templates!

It hasn’t been a simple choice, because we invested a lot of time in building our custom CSS framework, but our long term goal and vision for Cruip has evolved during the time, so we had to change accordingly.

Why we’re switching to Tailwind

The main reason is that Cruip is transitioning from a niche gallery of landing pages to a marketplace of diverse high-quality coded resources, such as landing pages templates, website themes, and application dashboards.

So, the custom framework we initially built just to perform a specific task was no longer able to support the new long term vision.

Why Tailwind

The rationale behind switching to Tailwind is all about the freedom it gives us - we can create almost anything we've in mind without having to worry about the lack of flexibility of the common component-based approach.

Last but not least, we believe Tailwind is going to surpass Boostrap in terms of popularity sooner than later, and this poll we sent to our customers confirmed us just that 👇️

What’s next

Now, we’re getting closer to the launch of the first website theme based on Tailwind (sneak peek here), and we’re working on different new resources that will be released on Cruip.com in the next few months.

Alongside that, we’re also planning to change our business model from a buy and get all templates approach (similar to Tailwind UI) to a buy per single resource strategy - honestly, this is the scared part: our numbers are growing very well with the current model, but we feel that this a necessary step toward the new direction.

We'll keep you posted every step of the way :)

In less than two weeks our open-source landing page template has reached over 600+ stars on Github. Here are the numbers in detail:

🌟 636 Stars
🙌 149 Git clones
🕺 7,461 Unique users
👀 15,327 Overall views

We got the majority of this traction from a successful post on Hacker News, and we learned the importance of open-source projects as a marketing strategy to bring qualified leads to our paid products - in this case, new customers to Cruip.com.

We will probably release new open-source resources in the upcoming weeks, and in the meantime, have a look at the free template here, or download it on Github :)

When we create a new landing page for Cruip, we find it very helpful to have a few references of inspiration to help us come up with the right idea for the design.

We've been collecting these inspirations since the launch of Cruip, and just recently, we decided to turn our private collection into a product available for everyone:

👉 SaaS Landing Page

SaaS Landing Page is a design inspiration gallery showcasing the best examples of SaaS landing pages (front pages, pricing pages, about us pages, testimonial pages, etc...). Currently, the product includes over 300 examples, and we plan to keep showcasing new amazing stuff on a daily basis!

Fellow founders, have a look around and please let us know if you've any feedback or suggestions - If you think it's worth it, you can also support us on Product Hunt today:

👉 SaaS Landing Page on Product Hunt

Thanks 🙌

Today we finally launched React, Vue.js, and Sketch landing page templates 🔥

Have a look at 👉 Cruip.com

So far we've developed 11 premium templates and we plan to reach 20 premium resources within the next 6 months (see below for more details).

4 months of Cruip PRO - How things are going?

Recently, some fellow Hackers have asked me how things are going with Cruip PRO, so I would like to take the chance to share some insights/thoughts with all you:

Numbers:

We're steadily increasing our monthly revenues. For example, in September we did $1.200, and in October $1.500 so far.
We're pretty satisfied with how things are proceeding, but I can't deny that my expectations were a lot higher when we launched Cruip PRO 4 months ago!

What went wrong?

In my opinion, the biggest mistake we made has been to release too many free resources before start monetising. For example, when we launched Cruip PRO we had tons of free templates (16) and just 4 premium resources in our gallery.
The freemium model doesn’t work if you’re trying to sell what you’re also giving away for free (in our case, landing pages). Why? Because people always try to take advantage of free stuff, so as a consequence you end up having your biggest competitor in-house (the free resources).

5 things we learned

• Free and (often) freemium models don’t work for Indie Hackers. They both require crazy numbers to sustain and grow the product in the long run.

• We’re often scared of charging because we think our products aren’t good enough - That's stupid because if we skip the hard things, we’re just playing a rigged game.

• If the goal is to make money, we shouldn’t consider newsletter subscribers, the number of signups, Twitter followers, etc… as small wins for the cause - They are just vanity metrics.

• It’s simpler to convert 10 users at 30/month than 20 at $5/month. Furthermore, 10 users are easier to serve and manage.

• Instead of building products to solve our own problems, we should focus on what we're good at, so we provide real value and we also enjoy the journey.

What’s next

Our goal is to reach $6K in monthly revenues within the next six months, and in order to do that, we’re going to:

• Change the price: from $39 (limited time offer) to $69
• Develop new premium templates and gradually decrease (or convert) the free ones
• Expand the templates to new technologies (e.g., Hugo, Gatsby, etc..)
• Increase the marketing activities (via the blog and tutorials)

Basically we will double down on what is working (point 2 and 3), and we’ll increase our marketing efforts gradually.
I tried to keep it short, but please let me know if you’ve additional questions or curiosity : )