Cue
Curated Awwwards-tier UI components, reusable in any stack
Second post here. Last week's launch went okay — this one's about how the 3 months actually went. Nothing polished. Just what happened.
Month 0 — obsession phase:
Not "kinda interested" — obsessed. Every free hour spent watching dev breakdowns, dissecting how Awwwards sites got built, opening Figma files, reverse-engineering React source, reading component library READMEs at 2am. Six weeks of consuming before writing a single line of code.
If you're skipping this to "just start shipping" — you're probably building the wrong thing. Mental library first, code second.
Month 1 — talking to people, not coding:
Before building anything, Dm 30+ designers and devs asking:
- "What component library do you actually use?"
- "What's broken about it?"
- "What made you give up and just build from scratch?"
Their answers became the loopholes I built around:
- "Everything looks the same" → curated Awwwards-only
- "No AI prompts, just code" → added prompts tuned for Cursor / v0 / Bolt
- "Nothing is production-ready" → tested every component in a real project before adding it
Month 2 — building + shipping tiny:
Started slow. Dropped 5-10 components per week on X. Consistency was the only lever that mattered. Not viral posts — just showing up daily. Small screenshots, small demos, small threads.
X follower growth was slow. But the RIGHT people started following — designers, indie devs, people building for AI coding tools.
Month 3 — launch day:
Site went live. Posted on X. Told ~800 followers.
First paid customer in 15 minutes.
Sat staring at the Dodo notification for 20 minutes, refusing to believe it. Then DMed the buyer to thank them personally.
Next few days: 7-10 more paid users. Not viral, not exploding — just enough to prove the thesis wasn't wrong. Small but real.
What actually worked (in order):
1. Obsession before coding — 6 weeks of consuming before shipping saved 3 months of building the wrong thing
2. User research DMs — 30 conversations gave the exact positioning
3. Daily X consistency — not for followers, for accountability + audience
4. Shipping even when scared — the launch tweet was terrifying; hit send anyway
What I got wrong (that I don't see other founders talk about):
1. Cheaped out on tools early — spent 2 weeks rebuilding what a $30/mo tool would've done in 20 min. That "savings" cost me a paying customer's worth of time.
2. Isolated too long — didn't join founder communities (like this one) till month 3. Should've been here month 1 for feedback loops.
3. Waited for a "perfect" landing page — rewrote it 12 times before launch, then rewrote it 4 more times AFTER launch. Would've learned faster with an ugly v1 shipped week 1.
Site: cuedesign.space
X: @Alok619308
Reading every comment.
Hey IH,
Been lurking for months. First post.
The problem:
Every side project I built, I lost 4+ hours hunting Awwwards / X / random blogs for the ONE hero animation, scroll effect, or preloader that was actually usable. Awwwards has thousands of stunning UIs, but 95% are portfolio demos you can't ship. The other 5% are buried across 20 tabs.
I got tired of it. So I built the thing I wanted to exist.
The solution — Cue (cuedesign.space):
A curated library of 140+ UI components. Every single one hand-picked by me from Awwwards Site of the Day winners, viral X interactions, and production apps that shipped it best. Every component ships with an AI prompt tuned across ~50 iterations — so when you paste it into Cursor / v0 / Bolt / Claude, you land on the version worth shipping, not iteration one.
The core idea: someone else's taste doing the filtering. You browse instead of scroll. You ship instead of hunt.
Early traction (3 months in):
- 500+ signed up combined (waitlist + accounts)
- First paying customers converted within 15min after launch
- Building in public daily on X (@Alok619308)
- Users started DMing "can I get JUST this one component" — that's driving my next experiment
- Bootstrapped, self-funded, solo, India-based
Site: cuedesign.space
X: @Alok619308
Any thoughts, roasts, or 'you're missing X' — reading every comment.
5 Comments
That’s stronger evidence than the sales alone. I’d be interested in digging into what those users are actually using repeatedly. If you’re open to it, what’s the best email to reach you on?