lookup.design

Two days I tweeted the project at Steve Schoger, who's pretty big in the design community. He retweeted it and it got picked up by a bunch of publications like smashing magazine and prototypr which resulted in 60k pageviews over 2 days.

The key for me really was that instead of marketing it I just wanted to showcase a cool project I made.

Today I also added in google adwords. I still plan on using integrated ads but so far all of the companies I contacted ignored me or turned me down.

I'm also thinking of joining some affiliate programs but so far none of them seem like they would bring in more than google adwords.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/lookup-design

This week has been pretty hard, I did a complete UI overhaul of the site and decided to switch to an ad-based model.

I only got 1 conversion (for about 1k views) so I decided to focus on getting many free users (instead of a few paying). Since I want to build more products for designers I hope this can become a launchpad for that.

I also contacted some companies for ads, I want to add some integrated ads to hopefully cover the cost of running the site.

I realized that the main thing that makes my site unique is the ability to find specific components (say "navigation" or "searchbar"), so I've been working on a better search UI and did a lot of work on my index to make it as easy as possible to find what you're looking for. New version is at https://lookup.design/search

Getting really close to launching, I only really need billing and if I have time I'll give users the ability to put images into collections. I plan on launching on Tuesday next week.

I talked to a bunch of potential users for my app, key findings were:

• the problem is real! There are even memes about designers having a million browser bookmarks just for inspiration
• my site doesn't have clear directions on how to use it. So I added a new landing page (https://lookup.design/) to hopefully provide some context around the app.

The overall goal for this project is still 10k mrr. Right now the easiest way I see to get there is to get 1000 users that pay 10$ a month. I was a bit hesitant on how I should price the whole thing but I decided to just start off making the product payed, as that seems like it has the most potential.

Very successful Saturday, lookup.design now has analytics thanks to plausible (they're also public at https://plausible.io/lookup.design), I did a bit of work on the design and added a footer and nav to make it look like an actual website, settled on a logo for now and took care of the bare minimum for SEO (meta tags). Pretty happy about the progress so far and on track to have a presentable mvp for hn/product hunt etc. next week.

https://lookup.design/ has a database now. I also added and indexed about 100 new examples.
Images are hosted on Cloudinary and indexed on firebase, its a setup that didn' t take long to set up and will hopefully scale for quite a while too.
I'm aiming to launch on product hunt next week, until then I want to have at least 800 images, indexed, have a way for users to sign up and generally make sure the site at least looks like an actual website.