Saas UI

End of 2022 I took a little detour and took on a job that took up most of my time. The time I had for Saas UI was for support, maintenance and building new features. There was very little room for marketing, hence the silence on here. So what happened in the last year? I haven't been sitting still ;)

I surpassed my revenue goal in 2022, which was €25.000. This was the confirmation for me to continue working on Saas UI. In 2023 I released Saas UI 2.0 and hired a content strategy company to write content about Saas UI. This strategy turned out to work out well and it allowed me to keep going the revenue while I had little time for marketing myself. Next to that we released the first Figma design system (Thanks Tomasz), which is a game changer for design and engineer teams. As a result I surpassed 2022's revenue, while having significant less time for the project. This was an amazing result and it's the best reward you can get for working on something you're passionate about.

Meanwhile it's 2024 already, (I can't believe how fast the last year passed by). I'm very excited to be all in on Saas UI again. Since January I've been catching up on the backlog, pushing out a lot of improvements and updates. I'm also working with a couple of backend teams to implement their frontend with Saas UI. And of course picking up marketing again :)

2024 will bring a lot of good stuff to Saas UI, so do follow me here and on Twitter to stay up to date.

• Headless components with support for PandaCSS (Park UI), Tailwind (Park UI / Shadcn UI), and React server components.
• New default theme that's available across CSS frameworks.
• Continue work on the starter kit, adding fullstack features (trpc, drizzle, and more).
• We're working on Blocks which are pre-built components.
• Saas UI v3 (Chakra UI v3 is around the corner).

Happy coding :)

Time has been flying since August, it's far past due to post another update!

Growth has been steady as before and in September I crossed the $10k barrier, another awesome milestone! Still ramen profitable, so really excellent.

The website will get an overhaul soon, I will create separate product pages for the OSS core components and Pro starterkit to have a better separation of the different offerings. As well as a separate pricing page to highlight all differences better.

I've also been working on 2 new Chakra UI themes, which both will have a free version and an advanced version that will be included in Saas UI Pro. I believe this will also help drive a lot of extra traffic to the website.

After that it's time to start showcasing some cool products that have been built with Saas UI.

Challenges right now are still writing more content and being more active in communities. So I'm currently looking for collaborators to help with the core components and get Saas UI v2 ready. But also in talks to outsource the website overhaul, so I can focus on improving Saas UI Pro and content.

A quick update here, because I reached my ramen profitability goal of €2500,- this month, with 20 days to go. Really awesome to get to this milestone after 6 months 🥳

All thanks to my plan to add a premium membership plan that I launched last month, steady sales of new licenses every month and of course all awesome early adopters.

Happy coding!

July was slightly better with sales, but not at the level where I would like it to be. I updated the bootstrap license to include unlimited Saas products, and 1 client project per license to see how people would respond, but I don't have enough data yet to make any conclusions. I do feel like it's a good step up to increase the pricing after summer, once I complete all v1 pro components.

Clicks from Google and traffic are still picking up, Github stars are increasing steadily, so I am starting to reach more people, which is good. There is progress :) People are starting to find me because the design is similar to Linear (which was a big inspiration, I'm a big fan), this is an excellent niche that I can capitalise more on.

I decided to try a new idea and added a limited membership subscription, which will give startups support and priority development of components and project setup for a fixed fee, starting at €2000,- per month, paid upfront. After a week I closed the first deal, so far this was a success. This brings me officially at ramen profitability in August.

The membership is an excellent way to speed up development of pro packages, while also getting production level experience and feedback to improve the product. And it allows me to focus more time overall on Saas UI, big win-win here.

To close, growing my audience, writing more content and improving the website is something I have a hard time finding the time for right now as I took on a new freelance gig. I'm not sure how to solve this, but I might need to hire a technical writer to write content for me, I'll look into that this month.

Cheers!

Traffic is picking up, but sales aren't. I expected a small dump this month because the life-time free updates deal ended on June 1st, but this month was disappointing with less than 500$ in sales.

Still a lot of work to do on growing my audience, I'm considering launching a deal on AppSumo as an extra distribution channel.

SEO performance is pretty poor as most of the pages (especially the components) are known to Google but still not indexed, which is costing me a lot of traffic. Chakra Developers should be able to find the library when looking for Chakra UI Stepper for example, but Saas UI doesn't appear in the results.

To start improving this, I wrote my first post on dev.to. I'll be posting my tutorials and guides the coming months to work on more backlinks and authority. As well as improving the content on my own site.

One thing that I did completely wrong is leaving 'soon' label for pro components on the website for far too long while the components were ready. It's rather off putting coming back to websites that have soon labels for far too long.

I'll be releasing the updated website with all components tomorrow, together with an awesome new logo and above all v1 of Saas UI Core!

Curious to see what the summer will bring.

Sales have been picking up this month, nearly hitting $1500,-. Very pleased to see this result.

I'm moving away from the life-time free updates to a recurring model for new customers, starting tomorrow. This will make the product more sustainable in the long term. Which means you'll need to renew your license every year to keep receiving updates. I haven't settled on a renewal fee yet, but it'll be a discounted price.

Customers are starting to share what they've build and I'm really impressed, it is really satisfying to see other developers build great products with the help of the UI Library.

Search engine performance is improving a lot too, the traffic is picking up. It can be improved a whole lot more by writing guides and other content.

Growing my audience and spending more time on marketing still is the biggest challenge for me.

It far past time to post an update again.

I haven't been able to have much progress with development, and less so marketing in April. But it was quite a good month with about €1000,- revenue again. Saas UI Pro, although far from finished is ready for beta testing.

One big challenge I'm facing now is the lack of feedback. I really feel like it's important to make sure to develop the product in the right direction. This all boils down to growing the audience and onboarding more customers. The goal is to get more involved in communities and create more awareness of the product.

March started off with a bang, 3 new sales of which 2 unlimited licenses, I can almost start paying my ramen if I can keep this up!

This month I will focus more time on marketing, I will launch a new improved homepage, and start looking for other channels to post on. I'm not a very vocal person, but it's actually very nice to be part of communities like Indie Hackers.

The first 2 weeks of the launch started above expectation, I was really confident I was on the right track. The last 2 week of Februari I spent less time on marketing and that showed in growth of new followers, interactions, Github stars and signup. I made €198,- in total.

The initial response on Twitter was very positive, I got about 30 signups in the first week, so I decided to move to the next stage and sign up for Gumroad and start a pre-sale for Saas UI Pro.

I made the first sale (€99,-) a few days after silently adding the pre-order buttons on the pricing tables, really exciting, I feel like I'm on to something here 🚀