UI Sources

Wow this was a rollercoaster. Within just the first month of launching, I've crossed 100 paying subscribers which equals $3k+ in revenue.

Some learnings

• Having the shortest plan as quarterly helped increase the average order value imo. The lowest otherwise would have beem $8/mo and I didn't want to worry about fixing churn this soon.

• Most people are buying shorter term plans, fewer are buying annual plans. Very likely because designers mostly need this during the start of a new project and lesser throughout.

So far when you checked out an app, you would see video interactions and screenshots. With this redesign, I added two new features

Metadata: Each app now showed number of downloads, an Editor's Note, localization, links to the App Store, Play Store and Website etc.

Profiles: After some heavy manual lifting, I curated the profiles of 650+ designers and product folks who had worked on the apps I had documented so far!

My company registration not having made much progress due to the COVID-19 lockdown, I decided to use Gumroad for payments and launch it!

Added a new landing page, restructured all the other content pages, implemented logins via Memberstack etc. To start things off, I added two pricing plans: My two pricing plans: $29/3mo and
$99/12mo

🏆 #3 Product of the Day
⬆ 800+ upvotes

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ui-sources-2

🏆 #3 Product of the Day
⬆ 1400+ upvotes

From ProductHunt:

"A few months back, I noticed a trend on Instagram and LinkedIn where creators were creating "micro-blogs" in the form of carousel posts. Some of my favourite designers had started sharing their learning process on Instagram, and I was finding tremendous value in it!

However, over time it got hard for me to keep track of interesting posts and easily search and look-up older ones. I created this website as an aggregation of these "micro-blogs' aka booklets, categorised them by topic and made them searchable.

One of the problems self-taught designers, marketers and creators face is that online courses are useful only if you know exactly what you need to learn and want to explore DEPTH. But while starting out, often you don't know how vast the topic is. With my interviews with early users, I've found a lot of them using Booklets to explore the BREADTH of an industry before they decide to start learning."

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/booklets-io

I'll be honest here – I didn't have a rock solid plan. However after spending 2.5 years at Unacademy, it was finally time for me to go back to being a full time founder.

I'd put in my papers a couple works prior and my last day was on January 31st.

My Feb 21st, I'd finished designing and building a membership site for UI Sources using Webflow and Memberstack. However, I realized that I couldn't start accepting payments because my company registration got stalled.

Decided to focus on a different project, Booklets.io and wait for the right time to launch UI Sources Pro.

I'd been making visual design changes, page redesigns and optimizations all this while. After more than a year of running it, my main goal was to figure out a solid monetization strategy that didn't rely on affiliate and ads.

Decided to go with a subscription model, designed a landing page, then sat on it for a month or more trying to figure out how I'd pull it off using Webflow.

Then, I discovered Memberstack. However it only accepted Stripe which wasn't available in my country. Then I sat on the idea some more.

Haha this took longer than anticipated, but finally my two revenue streams combined (Affiliate + Advertising) were now netting my over $100+ in monthly revenue.

My expenses so far were under $50 a month and included Webflow, Buttondown, Gsuite and Vimeo Pro.

So far, I had limited monetization. My own fault for not thinking of it sooner, but the goal was to launch as soon as possible, build the email list, add content every month and gradually grow it.

Initially I dismissed Carbon because I imagined the revenue would be too small to be significant. In the first month, I made $20 a month with around 25k impressions.

So far what made UI Sources stand out was that it was the only pattern site that included videos and microinteractions from sites. What all the other pattern websites had were just screenshots.

I felt both formats had their benefits and wanted to include static screenshots on UI Sources as well. Thus began an arduous process of going back to every single app that I'd added and collecting content to add.

Instead of posting individual screenshots, the approach I chose to take was to put all screens for a flow (eg How Headspace does Onboarding) into a single composite image.

How Headspace does Onboarding: https://www.uisources.com/explainer/headspace-habit-formation-onboarding

This was my first monetization experiment. I signed up to the UI8 Affiliate program by sending them an email and adding products to the site.

I created a dedicated page where I curated some UI kits around finance, food, entertainment etc. In the first month I made $35 with 8 sales.

http://ui8.net?rel=abnux