How I Grew A Landing Page SaaS For Developers To $80K/Month
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hi folks, I’m Manu and I’m the founder of Aceternity UI, A component library of modern building blocks that helps developers build landing pages.
I’m a developer trying to solve problems by building products and web apps that can one day impact millions of lives.
I primarily run a web design and development studio called Aceternity where I’ve worked with people from all over the world to help them get their idea on the internet and grow it from scratch.
I run various products along with services at Aceternity, some of my notable products are Aceternity UI and Aceternity UI Pro, the primary customers of these products are web developers and founders.
As of today, Aceternity UI Pro crossed $80k in revenue and has been 2 months since launch. I primarily market Aceternity on Twitter / X. Here are some of the analytics of the current month
How did you come up with your business idea?
The idea of Aceternity came up iteratively. I never thought that I’d build a component library that will host some of the coolest components from around the internet.
Earlier, I had this hobby of creating beautiful components for my personal projects. That hobby turned into a product which was based around components, but not just the code, I also enjoyed explaining the process behind it. That is when I started to write blogs around how to create beautifully designed code snippets and how to approach component creation in general.
But then I quickly pivoted to just creating a copy paste alternative to blogs because the analytics suggested that no one was actually reading blogs, everyone was interested in quickly implementing what I had to provide.
That is when I launched Aceternity UI initially with a set of just 7 components. I launched fast and launched with what I had because earlier I committed a lot of mistakes with over optimizing my products only to realize later on that people are not going to use it. So to quickly test out if people are liking the things that I’m building, I had to launch quickly and take feedback as soon as I could.
Once I launched it, it started picking up traction from Product Hunt and Twitter, people started using it and feedback came in quickly. I wasted no time in setting up the right feedback channels and improving as and when I got something valuable to implement.
Give us a step-by-step process for how you built the first version of your product.
The product-building path was fairly simple. The idea was to provide lots and lots of value for free so people actually use the components without friction.
- Setting up a simple website where I could add and publish components rapidly, I started with what I knew, which was Next.js, Tailwind CSS, framer motion and Vercel.
- Added the first set of components which were visually appealing and something which was not already there.
- I built the website on a weekend, launched it and started talking about it everywhere.
- The only costs associated were hosting costs (vercel - $20/mo)
- I was already building components but with blogs, so keeping it separate and providing just the code was easier for me to do.
Here’s how the initial version looked like with a view components:
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Once I started getting initial traction, I doubled down on adding more components. My service business was running on the side and most of my time I spent on building new components for varied use cases.
Build. Build. Build. Build. Build. It’s better to write bad code than to overthink about writing good code that no one is going to use. Your customers don’t care about code quality.
How did you “launch” the business?
I launched Aceternity UI on Twitter and Product Hunt. The Product Hunt launch fetched me the initial users but Twitter helped spread the word really quickly.
Once people started using it, popular youtubers like Fireship noticed it and published a video on it. From there the word spread really good in all directions and I had people buying my services from all over the world.
After around 4 months of Aceternity UI, I built a decent distribution through my website, My twitter grew to 20k followers and I was able to launch Aceternity UI Pro with much less friction.
The primary market channel for Aceternity UI was word of mouth. People really liked the components so much that they were talking about it within their companies and social networks.
I built the product by keeping users in mind. I’ve been building products for over 7 years and I put all my experience into this product, be it the learnings and the challenges. The lesson I learned was to just push as much as I could while improving what I already had in place constantly.
How did you land your first customers?
First customers came directly through the website after a few days of launch. My customers are primarily early and small scale businesses, and have worked with a lot of YC backed companies.
I myself come from the mindset of a startup culture, which includes pushing code and taking feedback constantly, no fixed work hours and extremely efficient output. The same strategy is followed by enthusiastic founders, who I absolutely love working with.
Since I had the same mindset, I attracted a lot of founders and one of them was John Shahawy. John was my very first client who trusted me with his product. We’ve worked together for over two years on several projects. He taught me everything about business that I know today and I owe him so much. He himself is a builder and has played a pivotal role in my career as an engineer / business owner.
From there, I got a lot of referrals. That helped me initially to set up a base for my work, which I later utilised to build a brand for Aceternity.
How have you grown your business?
Aceternity now is a team of 6 people. 2 Front-end engineers, 1 full-stack engineer, 1 designer, 1 social media manager and 1 product manager.
Since I had a lot of requests coming in (at one moment I was handling 7 clients at a time which was challenging), I quickly realised that I need to delegate some of the tasks that can be taken care by people who are better than me.
That is when I hired my first full-time employee to help me with client work so that I could focus on products which were there at Aceternity.
The full time hire proved to be worthwhile and it gave me confidence to hire more and streamline processes.
Now I’m totally into building and improving Aceternity UI Pro, which is our flagship product. Our focus is on improving SEO, building a brand for Aceternity, Content marketing with YouTube and Twitter / X.
Ideally you want to share your wins, losses, learnings and pretty much everything that you experience in your journey. You will find people that resonate with that and will stick with you through thick and thin.
Give us a breakdown of your revenue & financials.
Here’s a rough breakdown of the last month revenue that we made:
- $40k from Aceternity UI Pro
- $30k from Services at Aceternity (We build websites for founders)
- Average monthly revenue varies between $60k - $100k per month. The goal is to exponentially increase it with the help from the team.
- Expenditure is around $5k/mo as of last month.
- I have one product that sells (Aceternity UI Pro), the rest is services that I offer (Aceternity UI Pricing).
What does the future look like?
My ultimate goal with Aceternity is to provide immense value to people so that they can create awesome looking and functional websites with minimal friction.
That includes creating tools and apps for people that actually helps them with their day to day activities.
Realistic goal for Aceternity UI Pro is to reach $100k MRR within the next year. I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to achieve it if I put in the time and effort required to put it. Along with that I’m also exploring different marketing channels like Ads and YouTube videos.
In the next 5 years, I believe Aceternity will be a standalone web dev studio that big corporations reach out to for carrying out their complex dev related activities. It will give me an idea of the bigger picture which is there for grabs.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
There are a lot of lessons that I’ve learned in the process, some of them are:
- Listen to your customers. Talk to them a lot. Go out of your way to help them. Be available in your support chat always.
- Give without expectations. Provide value without getting anything in return. The compounding effects are immense.
- Build polished products. Clean UI + UX will position you as an expert in your field, take that extra step.
- Never shy away from criticism. It will only help you make your product better.
- Build. Build. Build. Build. Build. It’s better to write bad code than to overthink about writing good code that no one is going to use. Your customers don’t care about code quality.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
I’d say just put your authentic self out there in the open and you will find your people. The thing that has worked for me was to put myself (vulnerable) and to my surprise, I got a lot of support from the community. People were really helpful towards me and my product, they wanted me to win.
So ideally you want to share your wins, losses, learnings and pretty much everything that you experience in your journey. You will find people that resonate with that and will stick with you through thick and thin.
Where can we go to learn more?
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
