Union - App Studio

How I Grew My App Builder From 0 to $12K/Month

February 26th, 2025

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About
Business

paolo

Founder, Union - App Studio

$12K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Union - App Studio

unionstudio.app

from NYC, NY, USA

started May 2024

$12,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Who are you and what business did you start?

Hey Im Paolo, I left MIT in 2010 to found my first startup and now im on my 4th one. You could say it's a bit of an addiction. I most recently created Union, which is an app studio for creatives, who don't necessarily code. We take the best features of design tools like Figma, and generative UI tools like Replit or v0, but the output can run natively on any OS, including the Web. We went from 0 in January to about 16K today, so im elated and it's time to start telling the world about what we do.

Union App Studio

How do you come up with the idea for Union - App Studio?

We love Figma, who doesn't love Figma. But at the same time, nobody loves the journey of going from Figma designs to production, it's a brutal pain point and over the years the process has only become more tangled and schizophrenic. Then AI has surfaced and a lot of people thought that this was a panacea. Ok, sometimes you get lucky and AI spits out something that works, but when you try to get more specific about what you want, it consistently fails. Now imagine fighting like this to get your product on every platform. At this point, we realized there was a sweet spot somewhere in between the two.

How did you build the initial version of Union - App Studio?

First we started by looking at the intersection between all the operating systems, desktop and mobile. We quickly build out code in C and C++ to handle the most essential things, like showing a window, interfacing with native features like the camera, filesystem, etc. And most importantly, painting a UI.

We made it possible to build native apps with UIs using plain old Web tech. Just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, or your favorite frontend libraries like React. Which is cool, because everyone already understands Web tech. This was a massive engineering challenge, it didn't happen over night. We actually raised VC to solve this problem. The problem was, most people didn't understand what problem we had solved, we weren't good at marketing it, and there wasn't really a market with a paying user for this.

At this point, we saw how tools like Figma and Sketch had validated a lot of things. So we spent about 6 months replicating the features we thought were essential to a good design experience, but for responsive, functional UIs.

Now we're able to give people a tool that they can primarily drag and drop pre-fab'ed components to design UIs. Do you need something doesn't exist? No problem, you can have AI generate a new component for you. Not exactly what you wanted? Drag things around or pop open the code editor and tweak some JavaScript or CSS.

Two room office in Amsterdam

How did you launch Union - App Studio and get initial traction?

Well we just started telling the world. Hah! We're really interested in great story tellers which is how we found Starter Story. So far it's been a lot of working within our personal networks and testing the water, asking people for their honest feedback and thoughts. Quality over quantity at this stage. I think in the early sages of some things, it's better to have a smaller amount of die-hard cult members than a huge number of people who could take it or leave it.

Our first customer was a cold inbound from Github. They noticed our stack and did a bunch of technical due diligence, and they just asked us if we had ever considered working in the public sector. We were a bit skeptical at first, it took quite a few months before anything materialized, but now we've got traction with tier-1 defense contractors, helping them redefined the meaning of rapid application development.

What was the growth strategy for Union - App Studio and how did you scale?

Well as I said we just got out of dev mode, so we'll have yet to see what works.

One thing that's cool is social platforms like twitter/X have been reduced to simple rage-bait formulas so they're pretty easy to game. Is that going to translate into revenue? Im not sure, a lot of people with 100K+ followers and a lot of engagement living on someone else couch these days. Of all the platforms I'm the most optimistic about Reddit, it's always been a shit-posting and porn platform so that's just a baseline and people are used to that, they are also there for politics, tech, cooking, etc. With Reddit you can still deeper conversations with people about topics and bad behavior or intellectual dishonesty will get downvoted until people just delete their posts.

What were the biggest lessons learned from building Union - App Studio?

I've been in dev-tools and deep-tech for over a decade. The biggest mistake in dev tools is thinking that solving a hard technical problem will translate into revenue generation. Developers are extremely hard to please and they expect most things to be free. Gaining developer trust by doing the right things means they may take your tools to work with them, but champions don't necessarily translate into sales. In most cases, good dev-tools can fall out of revenue generating products, but I don't think revenue generating products fall out of dev-tools.

You can mitigate this to some degree by having a better-together story is essential. You'll never solve all the problems but if you have something truly valuable you can build an ecosystem. This is one of the most underestimated efforts, and it's been our number one tool so far.

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