Quick Overview

As a designer, I realised I was designing the same old components over rand over again. So, I slowly built a Design System UI Kit for myself to use across projects which in turned allowed me to hit the ground running and save a bunch of time.

After a few months, I realised this may be helpful to other designs, developers and makers so decided to beef it up a little, add a bunch of features to make it easy to use regardless of profession, design a website and released the kit.

The first 2 months of 2021 were slow going to say the least. From Jan 1st to Feb 28th, I made a total of $142 in sales. Enough to give me hope, but not enough to keep my motivation high.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t expect an instant success and marketing is not my strong suit. Is it my kit? The site? Is the use-case obvious? All these questions, I figured it was time to find some answers.

Discovery And Strategy

To find the answers, I done Four things.

1. Asked those who downloaded the demo why they didn’t buy
2. Asked those who bought the kit what caught their attention
3. Asked other Kit-Makers for feedback
4. Checked out my user-flows using Hotjar.

I didn’t get many replies from those customers I reached out to, the responses I did get were positive but not a right fit for them, they wanted something more like a typical UI kit, not a “lego style” kit.

The makers I spoke to gave some great advice. They said the kit was very good and easy to use, but the landing page could use some improvement.

The userflows, though, are where the issues really came to light. I watched visitors click around aimlessly. Stop and read areas, whilst skipping over others. Many would stop at certain areas and (seemingly) assume it was the end, and leave.

Watching hours of footage, I was making notes into a spreadsheet. Each row was an issue and if multiple users had the same issue, I would add an extra check next to that issue to get an order of priority.

The Redesign

A few things I noticed were

• Users were getting hungup on the hero image.
• The site was not explaining the kit enough
• The site was not showing the kit off enough
• The features and use-cases were not obvious
• It was pretty bland, and did not reflect the amount of work that went into the kit itself.

So, I went ahead and redesigned the site from head to toe. Taking extra time to add some interactive elements that show off the “idea” of the kit. How it is different for others and how users can expect to use it.

In the early hours of March 22nd, the new site went live.

The Result

Old Site
Jan 1st — Feb 28th: $142
Mar 1st — Mar 21st: $0

New Site
Mar 22nd — March 30th: $408

That’s right. The week after the new site went live, I had made over 2x the amount I had made over the last 2 and a half months.

If we were to break it down to metrics, Jan and Feb made on average $71. March (despite the first 3 weeks making $0) made $408.

My first sales goal with simplekits is to make on average, one sale a day. Thanks to a carefully redesigned landing page, and a great week, it is looking closer than I initially thought.

Closing Thoughts

Is the site perfect? No way.
Is there more I could be doing? Absolutely
What’s next? Well, now my landing page feels in a good spot, I just need to start marketing it. I suck at marketing, and would love any ideas from fellow indies!

If any of you want to check out my Design System Kit, you can at www.simplekits.co

If you are interested on more indepth design tips, ways to improve your user experience or just want to keep up with other projects I am working on, consider following me on twitter