How a Weekend Side Project Became an $80K/Month Developer Tool
Manu Arora turned a hobby of designing UI components into Aceternity UI, a copy-paste component library that hit $80K in revenue within two months of launching its paid tier, powered almost by word of mouth and Twitter.
Founder · X
Part of Solo founders
Business snapshot
Monthly revenue
$80K/mo
reported Oct 2024
- Business model
- Templates and digital assets
- Started
- Mar 2021
- Team
- Solo founder + 2 staff
- Based in
- Jaipur
- Pro revenue in 2 months
- $80k
- Monthly revenue range
- $60k - $100k per month
- Pro revenue last month
- $40k
- Services revenue last month
- $30k
- Monthly expenditure
- $5k/mo
Channels
Tools
- Next.js
- Tailwind CSS
- framer motion
- Vercel
- Twitter / X
- Product Hunt
- YouTube
Founder-reported figures, not independently verified.
Who built it, and what they built
Manu Arora is a developer based in Jaipur who runs Aceternity, a web design and development studio serving clients around the world. Alongside client services, he builds products aimed at web developers and founders.
His flagship product is Aceternity UI, a library of ready-made components that developers can drop into their landing pages. A paid tier, Aceternity UI Pro, serves the same audience of developers and founders.
He describes himself as a builder who wants the products he creates to eventually reach millions of people.
Where the idea came from
The idea emerged gradually. Manu had a personal habit of crafting polished components for his own projects, and he enjoyed explaining the process, so he began writing blog posts about designing beautiful code snippets.
Analytics told a clear story: readers were not finishing the blog posts. They wanted to grab working code and move on. He pivoted from tutorials to a direct copy-paste format.
The first version of Aceternity UI shipped with only 7 components. Past experience over-polishing products that nobody used had taught him to release early and gather feedback fast instead of perfecting in private.
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