Can you introduce yourself and describe your journey into indie-making and entrepreneurship?
My name is Benten. By day, I work as a Senior Web Designer at Bunsen, a design agency for science and deep tech companies. Outside of my day job, I am building a web design and development studio on nights and weekends called NOOON Studio. I’ve also been getting really into side projects lately, like co-founding an inspiration website focused on footers (footer.design, building a small community of designers sharing their work every week (daretoshare.design), and creating a web design course (introtoweb.design).
I've been freelancing since I landed my first client in 2013, but I've only gotten into side projects within the last six months or so. I used to think side projects were a waste of time if they weren't actively making money, but I've found incredible value in the network I've built as a result, and getting to build cool things with friends is tough to beat.
Benten Woodring
What inspired the idea behind your product?
Footer came as a result of a need I had as a web designer. I've always struggled to design footers and was looking for inspiration and discovered a dedicated inspiration site for footers didn't exist. After shooting out a Tweet asking if I should build it, I got connected with Matt Cram and Devin Fountain, and we got started on building a site dedicated to footer inspiration. Just a few weeks after meeting, we launched the site and footer submissions started pouring in.
Can you share some achievements that highlight the success of your product?
Within a week of launching, we were featured in Fast Company, which was pretty wild. Who knew a site about footers would get that kind of attention?
Today, seven months in, we've crossed 200 posts on the site, have over 1,000 email subscribers and 2,800 followers on Twitter. We have yet to monetize our product (aside from maybe $10/mo from ads), but we are dedicated to keeping this resource free for everyone to use.
We've had many copycats, even including large inspiration sites who have taken our content and put it behind a paywall. We are still pushing out new, curated footer designs every week, for free.
What's your tech stack?
One approach I've been sticking to religiously is to get to MVP as fast as possible. The biggest obstacle to any new venture is momentum, and taking a lot of time to perfect something typically ends in not ultimately launching something.
I like to build in public and share half-baked ideas on Twitter and see what gains traction. Rather than building something no one wants, I crowdsourced domain name ideas, and found my team through Twitter. I also shared updates regularly with designs in progress, which helped us gather more ideas as we started building.
Matt Cram and I designed the site in Figma, and Devin Fountain brought it to life in Webflow. We only had a few iterations before we landed on something we liked, and worked as quickly as we could to go live.
What challenges have you faced?
We were one of the first hyper-specific design inspiration sites out there. OG Image Gallery and Rebrand were the only niche sites around when we first launched. Now there are tons of niche inspiration sites, which is exciting, including navbar.gallery, deck.gallery, storefront.design, and 404s.design, which was actually built using a cloneable of Footer that we launched last year so others could easily create their own inspiration sites.
Any "competition" we've had, if you could call it that, are other established inspiration sites claiming our content as their own and putting it behind a paywall. We are still the original footer inspiration site, and we all know the Oscar Wilde quote: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness." Needless to say, we aren't bothered by it.
Can you share a pivotal moment or milestone in your journey that significantly impacted your product's success?
Collaborating with our design community when we launched on Twitter was our biggest success. We worked closely with designers with larger followings to help promote our launch, like Grace Walker and Fons Mans, among many others. Our launch announcement spread like wildfire, which I think is what lead to us being featured by Fast Company.
What strategies have you used for growth and engagement?
We just post consistently. Some inspiration sites only publish every few weeks, or even more infrequently. We do our best to post every day if we can, if not at least a few times a week. We are all doing this outside our day job and client work, but we are dedicated to providing as much value as possible to the design community as we are able with this little project.
How do you see your product evolving in the future?
I would love to make the designers featured on our site easier to find and get hired by potential clients. We have early iterations of designer profiles and ideas for a job board that we would love to build out sometime. We also have a newsletter that I would love to be more consistent with. Our last newsletter featured an exclusive interview with legendary designer Brijan Powell hosted by Devin, which was a treat to read and listen to. I would love to do more of those, more consistently in the future.
What advice would you give to aspiring indie makers and creators looking to launch their own products?
I actually wrote up an entire outline for a talk on this exact topic that I submitted for Config (which I was not selected for). I've learned so much in the last six months and would condense my learnings into a few points:
- Launch quickly
- Have fun
- Find friends to build with
- Build in public
- Get feedback from your users and audience
- Continually iterate
- Leverage your network
- Don't take things too seriously
If you enjoyed this creator story, be sure to follow their journey and check out the products and tools that they're creating!
