Design Business: How to Make Money on UI Kits

Design tools are at war – let’s discuss it with experts. Today we talk to Dmitry Bunin, a UX designer and author of the Frames UI kit. He’s shared his vision of the good design tools, the niche ones, and the useless. Also, we’ve asked about his sources of inspiration as well as places to sell and promote designs.

Best UI Kit

I’ve made more than $50k selling my Frames UI kit. It’s more than 1K licenses sold.

 

Monthly Revenue

Is it possible to bring home the bacon this way? From a single product, a person like me can do $5-8k per month, and I believe many people out there are doing much more; I’d like to mention Meng To and UX Power Tools as examples.

This kind of “asset” design field really favors the constancy of efforts the one can put in a product. Just like the design tools that keep evolving and getting better, the assets and their value are increasing especially in the UX/UI field.

Maximizing the Revenue

In general, the sales depend on

• Provided value
• Impact
• Category
• Visual style
• Functionality
• Many other things you invest time in.

You can strike hard in many different spots, like a presentation, a YouTube video, cool article. These are the things that will help your product stand out.

Sales really differ from the frequency and quality of your social media nukes, updates, and articles.

Here’s what UX Power Tools said on the matter:

We looked at the already-very-saturated UI kit market and realized why we never buy them. UI kits are highly stylized and damn-near impossible to customize. Holy crap, we found our calling:
A UI kit geared toward efficient, scalable, and sustainable UX design.

Christian Beck, UX Power Tools

I would like to add that as long as you continue to stay content-oriented and do it regularly you can have good results with any kind of digital product. The concomitant content is really important at long-term perspective, skills like writing and video editing are really helpful to make the best impact on the design audience.

Design Marketplaces

There’s a bunch of marketplaces: Creative Market, UI8, Envato, etc. How would you rate them? Which ones generate the money?

I think the best marketplace is your own website, but in terms of achieving your goals and making the first move, I would just go for all of them at once.

From my experience:

– Envato Elements is the best, generating $200-300/month
– UI8 is a close second with $100-300/month
– Creative Market still manages to generate a bit less profit, $0-100/month

You can easily analyze the results of those markets at the end of the first month since they all have the same monthly payment schedule.

I think it’s important to understand that you need to spend less time on those platforms and more on your products. Try to always eliminate the repetitive work. For example, designing your product presentation just make one template and reuse it for every market where you will place it.

Design Tool Race

As Vladimir Kudinov said, the fashion in the area of UX kits changes so frequently. You end up updating and updating, like in a hamster wheel. Quite pessimistic, huh.

I think the design tool race is a very interesting thing: you can observe and participate as a maker or designer. Competition is the main reason why the UX tools are gaining popularity among product teams.

While we as designers master a bunch of software from Macromedia to InVision Studio, the whole industry is requiring us to constantly learn new software and stay competitive. Moreover, the tools shape us as designers, so I find it useful to master them, just like a good old sword, with a grip you know, to slice down the daily routine tasks. Which at some point helps you to be better and faster than other designers, especially the ones that have to keep inventing the same wheel from project to project.

How to Launch a UI Kit

There are various channels to launch your UI kits:

• ProductHunt
• Sketch App Sources
• Dribbble
• Behance, and probably many more.

Hitting all of them or at least as many as you can is always the best choice.

ProductHunt

From my experience, ProductHunt is definitely number one in generating a strong weekly or even monthly traffic pump to your websites. This is a top opportunity for digital products like UI kits, icons, illustrations and etc to get worldwide attention.

Medium

Medium has truly become the platform of my choice over the past year since it manages to generate very good numbers and helps you to demonstrate your product in many ways, using words, pictures, videos or even audio files, and websites like Dribbble and Behance can only help to share images, with a very low retention rate.

Sketch File Sharing

Websites like Sketch App Sources and Sketch Repo to share free files with the community, which in return favors me with visits or purchases. I also do use Dribbble and Twitter to highlight products, files, articles, and all the stuff I do on the internet.

Conclusion

UI kits and other graphic design assets are a good source of passive income.

To launch your product, I recommend:

1. Making your own website. A must.
2. Launching at ProductHunt. This is a single best source of initial customers.
3. Launching on secondary websites such as UI8, Envato Elements, Creative Market, Sketch App Sources, and Sketch Repo.
4. Keeping work: write the articles on Medium, create YouTube videos, and yeah, the articles like this.

About the author: here we had a talk with Dmitry Bunin, a UX designer and author of the Frames UI kit.

Read an article about accessibility in UX design, check the practical definition of usability and review the most hated UI/UX patterns