Entrepreneurship is f****** hard!

Almost every day, I see a post/video on "How I made $10K/20K/... in 1 week!". While I'm not saying they all are lying, but it doesn't give a realistic picture of building a business.

In my experience, entrepreneurship is f*** hard!

It took me 8 months to make my first dollar from the internet and 7 months after to make $3K+!

How did it begin?

At the start of 2024, I started my indie hacking journey. I was building random side projects, documenting everything on YouTube.

As I kept experimenting with some projects, I wanted to make them look unique. So I started looking into different design systems, and that’s when I discovered neo-brutalism and I instantly loved it.

I wanted to build my websites in that style, but couldn’t find any library that matched what I had in mind. So, I decided to build my own!

In September 2024, I made my first commit to what would later become RetroUI. At that time, it was simply an open-source passion project with no plans for monetization. A month later, I shared it publicly on YouTube. To my surprise, people actually liked it.

The project quickly hit around 100 GitHub stars in the first couple of weeks. Nothing crazy, but it felt validating that people were into it.

After that, I kept adding new components here and there, and RetroUI slowly continued growing. By early 2025, it had crossed 300+ GitHub stars.

Launching RetroUI Pro

As more people tried the open-source version, I wondered if anyone would pay for a premium version. In April 2025, I launched RetroUI Pro with only 30 UI blocks priced at a $99 lifetime fee.

I honestly had zero expectations. But to my surprise, I got one sale in the first month… and three more in the second. That was enough validation for me.

But the problem was, at that time, I was still juggling other projects and not putting much effort into RetroUI. So, as the launch hype wore off,  sales dropped back to zero the following month.

Meanwhile, my other projects weren’t going anywhere either.

So I made the call to scrap everything else and go all in on RetroUI. I publicly challenged myself to reach $100K in revenue with RetroUI and to post a weekly YouTube video documenting the journey.

Once I started putting all my focus on RetroUI, things began to move again. I started shipping more, posting more, and talking about RetroUI wherever I could on YouTube, X, and Reddit.

As of November 2025, RetroUI has:

• 1,000+ GitHub stars

• 31 Pro customers

• About 3,000+ dollars in total sales

  
  

  
  

Marketing & Growth

I’ve done zero paid marketing so far. Everything has been completely organic. 

Here are a few things that worked for me ↓

🧩 Being Open Source

All the core RetroUI components are free and open-source. People are much more likely to try, share, and even contribute to open projects, and that’s how RetroUI got its early users.

Those who are happy using just the core components stay on the OSS version, while people who need extra UI blocks, templates, and the Figma kit upgrade to RetroUI Pro.

Making content

As I mentioned earlier, I have been posting tech content on YouTube. Over the past 1.5 years, I posted 100+ videos!

Every now and then, I make a video on my channel where I can feature/talk about RetroUI. 

Example:

Building in public

When I started the $100K challenge, I decided to post one video every week, sharing everything I’m doing to reach the goal. 

Playlist Link

A lot of people discover me through these videos, and some of them check out my product and become users.

Being Active in tech communities.

I try to be active on Twitter/X tech communities, as that’s where many of my target customers are.

So whenever I’d find a discussion related to UI Libraries, I’d just engage there, and if there’s an opportunity, I’d just include my product link.

Keep Shipping!

There were plenty of moments when it felt like nothing was working. But every small update, every video, and every post slowly added up. And even now, after almost four months of starting the 100K challenge, I have only completed around three percent of the goal.

I still have a long way to go, so I keep reminding myself:

Keep shipping. The momentum always catches up eventually.