How this solopreneur monetized the right product after multiple wrong successes
Archive Date: February 22, 2018
Part 1 of an interview with UX/UI designer and solopreneur, James Tang, creator of the Sketch plug-in Magic Mirror (now Magic Sketch). This interview was conducted in Cantonese, with the English version is a translation with approval from James. Part 1 covers James’ journey in experimenting with ways to generate income after leaving a paid job in Hong Kong’s startup scene.
18 months of experimentation to become income independent
Back in 2014, James had Carshare, a growing blog following, but no income. Within 2 years, he had developed a product, Magic Mirror, that generated enough income to be a full-time job. Though the road to building a Sketch plug-in evolved naturally, it was not obvious at the time. When James had quit his job, he had the general goal of being location independent and achieving a work-life balance. With 20-20 hindsight, sat down to discuss his process of learning from others, mastering, reflecting, and pivoting that helped him decide what to try, stop, and continue until he found product people would pay for.
Find a counterpart and become a part-time apprentice
Most entrepreneurs are told to think of a product first and content is only a marketing tool. You went the other way around and created content before you got to your products. Why is that?
I met Meng To, the UI / UX designer who wrote DesignCode, when we were working at a startup called Carshare together. He is an incredible UI/UX designer who helps other designers think technically using Swift and XCode. After we both moved on from Carshare, I helped revise part of his book about iOS development and UX design. It gave me a taste of how someone could successfully market and monetize their knowledge as a product. That’s when I began experimenting with my own blog. At the time, Medium was an up-and-coming blogging platform that was free, well-designed, and easy to use.
Riding the wave with a different spin
So you didn’t think too much about what types of blogging platforms to use?
If writing is like a product, then the blogging platform is the tool. Choosing the right one for your needs is important. I tried a lot of platforms and was looking for something that could use markdown (a plain text formatting syntax meant for export to HTML and other platforms) conveniently. I tried Ghost, Silvrback, Svbtle. I’d also considered a self-hosted Jekyll blog. In the end, I kept most of the content on Medium.
James shares his lifestyle experiments on Medium.
For technical writing, there are better platforms than Medium that have more markdown features.
Yes, but Medium is beautifully designed for reading and writing, and as a UX/UI designer, that matters to me. At the time, Medium was becoming popular, but there wasn’t much technical stuff written yet. I starting writing about iOS development because that’s what I knew and I was treated it like a public diary of things I was working on or learning. My technical pieces became a hit and my Medium followers, who could see my integrated Twitter account, started following me on Twitter as well.
Meng was able to monetize because he knew his audience. He wrote for designers who wanted to code iOS apps. I wrote from the opposite perspective — for developers who want to understand and learn design hacks.
Start with a learning attitude before thinking about growth
Would it be fair to say that you only thought about growth after you started a new project? Yes, in my blogging and later products, I started because I wanted to try something. It was enough for me to finish a project or document my work in my blog, and in the beginning I didn’t have many followers.
Of course I had generating income at the back of my mind when I started because I saw how Meng did it firsthand. But I realised I had a lot to learn about writing for the web after I started. I was lucky because I could learn directly from him for things like linking back to his content, choosing pricing, and engaging the online community throughout the process of writing an e-book.
I also read a lot of articles explaining content marketing and blogging. I developed my Medium blogs based on trial and error and learned from other blogs, like my favourite technical writers. The best learnings were content from people that I knew, like Meng and Lifehack.org, content platform and company that another Hong Kong serial entrepreneur, Leon Ho, built from a personal blog. Knowing the people behind the product helped me see the effort that went into the content. Also, both of them are single founders, which is similar to how I work as a freelancer.
What were some of the blog tips you picked up?
- Write good, useful content
- Create a high resolution cover image
- Write in point form
- Write a catchy title, but don’t be over the top or misleading
- Again, write good content – concisely
So you were writing for a hypothetical audience before you attracted your 1000+ Twitter following. As more people began to follow me – once I had 500+ Medium followers – I began profiling them on Twitter. Before that, I didn’t give myself the pressure to “growth hack” my publication. But once I had a more significant number, I knew people liked my stuff and I wanted to get know the community. Most of my readers were technical, so I got more engaged on Twitter to learn about things that other technical people would like. That’s like getting user feedback to get inspiration for the next feature for the next iteration of a startup app.
Creating products that go with your learning flow
James could often be found by the espresso machine at Blueprint HK, a coworking space run by Swire Properties.
So how did you choose what to teach yourself and share for iOS development and how did that end up leading to actual apps?
Like many developers, I learn using open-source libraries and also open-source my own development projects. Writing and building features or even apps can go together once you get used to writing. At one point, I got really interested in creative UI/UX, navigation and gestures like the sidebar menu in the Facebook app, and pinch to create tasks in the Clear todo list app. Just before or around the release of Facebook 2.0 and Clear, my libraries were the earliest open-sourced projects that successfully mimicked their gestures. That library grew my followers from 10 to 300. You could say one of my first lucky breaks was building a product a the right time, so other developers discovered me. Once they did, they also discovered I wrote about my learnings as a developer.
How did you find inspiration for the products you were working on? Do you remember the MVP startup craze, when people created teaser videos with conceptual products to test out a market reaction before building? (Check this list of 5 MVP Startups)
James catching up with a fellow developer in Hong Kong.
Basically, I was following those videos, and some concepts seemed to fun to try. From a UX/UI designer’s perspective, loved the seamless transition in Pinterest, fancy bouncing menu in Path, and the highly realistic textures and UI effects in Camera+. I wanted to try recreating them myself. So you could say I practiced creating products or features by reverse engineering them, and building my own open-source version.
What would be your advice to someone else starting out alone? Stick with what you like. There’s so much stuff out there, and such limited time. Share your thoughts and let others know through blogging and tweeting. It’s better to go niche.
Leveraging and pivoting are skills that need practice too
You were associated with a recognized UX designer, Meng, had growing followers and contributed solid content to the dev community. Could you leverage all of that by the time you came up with a product? I tried to, but I failed. Because I was already contributing to Meng’s book, which sold well, I figured I could try writing a book of my own. I tried to build my content ecosystem by using a concrete iOS app as an example. I had experience blogging, writing a book, and writing iOS apps. Plus, I wanted readers to learn iOS design, development and promotion through a hands-on project (an new app I built).
What product example did you write with? At the time, I was interested in productivity and had a desktop app on Mac App Store, so I adapted the Pomodoro Timer concept. It was the year Apple released the Apple Watch, so I made an iOS app that supported the iPhone and the Apple Watch.
The Pomodoro Timer app developed for Apple Watch Series 1 would be later rebranded as the iOS app “Today”. Image courtesy of James Tang
How did the writing go? Making the application turned out to be much more work than I originally expected. The app was simple, but it was really difficult to have one working example that would use all the technical topics I wanted to cover in a cohesive way. I decided to finish my app and see how well it did in the App Store before continuing writing the e-book. In the end, I stopped writing.
So about a year in, you had a decent following and a failed product. I put in some in-app purchases to monetize my Pomodoro app, but it didn’t seem like it was going to have sustainable revenue. I knew I had to find another product to generate income.
How did you take your learnings and improve on your next product? I didn’t exactly sit down and think: ‘What next startup product should I do next?’ I’m a developer who loves design and products, but at the same time I needed to earn a living. I’m not looking to build a startup team and raise investment funds.
But building the Pomodoro Timer app gave me insight into another pain point. I used Sketch for design, and there was a missing feature that I really wanted. I did some research and noticed that other competing design tools offered that feature, but no-one was trying to solve that for Sketch, which is now one of the most popular tools for UI / UX design and mockups. That’s when I knew I had something I wanted to explore.
Basically, I wanted a tool that could do perspective transformation to do mockups (think of someone holding an iPhone at an an angle versus facing the screen). This existed in other platforms, which means that designers probably use it (market validation). But the growing Sketch community didn’t have it. As a developer, I wanted to solve my own problem and this time, unlike the Pomodoro App, I had a clear potential set of customers.
In the end, it worked out.