In this episode, Alex, a Romanian developer, tells the tale of how he and his friends grew their small side project into a $17,000 a month business. In the beginning, they were coding in a Starbucks. Now their team has grown, they've sponsored 20 hackathons around the world, and business is booming. Here's their story. Written by Alexandru Paduraru: http://twitter.com/axelut Read by Quincy Larson: https://twitter.com/ossia Original article: https://fcc.im/2F5yfQX Learn to code for free at: https://www.freecodecamp.org Intro music by Vangough: https://fcc.im/2APOG02 Transcript:  In 2014, my friends and I set out to build the best possible web design tools. We built UI kits, Admin Dashboards, Templates, and Plugins. We’ve always tried to create products that are helpful in the development process, and that we ourselves would use for building websites for clients. From a revenue’s perspective, if we don’t take into consideration the Black Friday sales (which doubled the amount that we made in November 2016), we are grossing around $22,000 per month. Part of that goes toward paying our affiliates’ commissions, collected VAT, payment vendors’ taxes, and other expenses. We end up netting around $17,000 each month. In this case study, I’ll share exactly how we built our products and grew our business. You’ll hear all about: What motivated us to start our startup, Creative Tim, and how we built our initial product How we got our first users Marketing strategies we used to grow How our business model works The story behind our revenue sources Biggest lessons we’ve learned so far 1. What motivated us to get started with Creative Tim and how we built the initial product We started out as a two-person agency in Romania with no funding from third parties. We didn’t have enough cash to rent an office — even desks at a co-working space —so we just worked out of a Starbucks. We were barely able to pay our daily living expenses by doing work for clients. Creative Tim was a side project that we thought would come in handy to web developers like ourselves. We noticed that we were always “reinventing the wheel” when working with clients, and creating the same items over and over again for their websites. So we wanted to create a few standard components, like login and register modals, calendars, wizards, headers, and footers. Over the span of a few months, we dedicated our time to implementing the platform and a few freebies (alongside the agency work). In the beginning, we didn’t have any Twitter followers, Facebook fans, or email list subscribers. We posted a lot of stuff about our freebies on various design forums and we used the “stalk web developers on Twitter” technique to spread the word about our products. 2. How we got our first users At first, nobody really understood what we wanted to do. They didn’t understand the value we could provide by helping them improve their businesses. We decided that it would be better to create a more complex product that would help people understand what we were doing ? We launched the Get Shit Done Kit, a UI Kit based on Bootstrap. It was featured on Designer News, and it was quite popular. We got over 11,000 users from that source, which was a huge spike for our business. Then two weeks later our startup was featured on Product Hunt. That gave us another spike with over 5,000 users. After that, the situation was stable, and we graduated from 0 users/week to a consistent 2,000 to 3,000 users/week. A couple of months later, motivated by the success of free Get Shit Done Kit, we released Get Shit Done Kit PRO the premium version of GSDK, with more components and ready-to-use example pages. Initially, we only made a few sales. The product was generating about $200/week, which was not nearly enough to sustain our business. At the same time we were working on a web project for one of our clients. Then in December, we got published on Bootstrap Expo, the most popular gallery for showcasing websites created with