A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to share Shuffle's story at the start-up-related event called Aula Polska[1]. It has received incredibly positive feedback. It was because I talked about the role of luck in running start-ups.
I shared in it the three most fortunate situations that got us where we are and helped us grow to $50k monthly revenue, entirely bootstrapped.
[1] The presentation is in Polish, and you can watch it on YouTube (1:31:10 - 1:41:54).
I've been working on Shuffle for three and a half years. For the first two, I worked on it alone. You can find the first mention of Shuffle in this Hacker News post from Jan 4, 2019. The three cases described below occurred during this period.
Today the Shuffle team consists of 7 people, and every month we acquire around 350 new customers.
Shuffle has no external funding. That is the path we are now consciously following.
However, this is not how the story of our start-up began. My work experience mostly came from a fast-growing company. In 2009, I joined a company that grew to over 200 people in three years, including the technology team (that I managed) to over 30.
I thought there would be a lot of similarities here. Having already an MVP and first sales, I prepared a pitch deck and approached a few VCs.
Fortunately, I came across some smart people who told me it was nonsense.
And I say "fortunately" because three years ago I didn't know what I needed to build. If I had accidentally gotten that funding, I probably would have spent money and made the wrong product. Certainly different.
Shuffle editor works with four very popular technologies: Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS, Bulma, and Material-UI.
In 2019 I had the first editor for Bootstrap and two options to develop it further:
I chose the second option, and today, we are the beneficiary of that decision. I'm talking specifically about SEO here.
However, I chose it not because I knew SEO would be so important to us but because I was too weak a developer to build a better product myself.
It was easier for me to create four MVPs for different technologies than one super polished product.
Today, of course, the situation is very different, and that’s thanks to the people I brought on the team!
Michał, Patryk, Krzysztof, Krystian, Sławomir, and Weronika 👋
The idea for the visual editor from the beginning was that we give ready-made components (UX), and users style them themselves in the framework they know (Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap, Bulma, Material-UI).
Life verified that it's not that easy to build a nice layout (choose a color palette, fonts, assets, etc.).
In 2020, the developers of Tailwind CSS created a super popular library of components (Tailwind UI), and one of our users asked me if he could import them into our editor.
The conversation went roughly like this:
User: Do you have plans to make it easier in the future to import Tailwind UI components?
Dawid: Nope. It's not possible.
User: I want to ask you if you can proceed as "Company X" did with how they integrated Tailwind UI - they did exactly what I suggested yesterday.
Dawid: Nope. Too many legal issues.
User: I don't see any legal issue. You can not bundle it or base your product on it - that's all. You just make sure that your product is adapted to the market. We bought Tailwind UI to be able to use it, right?
Dawid: Okay! You convinced me.
I implemented the integration (at this point, Shuffle was a one-person company), and it gave me super valuable information, a killer insight!
People who uploaded this library exported the project from the editor much more often than people who only had my content.
Thanks to the user who “forced” me to create the integration, I changed my thinking about the product and what we should build.
The next decision was simple. I look for the best designer, and we create beautiful UI libraries ourselves. It worked pretty well!
Today, Shuffle is an online editor for people who don't have a design, don't have that expertise, but want to build a beautiful and functional website in a CSS framework they love. Simple.
We had a lot of luck, that’s true, and this is the main point here. However, three elements have increased the chances that this would work.
1. Senior MVP Developer on the team
In the described story, that was me. I’m not the best developer I know, but I can create experiments fast and iterate on them. If I had to ask freelancers, software houses, etc., to develop such experiments (new editors, integrations), this would not happen due to multiple reasons ($, time, etc.).
2. Product-Founder Fit
A situation in which you continue to work even though it makes no economic sense. If I had thought logically, I should give up on it after six months of work.
3. Platforms and Technologies
The third thing that worked super well was basing this product on already popular technologies (platforms). That doesn’t guarantee success, but it makes many things easier. SEO, getting your first users, etc.
Markets are telling us that a difficult situation lies ahead. Just remember, by not giving up too quickly, you still have a chance that you will hit upon something that really works! It took me two years to find it 😊
Good luck!
If you're interested in where we are now:
Try Shuffle Editor →
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