Latest / Solopreneur Sessions with Fexingo: One-Person Businesses, Freelancing, and Independent Work / How a Solopreneur Built a 150k Side Project in 90 Days
Transcript
- Lucas: There's this persistent myth that building a significant side project requires you to quit your job, go all-in, and risk everything. But the story we're looking at today completely flips that script. Luna: I'm guessing this is the one about the designer who made a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in three months while working full-time? I saw that case study floating around. Lucas: Exactly. Her name is Megan, she's a graphic designer at a mid-size tech company, and in early 2026 she launched a pack of UI assets for Figma — specifically, dashboard components for SaaS products. Basic stuff like navigation bars, data tables, and metric cards. She listed it on Gumroad with two tiers: a ten-dollar basic pack and a fifty-dollar pro bundle that included editable source files and a custom color palette generator. Luna: And she hit a hundred and fifty thousand in revenue in ninety days? That's a massive number for a side project. Lucas: It is. But the interesting part isn't just the revenue — it's how she got there. She didn't have an existing audience. She didn't run ads. She didn't have a newsletter. She started with exactly zero followers on Twitter. The whole thing kicked off with a single post on a subreddit. Luna: Which subreddit? r/Figma? r/UI_Design? Lucas: r/SaaS. She posted a message saying something like, 'I built a set of dashboard components in Figma — here are five free samples if you want to download them.' No links to a paid product, just a Google Drive folder with five free components. She got about three hundred downloads in the first twenty-four hours. Then she followed up three days later with a second post: 'The full pack is now available on Gumroad for ten dollars as a launch discount.' Luna: So she used the free samples as a lead magnet. Smart. Did that convert well? Lucas: About twelve percent of the people who downloaded the free samples ended up buying the pack. That's around thirty-six sales from the subreddit, which is modest. But that wasn't the real engine. The real engine was a single tweet that went viral about a week later. Luna: What did the tweet say? Lucas: She posted a screenshot of a dashboard she designed using her own components, with the caption: 'Built this in 45 minutes using a Figma template I made myself. Link in bio if you want it.' It got picked up by a few big design accounts, and within three days it had over a hundred thousand impressions. That tweet drove about eighty percent of her total sales in that first month. Luna: That's the kind of luck you can't plan for, but also — she had the product ready and the link available. She was prepared for it. Lucas: Right. And she also had an email drip set up. If someone visited the Gumroad page but didn't buy, they could enter their email to get a freebie — a one-page guide on designing consistent UI. That triggered a seven-day sequence with three emails: a follow-up with a testimonial, a reminder that the launch discount was ending, and a final email with a case study of someone who built a dashboard using her pack. The conversion rate on that drip was about five percent. Luna: What was the breakdown between the ten-dollar pack and the fifty-dollar pro bundle? Lucas: Roughly seventy percent of buyers purchased the ten-dollar pack, but the thirty percent who bought the pro bundle accounted for about sixty percent of the total revenue. That's the classic tiered pricing dynamic — the basic tier gets the volume, the premium tier gets the value. Her average order value ended up being around twenty-two dollars. Luna: And she did this while working a full-time job. What did her schedule look like? I imagine she couldn't spend hours every evening on this. Lucas: She was very deliberate about time. She spent about two months building the components on weekends — maybe six to eight hours each Saturday and Sunday. She didn't work on it during the week at all. Then the last month was mostly the launch and the email setup, which she handled in short bursts after work. So total time investment was probably around sixty to seventy hours over three months. That's a pretty insane hourly return when you do the math. Luna: That's over two thousand dollars per hour if we're being generous with the time estimate. Which is bonkers. But it also raises the question: is this replicable? Or was she just lucky with the viral tweet? Lucas: There's definitely a luck component. Viral moments are inherently unpredictable. But here's the thing — she stacked multiple channels. The subreddit pre-sale, the email drip, the tweet. If the tweet hadn't popped off, she probably would have still made ten to twenty thousand dollars from the subreddit and organic Gumroad discovery, which is a solid side project. The viral tweet was the multiplier, but the foundation was still there. Luna: What about the product itself? Was it genuinely good, or was it just marketed well? I've seen plenty of mediocre templates make money on Gumroad. Lucas: From what I can tell, the quality was above average. She had a background in product design, so the components were well-organized, used auto layout properly, and included both light and dark mode variants. She also included a short style guide PDF. That attention to detail probably helped with word of mouth and the testimonials she featured in the email drip. Luna: So the lesson might be: build something genuinely useful for a specific niche, give away a sample to prove your quality, and then have a simple sales funnel ready. If one channel pops off, you're set. Lucas: Exactly. And the niche part is critical. She didn't build a generic 'UI kit.' She built dashboard components for SaaS, which is a very specific need that a lot of designers and founders have. People are willing to pay to save time on something that's narrow but high-value. Luna: If today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That kind of thing helps us keep doing deep dives like this one. Lucas: Yeah, genuinely. If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, that link is the simplest way to keep them going. No pressure, just an option. Luna: Alright, back to the story. One thing I want to dig into is the pricing strategy. She set the basic pack at ten dollars and the pro at fifty. Why not twenty and a hundred? Or even five and twenty-five? Lucas: She said in an interview that she based it on what she'd pay herself. She figured most individual designers or indie founders would be comfortable dropping ten bucks on a template without thinking twice. Fifty was the stretch price for people who wanted the extra stuff — the source files and the color generator. She tested it with a small group of friends first, and they confirmed the price points felt right. Luna: That's the kind of research a lot of solopreneurs skip. They just pick a number out of thin air. Lucas: Right. And she also used a scarcity tactic that actually made sense: the launch discount was only available for the first week. She set a hard deadline, and that created a small spike in purchases on the last day. About forty percent of the launch week sales came in the final twenty-four hours. That's the classic time-pressure effect but done with integrity — it wasn't a fake countdown that reset. Luna: Did she ever quit her full-time job after this success? Lucas: No. As of our recording date, June 4th, 2026, she's still working her day job. She told a newsletter that the side project income is nice, but she values the stability and the health insurance. She's considering launching a second pack later this year — maybe for mobile app UI — but she's not rushing. Luna: That's a healthy perspective. I think a lot of people would have quit the day job immediately and then blown the momentum. Lucas: Exactly. She's treating it as a side project, not a desperation play. And that mindset might actually be why it worked. She wasn't stressed about the revenue. She was just building something she enjoyed and sharing it. Luna: One last question: if someone listening wants to try something similar, what's the single most important step you think they should take? Lucas: Identify a very specific pain point in a community you're part of. Megan was in design communities and saw people constantly asking for dashboard templates. So she built exactly that. Don't try to solve a generic problem. Solve a specific one for a specific group. Then give away a small sample to prove you can deliver. That's the whole playbook right there. Luna: Yeah, I think that's the kind of advice that actually lands. Specific, actionable, and honest about the effort involved.