Building Designpiq: Six Months In

Why I built this

I kept finding great design resources by accident. A tweet here, a Product Hunt launch there. There was no good place to just browse — no curated directory that felt like it was made by a designer.

So I built one.

Month 1–2: Building before launching

I spent the first two months building the product before telling anyone it existed. In retrospect, this was the wrong call. I over-built the ingestion pipeline and under-built the actual site.

The lesson: launch ugly and early. No one cares about your ingestion script.

Month 3: The first real traffic

A post on a design forum drove the first meaningful traffic spike — around 400 sessions in a day. Most bounced. The ones who stayed were searching for specific tools (mockups, font bundles).

This told me search intent matters more than broad interest.

Month 4–5: SEO starts working

Category pages started ranking for long-tail queries. "figma mockup plugins", "free icon sets 2024" — not enormous volume, but consistent and compounding.

The product pages help here too. Each one is a dedicated URL for a specific tool, which gives Google something to index.

Month 6: What I would do differently

Three things:

1. Launch earlier. Build the MVP in four weeks, not eight.
2. Fewer categories, more depth. A directory with 20 great mockups beats one with 200 mediocre ones.
3. Email list from day one. I waited too long to add a newsletter. It is the only channel you own.