I want someone with a background in design (both UI and UX) to create design resources targeted at developers.

The goal is not for us to become designers, but to create designs that are good enough to show to early users without embarrassing ourselves.

Put differently, I want enough skill to design products that can grow to the point where I can hire a freelance, professional designer.

Why I care about design as a developer

1. I want to build my own products quickly and without having to either pay thousands to a freelancer on an unprofitable idea, or try to “partner” with someone who may not be up for the slog of a startup/micro-saas.
2. When I used to freelance, my customers didn’t want to pay for a designer for the internal dashboards, but I wanted to still give them something that looked and felt professional enough.
3. When building internal tools for my W2 jobs, the ability to efficiently build well-designed tools would limit the need to bring staff designers into the process, and reflect better on me while helping us move faster.

Developers are willing to pay

There is a relatively large market of people who sell educational resources to developers, indicating a general willingness from developers (and their employers) to pay for education.

Wes Bos is likely the best example at the level of an individual creator + a small team. One of his courses, Fullstack Advanced React and GraphQL claims to have 31,000 sales at a price of $82.

In my experience, this pricing is actually on the low end of developer resources, and given that developers normally charge $100+/hour, it’s easy to justify this expense if something saves even an hour or two.

The Competition

The excellent Refactoring UI is basically the only prominent “design for developers” resource nowadays; their site claims to have sold 20,000 copies of the book, which start at $100 for “The Essentials”.

Refactoring UI was written by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger, who also who designed TailwindCSS, which spawned TailwindUI (their paid product). TailwindUI started as predesigned components and has recently added fully designed templates.

I’ll expand on this idea in the next section, but Adam and Steve’s work is, in my opinion, the strongest validation of the demand for better design resources.

The Opportunity

RefactoringUI, TailwindCSS, and TailwindUI are all addressing this problem via low-touch solutions that lower the bar for accessible design resources. This is valuable, but not sufficient to become a competent designer/developer.

Their tools and resources address the issue broadly; the opportunity exists to address design education deeply.

The best education involves regular feedback, and this is where I think the big opportunity exists to provide paid feedback while also creating content you can share publicly.

Things you can do that I would pay for:

1. Product feedback videos. This can be public or private. I’d happily pay $30-50 for you to do a 10-minute breakdown video of my existing products and give constructive feedback.
2. Similar to the product feedback, I’d happily pay for a short video coaching session where we discuss a design challenge I’m trying to work through.
3. Cohort-based coaching. I’d pay $300-500 for a 6-8 week course where each week we discuss a different aspect of design, apply the principles in our own work, and share with each other and the instructor for feedback.
4. Private coaching. This one is self explanatory, and is probably out of my price range, but there’s likely demand here, which is worth mentioning.