How Components UI started: Sell your leftovers

Components UI started as a leftover.

At the end of 2019 I was working on a community around entrepreneurs in my country. I reached out to my network to find out people that were interested in joining this community. The main purpose was to share lessons learned and resources of building a business in our country in a specific way. I found a some interest on the idea so I decided to push forward.

Once that idea was kind of validated by interviewing people, I decided to start building a landing page to explain the value proposition of the community and to add a "pay now" button at the end.

By that time I didn't want to focus on designing or building a super polished landing page. I just wanted to build it fast and ship it fast. I've been reading about a platform called Carrd.co that basically allowed you to build a one-page site for pretty much anything. I was sold. I joined Carrd and started to build the landing page.

Carrd has some templates for a lot of purposes but I didn't find one that fit my needs so I decided to start with a blank canvas and build it myself. I kept it simple and just added a hero section, a "features section" with the benefits of the community, a pricing table and a "frequently asked question" section. After a couple of days of refining the details I published the site and shared it with the people I interviewed before.

Some people joined the community but after a couple of months I shut the project down.

After the community project, I started to dabble with some other projects and found out I could use the same components I already had from the community landing page. Instead of building the new project from scratch, I could use the leftovers from the community project landing page and just modify the design, colors and text.

I shipped another small project and I noticed I kept coming back to the same components I had already built in order to launch a new landing page. That's when I realized that maybe some people were having the same problem when launching multiple projects. It clicked. I started to compile the components in one single Carrd project that I could re-use for multiple projects.

These components were in fact "leftovers" from another project that I could repackage and sell. That's how Components UI came to life.

There are a ton of examples of businesses or projects that came to life from a "leftover". One of my  favorites: Ruby on Rails — a programming framework — was a leftover from one of the founders of Basecamp. He used the framework to build their product but then found value in the framework, repackaged it and distributed online.

This "leftover" mentality also applies to the physical world. If you are a designing furniture for a client you might find that at the end of the process you are left with a lot of iterations of that furniture piece. The final piece might look different from those iterations so you could use those iterations (read: leftovers) and turn them into something else: a new furniture piece, a digital course on the process of designing furniture or maybe even proof of work for other clients.

If you can't come up with an idea for a new project you should look into your leftovers from other projects. You'll find out ideas that you can repackage and resell as a whole new different product. Here's proof that selling your leftovers works: