The UI designer who built a $50K-month template empire (and burned it all down)

The Concept‍

In 2016 I founded a company called "DesignIt", which was designed to create high-quality design templates and UI kits for Figma. Think "Material design dashboard kit for $49" or "Themed iOS components you could drag and drop into your prototype."

Yes, it’s almost exactly what companies like UI8 or ThemeForest do today, but this was before they looked into Figma (you can be too early...). It was a fantastic business idea that I completely destroyed.

I was a UI designer by trade, grinding away at freelance projects in coffee shops, my laptop cluttered with layers of half-finished wireframes. The design world was shifting: Figma was eating Sketch’s lunch, and designers were desperate for templates. I saw it clearly: no one was building reusable, pixel-perfect design systems for the new generation of tools.

So I quit my contract gigs, maxed out credit cards, and started cranking out kits.
Minimalist landing pages. Mobile and desktop templates. Neumorphic buttons. Smooth floating shadows everywhere. Everything designers needed to fake productivity while their bosses thought they were design gods.

I wasn’t trying to build a company. I was trying to redesign everything and pack into set of editable screens. And this turned into obsession quickly.

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The Funding

‍Initially, I planned to bootstrap DesignIt: no investors, just pre-orders and true grind. But when I moved to San Francisco from Portland, I stumbled into a crowd of angels and VCs who’d later become the backbone of "DesignTech Valley." They were hungry for the next big thing, and I had traction.

You have to understand, these meetings didn’t go "kinda well." They went "holy-fuck-why-aren’t-we-collaborating-yesterday" well.

When I pitched to Marissa Chen (a designer-turned-angel who’d sold her startup to InVision), she cut me off mid-sentence and said, "How can I wire you $200K tonight?" She introduced me to Raj Patel (now a partner at Design Capital), who asked, "How can I get a seat at the table?". I ended up in a Zoom call with Kamran Pourzanjani’s brother Ali (who’d exited a 3D modeling tool for Blender users), and he said, "How can I invest?"

I was a nobody with a Medium and a Dribbble profile. No pedigree. No network. Just screenshots of templates that sold out in 48 hours.
They saw the future: Figma would dominate, and DesignIt would be its unofficial app store.

That led to a $1.5M seed round from firms like Index Ventures, NEA, and a raft of angels who’d missed the boat on Adobe’s Creative Cloud. We called it "the nuclear option." We hired a CFO at 24. We rented a penthouse office overlooking the Salesforce Tower. I was the king of the DesignIt castle, and the throne was made of hi-end components.

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The Business‍

It turns out when you sell a Marketing dashboard that looks exactly like the real thing, people want it. A lot of them.

We hit $500K in sales in our FIRST QUARTER - this was 2017, when most designers still used Photoshop. The kit went viral. Twitter threads dissected its layer structure. Indie Hackers wrote thinkpieces about "the DesignIt paradox."

If you’re an investor, and you hear your portfolio company just printed a half-million dollars without a sales team, you lose your mind. I got invited to speak at Web Summit. I was featured in Wired as "the guy who made design lazy." I rented a Tesla and parked it in front of my apartment like a trophy. We hired several contractors to keep up with template demand.

The roadmap was insane: grinding UI kits for every niche, versions for Framer & Webflow, even a plugin that turned Figma frames into ready-made React templates overnight.

But here’s the problem: I didn’t follow Figma’s updates fast enough.

Figma was moving at warp speed. New vector networks. Auto-layout overhauls. Variants. Every time they dropped a feature, our UI kits broke. Our iOS templates? They relied on old component nesting tricks that got deprecated. Our dashboards? Their auto-layout magic clashed with Figma’s new constraints system.

Fixing one kit took days. Fixing all of them? A Sisyphean nightmare.

I thought we could out-hustle it. Hire more contractors. Work longer hours. But the updates kept coming. Worse, competitors started automating their template upgrades using Figma’s API. We were hand-coding ours.

Our backlog grew. Customers demanded refunds. Reviews called us "lazy" and "outdated".

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The Market

‍By 2018, two things happened that I never saw coming.

First, Figma released "Community Templates" - a free, built-in version of what we sold. It wasn’t as polished, but it was legal, faster to duplicate, and updated in real-time by thousands of designers. Second, a class-action lawsuit hit me from a designer who recognized her stolen illustration as a placeholder in one of my templates. She’d never signed anything. I’d never asked permission.

We went from being the darling of Design Twitter to a legal piñata. Investors panicked. My lead angel, Ali, stopped returning calls. The contractors quit when they heard we couldn’t pay them. I was funding template licenses out of my own pocket, convinced the Community Templates were a temporary hiccup.

I’d even hired a lawyer to fight the lawsuit, thinking we’d win and get back to growth.

I was wrong.

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The Model‍

The second twist was... piracy.

I discovered it when a fan of DesignIt’s kits (some 19-year-old in Pakistan) posted a Reddit thread titled “I Reverse Engineered the Orion Template and Put It on GitHub for Free.” I scrolled through the comments, stunned. Hundreds of replies. Upvotes in the thousands. People calling him a “hero” for “democratizing design.” My blood boiled. We’d spent 300 hours perfecting that Shopify kit. He’d stolen it, stripped the layers, and resold it for $1.99 on Gumroad.

Then it got worse.

A chineese developer scraped our entire library and uploaded it to a pirate site called Design Rip. Our material dashboard? $0.99. Our unbeatable Figma charts templates? $0.49. Even our dating app UI (now the bane of my existence) was being used in phishing scams. The same week, a Discord server called #DesignItLeak popped up, hosting cracked versions of our premium kits.

I grew up poor, working odd jobs to pay for my first Wacom tablet. My mother cleaned houses to fund my art school tuition. And now? I was watching strangers profit off my work while I scrambled to justify my burn rate to investors. The irony hit me like a Macbook to the chest: I’d built a tool to empower designers, and it became a buffet for freeloaders.

We tried everything. DMCA takedowns. Legal threats. Even hiring a sketchy “cybersecurity consultant” who promised to “poison the pirated files” with tracking scripts. None of it worked. The leaks multiplied. Competitors started bundling our stolen assets into their own packs, claiming ignorance.

One investor joked, “At least they’re spreading your brand.” I wanted to punch him.

Sales cratered. From $50K/month to $6K in six weeks. Customers didn’t care if a template was stolen, they cared if it was cheap. Our contractors quit when they saw the revenue dip. My lead designer, who’d once called me a “visionary”, sent a final email: “Bro, I can’t work on this anymore. Everyone’s using the cracked versions anyway.”

I was trapped. Fixing the piracy problem meant rebuilding our entire distribution model: locking files behind paywalls, adding watermarks, or suing broke students in Eastern Europe. But by then, I was too proud to pivot. Too ashamed to admit I’d built a product that could be copied faster than it could be sold.

The pirates weren’t even hiding. They’d tag us in their posts. “Check this free DesignIt clone!” They wanted us to see it. To know we’d been gutted.

And we had.

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The Wind Down‍

If there’s anything I want you to take from this story, it’s the humiliation of collapse.
I’d been the "Design It" guy—a meme on Hacker News, a hero to bootstrappers. And then I was a ghost.

Investors stopped inviting me to their Slack channels. At design mixers, people pretended they didn’t recognize me. I’d walk into Figma’s office hours, and their engineers would freeze mid-conversation. The CFO I’d hired in Month 3 ghosted me after I asked for an emergency runway analysis.

I spent every waking hour for the next 20 months trying to pivot. We launched a SaaS tier. We built a template marketplace. We even partnered with a sketchy SEO company to game Google’s search rankings. Nothing worked. Figma’s Community Templates sterilized the market. The lawsuits drained cash. And the scammers? They pirated our designs anyway.

One night, after a three-day coding binge to fix our broken plugin, I got a call from Marissa, the first investor to write me a check. She said, "We never thought this would scale to unicorn status. We just wanted to bet on you." Then she paused. "But you stopped listening to anyone. You kept building templates for a world that didn’t exist anymore."

She was right.

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The Release‍

I pulled the plug on DesignIt in 2020. I called the remaining investors into a Zoom room. My hands shook as I clicked "share screen." I’d written a 30-page deck explaining the failure. I wanted them to understand. To forgive.

But the lead investor, Raj, stopped me. "Bro, we closed this chapter two years ago. Honestly, we’re surprised you kept going."

The emotional weight collapsed like a bad flexbox. They didn’t care. They’d written off the $1.5M and moved on to back a guy who taught AI to generate logo animations. The press? They didn’t cover DesignIt’s death. My contractors had already left for rival startups. Even the scammers had moved on to Webflow exploits.

I sat there. The silence was louder than any tweetstorm.

Then I laughed. Because I realized what they’d known all along: I’d spent two years trying to resurrect a corpse, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn’t admit defeat.

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The Takeaway‍

At the time, DesignIt’s collapse felt like a career death sentence. I was 34. I’d burned all the profits. I couldn’t look at Figma without nausea. I sold my Tesla to pay back a friend. I moved into a roommate’s basement.

But here’s the twist: No one remembers DesignIt.

I’ve spoken at conferences since. I’ve mentored founders. I’ve even used my old UI kits in client projects (no one notices).
The investors who backed me? They’re still in my corner, because failure isn’t fatal in Silicon Valley. It’s a tax.

The losses sucked. But they were a moment. What matters is what you do after.

Today, I run a tiny design studio. We bill $50/hour. I don’t chase trends. I don’t sell templates. But when a young designer asks me how to avoid my mistakes, I say two things:

1. If you’re building for everyone, you’re building for no one. DesignIt’s templates appealed to thousands of freelancers in 2016-2018. By 2019, Figma’s Community Templates appealed to 2 million. You can’t out-granola bar a platform with free tools.
2. Your product is never neutral. I told myself DesignIt was just a tool, but tools have consequences. If you’re going to build something that affects users, know what that means.

The worst part of DesignIt’s failure wasn’t losing money.
It was realizing how much of my identity I’d tied to a product that was fundamentally a mirage.

But here’s the kicker: The same week I shut down DesignIt, I got an email from a 19-year-old in Jakarta. He wrote, "Your material design template taught me how to design. I’m now at Gojek."

I cried.

Not because of the failure.

Because someone still cared.

Because DesignIt wasn’t a total loss.

Because even in the rubble, there’s a story worth telling.

Because sometimes you have to lose everything to remember why you started in the first place.

And that, I guess, is the real design system. The one that doesn’t break when the market shifts. The one built for people, not just pixels.

The End