Building a design tool—whether it's a Figma plugin, a web-based SVG generator, or a full-fledged animation software—presents a unique challenge: your users have an incredibly high bar for aesthetics and user experience (UX). You are building tools for the most visually critical audience on the internet. For an indie developer or solo designer, competing with the marketing budgets of massive design corporations is impossible. However, the design community is naturally visual and highly engaged on social platforms. This makes 'building in public' the ultimate distribution strategy for design tools. When you build your tool in public, you transform the development process into a visual showcase. You share high-quality GIFs of complex canvas interactions, honest post-mortems of performance bottlenecks, and the iterative evolution of your UI. By documenting your journey on BuildInProcess, you don't just market the final product; you invite other designers into your creative process. They become your beta testers, providing critical feedback on typography choices and workflow friction before you launch. This transparency builds massive authority, turning skeptical designers into vocal advocates for your bootstrapped tool.
Design tools are inherently visual. Sharing a smooth animation, a clever color picker, or a beautiful UI interaction is highly shareable content. Building in public means your daily work automatically generates marketing assets that perform exceptionally well on visual platforms.
Designers are opinionated. If a workflow is clunky, they will tell you. By sharing early mockups and prototypes publicly, you crowdsource your UX testing to a highly skilled audience, ensuring your final product is intuitive and polished.
It's hard to convince users to try a new design tool. However, when you transparently share your unique angle—perhaps a focus on extreme performance, local-first data, or a highly specific niche like AI-assisted context design—you attract users who are frustrated with the limitations of the current monopolies.
By writing detailed, long-form articles about your design decisions, color theory, or vector mathematics, you position yourself as an authority. People buy tools from creators they respect.
We built the exact tools you need to share your journey without wasting hours on marketing.
Specific, concrete updates that actually drive engagement in this niche.
Don't just talk about the tool; show it. Post high-framerate screen recordings of your tool's core interactions. A satisfying drag-and-drop mechanic or a seamless zoom function is top-tier content.
Share the messy reality of turning your Figma designs into actual React or Tailwind code. Discussing the compromises you had to make bridging the gap between design and development is highly engaging.
Write long-form updates explaining your design system. Why did you choose a specific 8pt grid? Why did you select that specific sans-serif font? Design nerds love the minutiae.
Design tools must be fast. If you optimized your canvas rendering from 30fps to 60fps using WebGL or Rust, write a deeply technical post about it. Performance is a massive selling point.
Create scarcity. Share a link for 50 early beta spots. If users find a glaring bug, publicly acknowledge it, fix it rapidly, and thank them. Turning a negative experience into a positive, public interaction builds fierce loyalty.
How are you pricing it? A one-time lifetime deal or a monthly SaaS subscription? Share your pricing experiments and the conversion rates you are seeing from your landing page.
The central hub to document your design rationale, host technical deep-dives on your canvas architecture, and seamlessly cross-post visual updates to your audience.
The visual town squares. Driving engagement on these platforms back to your in-depth BuildInProcess articles is a proven growth loop for design tools.
If you are building a plugin, documenting your journey and engaging with the community forums is essential for gaining traction before you officially publish.
The building blocks of modern web design tools. Sharing your struggles and successes with these specific technologies attracts developer-designers to your audience.
Jim built a wildly successful image editing tool specifically for social media creators. By building in public, he constantly shared UI updates, pricing strategies, and user feedback, turning his tool into a staple for the indie hacker community.
Erwin built a browser extension for Tailwind CSS styling. By actively sharing his development journey and immediately incorporating feedback from other developers/designers on social media, he achieved rapid sustainability.
Pirijan built a spatial thinking and mind-mapping tool as an indie creator. He consistently shares new features through raw, unpolished demo videos, cultivating a dedicated following that appreciates the tool's unique, anti-corporate aesthetic.
Create your BuildInProcess profile. Write a post detailing the exact limitation in Figma or Sketch that forced you to start building your own tool.
Before adding any polish, post a video of your core engine working (e.g., just drawing a basic SVG shape). Prove the technical foundation exists.
Share a mockup of your tool's interface and explicitly ask your audience to tear it apart. This early validation saves hundreds of hours of coding.
Build a tiny, free feature of your main tool (like a quick gradient generator) and launch it to capture emails for your main product waitlist.
When you launch, share your daily metrics: traffic, conversion rate, and revenue. Transparently discussing the stress and exhilaration of launch week guarantees high engagement.
Yes, for generic tools. But there is massive opportunity in highly specialized, niche tools (e.g., 'a design tool specifically for email newsletters'). Building in public helps you find that specific niche.
Focus on the utility and performance. You don't need a pixel-perfect aesthetic if your tool saves a developer three hours a week. Document the time-saving aspect in public.
Lifetime deals are incredibly popular in the indie design community for early funding, but subscriptions provide sustainable MRR. Build in public and ask your audience what they prefer before committing.
UI can be copied; the community and the trust you build cannot. When you build in public, you become the face of the tool. Users will stay loyal to the authentic creator over a corporate clone.
While Twitter is great for quick GIFs, BuildInProcess allows you to pair your visual updates with the long-form context, technical deep-dives, and narrative structure required to truly educate and convert your audience.