When did this begin?

Culrs was started way back in 2016. We were in the latter half of our 3rd year of Engineering. We didn’t enjoy the theoretical textbook-education of college and wanted to venture into the practical side. We began working on this idea to build the first version of the product. We got hunted on Product Hunt and made it to the 2nd Top Product of the Day on December 10, 2016. We never anticipated that a product we built for experimenting would garner so much attention. Culrs went viral and was featured on several platforms, and we were enjoying the taste of fame that came with it.

However, by the end of our 3rd year, we had jobs to focus on. So, Culrs had to take a backseat while we began interning at startups. Getting internships wasn’t too hard, given the prior experience of a couple of freelance design projects that we did. Meanwhile, I and Rupak kept tabs on the trends in the design industry, training ourselves to be prepared for our future ventures.

And then we graduated and moved on to full-time jobs.

We always had Culrs in the back of our mind. We enjoyed the process of making it and were yearning to get back to it as soon as the right moment hit. And once we were stable with our jobs, it was time to go back to our lovely little side-project. The time came in November 2018.

Testing the MVP

When we first launched the product 2 years ago, the idea was to categorize palettes based on emotions, types of products, etc. In the downtime of Culrs, as we worked with different companies, getting more and more experienced in the field of design, our tastes changed. We got a solid understanding of how visual works, and we learned what it takes to come up with a good illustration or a layout, using colors as a medium.

So what was our strategy this time around? We had to revive a product we built 2 years ago! We couldn’t come back in the market with the outdated version of the product. The site needed a solid revamp. And that’s what we did. Our vision was to let the user focus on the craft while we took care of one part of their art, colors.

We realized that the site had to be more professional, with solid reasoning on what we were trying to cater to our user. So, we redesigned the website to meet today’s standards and updated the color palettes to align it with color theory. Our color palettes are now calculated based on the color wheel. What we created was an MVP. And then we began the process that helped us make the product that you see today. Testing the MVP.

Feedback, feedback, and more feedback!

Soft Launches was our way to go! This gave us insights about the aspects of the product that would or would not work and the improvements we needed to make in our MVP to turn Culrs into a full-fledged product before we launched publicly. We collected feedback from various channels like:

Drift: This is a conversational marketing platform. We integrated its live chat on our site where people could ask questions, report bugs, and give feedback. I used my picture as the face of the live chat. This assured the user that someone was really sitting at the other end, which made them feel connected. The users knew that they were actually talking to me. This worked so well because people rarely go to the Contact Us page anymore. Providing them a chance to give feedback in chat that was quick and without any hassle made a lot of people respond.

Ask the Pros : Approach the industry experts that can review your product and give critical feedback. In our case, it is Rob Hope. He is a South African born web designer and developer, who works on his side projects full time. He runs One Page Love, Email Love, and Yo!. Rob has always been an inspiration to me and Rupak throughout our journey. The best part about Rob Hope is the effort he puts in to do anything. When I sent him Culrs for review, he didn’t send text messages with feedback. Instead, he took out the time to record and send us audio notes explaining the good parts of the site, and the parts that could do better with some improvement. His feedback has been so detailed and helpful. It was exciting to implement the changes we decided to make based on his feedback. I’m so grateful to have him on our side.

: Approach the industry experts that can review your product and give critical feedback. In our case, it is Rob Hope. He is a South African born web designer and developer, who works on his side projects full time. He runs One Page Love, Email Love, and Yo!. Rob has always been an inspiration to me and Rupak throughout our journey. The best part about Rob Hope is the effort he puts in to do anything. When I sent him Culrs for review, he didn’t send text messages with feedback. Instead, he took out the time to record and send us audio notes explaining the good parts of the site, and the parts that could do better with some improvement. His feedback has been so detailed and helpful. It was exciting to implement the changes we decided to make based on his feedback. I’m so grateful to have him on our side. Maker’s Kitchen : I stumbled upon this awesome slack community for Makers, where over 1k indie makers around the world build, test, discuss, and launch their products together! I joined it, sent a message with my product in a few channels, and got some amazing feedback from the experienced makers.

: I stumbled upon this awesome slack community for Makers, where over 1k indie makers around the world build, test, discuss, and launch their products together! I joined it, sent a message with my product in a few channels, and got some amazing feedback from the experienced makers. Learn Design (WhatsApp Group):

Back in November, I joined a WhatsApp group called “Learn Design”, created by Abhinav Chhikara, who is the Head of Design at Unacademy. I found him from his Youtube channel, ABNUX where he teaches UI/UX Design. We decided to meet for coffee to discuss some business ideas. Abhinav explained to me how he ran his youtube channel and what all went on behind the scenes in creating and publishing tutorial videos. Talking to him about all this made me believe that this was the best time to revive Culrs.

I also found Chethan on the group, who is a Product Designer at Unacademy. He runs a Youtube channel called Design Pilot, where he publishes design tutorials.

Once Culrs was ready, I asked the group for feedback. Everyone in the group was so helpful. They began asking questions, trying to thoroughly understand the product and went on to give constructive feedback.

Chethan texted me on the side. He personally reviewed the entire site, clicking screenshots and sharing them with me to explain the good parts and the flaws in depth. His critical feedback was really helpful in improving Culrs.

Facebook Following : Ever since I joined FB, I always tried to connect with people that were in the industry. I basically used FB as LinkedIn. And it worked! I ended up networking with plenty of designers, developers, and entrepreneurs over the course of 4 years. And it paid off! I launched Culrs on FB and all those people engaged on my post, appreciating and giving constructive feedback that I could use to improve the product.

: Ever since I joined FB, I always tried to connect with people that were in the industry. I basically used FB as LinkedIn. And it worked! I ended up networking with plenty of designers, developers, and entrepreneurs over the course of 4 years. And it paid off! I launched Culrs on FB and all those people engaged on my post, appreciating and giving constructive feedback that I could use to improve the product. Reddit: There are subreddits for everything in the world. Use it to your advantage! We launched Culrs on TryMyThing and SideProject. Getting the feedback from redditors helped us look at our product in a new light. New perspective helped us in coming up with creative ways to improve the product.

Seeing the overall feedback, it was apparent that a product like Culrs was required and would work out in the long run. So many people were impressed with the idea and also thankful to us for creating Culrs.

We had all of this going within the matter of just 20 days of launch. We collated all the feedback and analyzed it. We got rid of the things that weren’t working, and incorporated features that would make Culrs more relevant and efficient.

And then with some connections and our efforts, we got ourselves on the internet to get our first early bird users!

There are many websites, resources, and creators who are ready to accept your product and share it within their network. And when the people in their network see it, they begin writing about it, giving your product more visibility.

Check out some of the links on which we got featured below.

We also managed to make it to the Top Picks of their weekly newsletter.

We also got featured on Neede.co, The Whale, Evernote.Design, Startup Tracker, Naver, TLDR Newsletter, SiloCreativo, etc.

And then something special happened! 🙈

This post had some serious impact. We had a huge surge in our traffic on 17th Jan.

Seeing this brings about a lovely feeling, about how our product impacts so many people and helps them in their daily work. This is the motivation to work harder to improve Culrs and take it to the next level.

Stats till now

Now let’s see how the numbers look like.

Google Analytics

We have 3500+ unique users acquired in just one month.

Newsletter

Our Newsletter subscribers are about 70. We haven’t had much growth in the last 2 weeks as we are still working on it. If you have any suggestions on how to increase our subscribers, and about the type of content you’d like to see, do mention in the comments below or drop me a message.

Add This

One interesting fact that we found from Add This is, Evernote is our Top Social Source. We have good constant traffic coming in from Evernote, indicating that users have bookmarked our site, and revisit it.

So, why am I writing this article?

I, as a product designer, am on a journey to being an Indie Maker. I want to live the end-to-end process of building products while learning from it. I am trying to build Culrs as an Open project so that I can share the process to inspire everyone to build side projects of their own. Building side projects is a quest to gain immense knowledge, and build a network across the world, which one can leverage to work better.

You don’t always need to have all the skills beforehand to build a product that works! All you need is determination. Just begin with what you have, and learn to build on.

If you are really passionate about something, build products around it and put it out in the world. Let people talk about it. Let people criticize it. What’s important is how much you learn from it, so that the next product you build is a blast!