How Arif finds customers for his neobrutalism-styled component library

Meet Arif Hossain.

Arif is a software developer (and indie hacker) from Bangladesh.

Learn how he has grown RetroUI, a NeoBrutalism styled React + TailwindCSS UI library.

The story told by Arif Hossain

Starting out

At the beginning of 2024, I started my indie hacking journey - building side projects and documenting them on YouTube, where I shared the technical side of what I was working on.

As I kept experimenting, I wanted to create unique UIs for my projects. I started looking into different design systems, and that’s when I stumbled upon neo-brutalism and fell in love with it.

I wanted to build my websites in that style, but couldn’t find any library that matched what I had in mind. So, I decided to build my own.

In September 2024, I made my first commit to what would later become RetroUI. I had no plans to monetize it! It was just an open-source side project I was passionate about. A month later, in October, I announced it publicly and shared it on my YouTube channel.

The response surprised me. The project quickly hit around 100 GitHub stars in the first couple of weeks. Nothing crazy, but it felt validating that people were into it.

After that, I kept adding new components here and there, and RetroUI slowly kept growing. By early 2025, it had passed 300+ GitHub stars.

Launching RetroUI Pro

As more and more people started using the open-source version, I wanted to see if anyone was willing to pay for this. So in April 2025, I launched RetroUI Pro, starting with just 30 premium UI blocks, priced at a $99 lifetime fee.

At the time, I had zero expectations. But to my surprise, I got one sale in the first month… and three more in the second. That validated the product!

But the problem was, at that time, I was still juggling other projects and not putting much effort into RetroUI. So, as the launch hype wore off, the next month’s sales dropped to zero.

Meanwhile, my other projects weren’t going anywhere either. So I made the call to scrap everything else and go all in on RetroUI.

I publicly challenged myself to reach $100K in revenue with RetroUI and to post a weekly YouTube video documenting the journey.

Once I started putting all my focus on RetroUI, things started to accelerate. I started shipping more, posting more, and talking about RetroUI wherever I could - on YouTube, X, and Reddit (examples below). And slowly, sales started coming back.

• RetroUI - a shadcn based component library, inspired by neo brutalism (Reddit link)

• I took your feedback and made the best React admin template! (Reddit link)

As of October 2025, RetroUI has grown to around 1,000 GitHub stars and 28 Pro customers, generating about $2.7K in total sales.

Below is my visitor stats for the RetroUI of the past 12 months.

Marketing and growth

I’ve done zero paid marketing so far. Everything has been completely organic.

Here are a few things that worked for me:

Being open source

All the core RetroUI components are free and open-source. People are much more likely to try, share, and even contribute to open projects - and that’s how RetroUI got its early users.

Those who are happy using just the core components stay on the OSS version, while people who need extra UI blocks, templates, and Figma kit upgrade to RetroUI Pro.

Making content

As mentioned, I have been posting tech content on YouTube. Over the past 1.5 years, I posted 100+ videos!

Every now and then, I make a video (example below) on my channel where I can feature/talk about RetroUI.

Building in public

When I started the $100K challenge, I decided to post one video every week, sharing everything I’m doing to reach the goal.

Check out my YouTube playlist.

A lot of people discover me through these videos, and some of them check out my product and become users.

Being active in tech communities

I try to be active on X tech communities, as that’s where many of my target customers are.

So whenever I’d find a discussion related to UI Libraries, I’d just engage there, and if there’s an opportunity, I’d just include my product link (example below).

Keep shipping!

Entrepreneurship is HARD, and it takes time!

It took me 8 months to make my first dollar from RetroUI, and another 6 months after that to cross $2.5K+ in total sales.

There were plenty of moments where it felt like nothing was working, but every small update, every video, and every post slowly added up. And even now, when I get fewer sales, it stresses me out. And I keep telling myself:

Keep shipping. The momentum always catches up eventually.

Connect with Arif Hossain

• X

• YouTube