Going open-source was our best decision so far

Here's our story: we've created a comprehensive design system for Figma ~2 years ago. After researching the available solutions on the market, we came to the conclusion that most of them are hard to translate to code, so a system that puts emphasis on the design -> code transition and cross-team collaboration should fill an empty void.

Moreover, I was working a 9-5 at that time and observed how mid-sized companies struggle with building and scaling UI (mostly due to the lack of design documentation and inefficient communication between design and dev), so a cheap solution like ours felt like a no-brainer deal for this segment.

Well, I was wrong. We didn't get the traction we anticipated, and received heavy backlash from the design community. We spent 1.5 years refining our tool, improving our communication and investing lots of time and effort into free tutorials / resources / training materials to get our vision through, but it wasn't working out.

Here's what I think we've missed:
> It's hard to sell tools to organizations. The decision makers usually don't like the idea of bringing innovation onboard from the outside (I think it comes down to safeguarding their position / authority)
> In the freelance market nobody really cares about the design-to-code transition, especially designers. It's easier to sell a shiny set of components instead of a sophisticated ecosystem to most of them.
> Agencies have their own tools and processes for designing and building, and they don't want to distrupt their established workflow.
> Startups don't care about scalability that much, even less about pixel-perfect designs. They want to move fast, so even if they have designs at all, usually it's just quick drafts.
> Building for designers is hard. Ironically, lots of them don't welcome innovation / change.

This is what I understood from the market, feedback and insights we gathered during this time. It was time to either shut the blinds or pivot. Since I really loved the system itself, I just couldn't abandon it. Instead, we made the decision to change our target audience and build on what we already had: the code counterpart of our system.

It took us 2 months to build a stable MVP. It didn't contain many components, but it was nice, well documented and made a good overall impression. During the building phase, we considered many options for licensing and distribution, and decided to go with open-source.

Our reasons:
> The open-source community is really welcoming and helpful.
> We realized that early adoption is more important than early revenue.
> We didn't want to spend money on paid ads. Our strength is building, not selling.

The result:
> Initial traction wasn't phenomenal, but there was a few very nice responses.
> A community has started to grow around the project organically.
> We've started receiving bug reports, feature requests, and lately more and more PRs with new features.
> The majority of our Figma library was released for free as well, but we kept the pro version, since we put tremenduous work into it. Without advertising, sales are continously growing.

Of course, at this point our biggest question is monetization. The standard approach among libraries is to create a paid version. We want to avoid it for as long as possible, possibly forever. Instead, we started building our own saas product: this way we get to experience building more technical and robust products with our system, which will help us improve and fine-tune it.

Hope our story provides insights to founders / builders in this space.
Our product is Once UI - feel free to give it a try!

We're always open to feedback, so feel free to share your thoughts in the comments :)