About

In the early days of GroundworkUI, we launched the product on ProductHunt. As part of that launch, as recommended by Product Hunt guides, we typed up a brief explanation of what this product is all about. It serves as a good introduciton, so we thought it'd be good to post it here. So here it is:

Hi all! Casey Li here - first time maker and hunter. I'm very excited to launch GroundworkUI on Product Hunt. It's a tool for web developers to easily create lightweight UI Kits for their sites and apps.

💡 Motivation So I've been building websites and web apps since around 2008. In fact, since 2012 I've been running a custom software agency that builds primarily web apps. Of course, with building web apps, we always have to think about design and a smart approach is either using a front end framework or a UI Kit. Here's the thing though - every time I tried using a front end framework like Bootstrap - I always found myself battling the framework rather than using it. I always found it a bit heavy in terms of learning and using and I always found myself wanting to do something it didn't want to do. So...I would opt for designing my own elements and creating my own UI Kits. Eventually, I would work with a designer, but I would work to create pretty light weight UI Kits that served me well for years and still do today. However, designing your own UI Kits has two problems. One, there is a lot of effort and expertise that goes into the design piece and then two, there is a lot of effort that goes into the coding piece.

So on one end, you have front-end frameworks like Bootstrap that are too heavy, or too hard to learn in full. On the other end you have building your own UI Kits which require a lot of expertise, time and effort. So I thought to myself - there's gotta be something in between. And that's where I came up with GroundworkUI.

I actually built a version of this as an internal tool a long time ago, but then I thought recently, this would make a great product for the general public - and that's where we are today.

🖥️ What is it?

GroundworkUI is a tool that allows web developers to easily create UI Kits for their proejcts. It abstracts full UI Kit design to just a few settings. The idea is you pick things like your colours, your roundness, your font, and your shadows, and GroundworkUI generates a UI Kit for you to use. So it allows for customizability, but does not burden you with the full design and coding process. Your UI Kit can then be published or exported to be used in your web app or website.

📖 How does it work?

It's pretty simple.

1. You Sign up for an account

2. You create a project

3. You pick your settings like Style, Roundness, Font, Shadows and see a live preview of your UI Kit.

4. You Save and Publish

5. You import into your website/web app

6. You use your UI Kit by using the CSS classes that are generated. (In the future, you'll be able to use things like React components, but for now it's just CSS classes).

🧑‍💻 Who is it for? GroundworkUI is intended web developers who code themselves. The output of GroundworkUI is ultimately code (like CSS, React components) that can be used in coding other webapps and websites. At this point, we're not sure if beginners or seasoned developers would benefit more, but that's what we're here to find out. 🎯 What are we looking for from the Product Hunt community? Feedback! We are in super early stages. We really subscribe to the MVP (minimum viable product) philosophy and it was important for us to get feedback well before we think it's done. So we've built an MVP that gets the general idea across and hopefully gets us the feedback we want.

There are really 3 questions we're trying to answer with this launch:

1. Is this a valid idea? We want to know are we generally on the right track and would this be something that you or people you know would use.

2. What would you pay for it? We ultimately want to monetize this, but we want to be fair and know what people would actually pay to use it (if anything).

3. What should we prioritize developing next? We have a lot of ideas including creating the ability to export to React components, adding more UI Kit elements, and more. We're not sure what we should prioritize and what people would find most useful now. So we'd love to hear from our early users what's missing and what is preventing them from using it in their projects.

Our goal is to answer these three questions via Product Hunt - but obviously any other feedback is also appreciated.

🙋‍♂️ Who is "we"? At this point, it's just me, Casey Li, who's building GroundworkUI. In the future, I might incorporate some of the staff from my agency, but today, it's just me. I get a lot of ideas from time to time, but this is my first time launching on Product Hunt. After reading the guidelines, it seems like a perfect fit for the early stage that I'm in.

I'm hoping I can connect with many of you and hear what you have to say about this product. Thanks and excited to be part of the community!