I wish Adam had addressed the impact of competition in a bit more detail.
Shadcn has definitely taken a big chunk, the premium ecosystem around Shadcn is absolutely exploding. I know. I run https://www.shadcnblocks.com and we saw huge month on month growth in revenue for the entire year.
Even with strong headwinds from AI, I expect our revenue to continue increasing throughout 2026.
I sell templates for a living and have used several of these providers.
The main options are
Gumroad - high fees and ugly design, solid system never had issues does most what I need.
Lemon Squeezy - it was very popular until being acquired by stripe. Full of serious bugs, bad support. Lovely design, slightly better fees than Gumroad, but many hidden. Would still use over Gumroad just cause the Gumroad checkout design is so bad it loses sales imo.
Paddle - haven’t used it but I think it’s probably as good as Gumroad or Lemon.
Polar.sh - the trendy new option, most creators abandoning Lemon Squeezy are moving there. Has lots of innovation in features beyond payments such as selling private GitHub access.
All of these platforms are MOR as far as I know, all provide the checkout UI etc. all handle digital asset file delivery. They are perfect for creators selling digital products that want a turn key solution and don’t want to do any development work.
I build and sell templates for a living. Like shadcnblocks.com or zerostatic.io. How long do you think I’ve got? It’s seriously an existential threat for me, but my sales don’t seem affected yet.
I specialize in building templates and component libraries. I’ve recently launched https://www.shadcnblocks.com which is a set of 200+ block components for Shadcn UI. The recent growth in popularity of Shadcn UI is extraordinary.
I’m also reworking and relaunched https://www.wickedblocks.dev which has nearly 200 free blocks for Tailwind. We’ll be released some optional premium sets here soon.
Finally we are about to release a set of 3 templates for 11ty at https://www.zerostatic.io where I build niche templates for SSGs. I believe these will be some of the best template available for 11ty and I’m keen to see if this niche has a serviceable market.
I've been developing premium themes for Hugo & Jekyll for many years at https://www.zerostatic.io so I have tried quite a few Git based CMS.
My favourite was Forestry (RIP) which was replaced by TinaCMS which simply didn't solve the same problem and it was for React websites anyway. CloudCannon now offers something similar to Forestry but requires you to host with them. Netlify CMS had potential but always felt poorly built and fragile, it was turned into Decap CMS when Netlify abandoned it. I admit I have not tried Decap, maybe because I never liked Netlify CMS.
Forestry was right in the sweet spot. It had the following.
* Able to be installed "over the top" of a markdown based site at any stage of the project without deep integration into the codebase.
* Does an OK job at inferring content types from folder structure+ssg type and fields from frontmatter, writes config as flat files to git. You can edit these to refine/improve the inital schema.
* no lockin to a specific hosting provided.
I’ve seen a lot of indie startups lately that are basically selling faster google indexing then you can get for free using google search console. I guess they are probably using this feature under the hood.
I have a large directory uses affiliate links. I’ve been running it for 1 year now and one of the biggest issues is affiliates changing their links. I was planning on building a basic link checker. I already have a script that is scraping and testing demo urls and gathering screenshots so it would make sense to just extend that. Bernard seems like what I need here but I’m not sure it fits neatly into my stack and I don’t think I would pay for it. If I didn’t already have the script and I was using Wordpress or some no code tool to build the directory then I feel I’d be more likely to use this service
I’ve been involved in the Jamstack, static site generator, template ecosystem for many years. Built At Lightspeed is a template marketplace focused on ssgs and “modern frameworks”
Sales have been entirely from Affiliate sales, mostly via the Lemon Squeezy affiliate program. Its doing about $400usd/month. I recently launched sponsors and the initial interest has been good.
Tailwind and Nextjs are the most popular categories and best sellers. Tailwind (like Bootstrap before it) has a vibrant commercial template ecosystem. I’m seeing a huge uptick in interest in “full stack” boilerplates that have hefty price tags of $100-$400 and I plan to focus on this area more. No code templates for Framer have also exploded.
The site itself relies on Algolia to drive the faceted search results and filters and overall I’ve been happy with it. It’s a bit expensive and the older release of its react hooks library had a lot of edge cases with nextjs, but it’s been improving.
This year I will continue to refine and curate the results, focusing more on content quality and classification the extending the inventory. I recently bumped it from 4000 results to 20000 as an experiment, and this was just by easing back some of the quality filters.
I love this. I'm a huge fan of static site generators and simple, authentic designs. It looks like lot of people who dig the indieweb philosophy use Jekyll and Hugo which is great, because they are still such amazing SSG's. Projects like this make me hopeful that everything wont be replaced by JS frameworks or Nextjs etc. For those interested
I've always found Hugo easy to get running. Compared to Jekyll, Hugo was always much easier as Jekyll always seemed to throw up some Ruby or Bundler issue every time you went back to it.
I've built a lot of Hugo sites and templates, I have 10+ open source themes at https://github.com/zerostaticthemes so here are my main observations of Hugo
* The docs do need a lot of work, but the forums and stack overflow are pretty reliable sources with Hugo having enough critical mass to get answers for even obscure errors and questions.
* Hugos big problem is the Go templating language. It's arcane and unintuitive. Even after years I still find myself forgetting how to do and or conditionals.
* Hugos template lookup order is opinionated but one of it's strengths.
* Hugos . context is opinionated but also one of it's strengths.
If you are looking for a minimal SSG then I think it's important that it's HTML based (so no Nextjs or Gatsby) - Jekyll, Hugo and 11ty are the main options in this space but there is also a wave of new options which seem worth considering. There is a great list of ssgs over at www.staticgen.com if you want to browse the up and comers.
https://www.jamstackthemes.dev has a similar list of Hugo themes but also has about 800 open source themes for all the other ssgs like Jekyll, Gatsby, Next etc
Probably a designer. Gets asked to design a banner ad and ends up trying to rebrand the entire company.
On a serious note it took me a long time to understand that some clients do only want you to execute and do not want you to provide a more holistic professional assessment at every stage.
Oh those UX designers, aren't they just gods. So gifted, with their ability to shape the minds of the pesants and turn every product into gold.
Games have been great for decades. There have been huge hits and misses.
Games have been addictive since the beginning.
Long before UX came along to claim the credit.
I'd love to see a UX team make StarCraft. You wouldn't even get functional software.
Free to play and loot boxes are a new evolution but they are far from the only type of game.
In fact many people play fortnight and dota2 and never spend a dime.
Fortnight is popular and addictive because it's a good fun game that gets everything right for teens. The game designers and the game team did this, not UX.
I attended a bootcamp and I was very successful along with many others In my cohort.
I noticed that many of those who struggler to find jobs were younger.
While there are many factors, I felt that 1 big factor was those who had paid the extremely high fees with their own money really gave it their all to make it work.
I got the impression many of the young students had been paid for by wealthy parents and we're not fully engaged.
Shadcn has definitely taken a big chunk, the premium ecosystem around Shadcn is absolutely exploding. I know. I run https://www.shadcnblocks.com and we saw huge month on month growth in revenue for the entire year.
Even with strong headwinds from AI, I expect our revenue to continue increasing throughout 2026.