If you’re looking to change up the look of your iPhone, using an iOS 14 icon set is a cool way to do it. You can replace all your favorite app icons with custom ones that have a consistent look and feel.
The popularity of this has taken many by surprise – including a designer who saw his quickly-created but beautiful set earn him a six-figure sum in just six days …
The designer, who goes by the name Traf, shared his experience in a blog post – including his advice to anyone else hoping to achieve something similar.
He is careful to preface things with the oft-heard adage that any ‘overnight success’ is actually years in the making; seven years in his case. His first icon set was created back in 2013 for the Cydia jailbreak store, and he says he made a total of about $17. This time, however, he made rather more.
I saw some people sharing screenshots of their iPhones after discovering that iOS 14 now allows you to add custom icons to your home screen using the Siri Shortcuts app […]
As soon as I noticed the hype, I put together some icons in my own style, downloaded some widgets, and tried it all out. I thought it looked cool, so I shared a screenshot of it on Twitter. Right away, people started asking about the icons in the screenshot. So I quickly packaged them, uploaded them to Gumroad, and embedded them on a Notion site using Super. All of this took about two hours.
The next day, the tweet had hundreds of retweets, thousands of likes, and over 100k impressions. The day after that, almost a million.
Then, MKBHD happened. He shared a video about all of this—using my icons for his setup, and linked them in the description. The next thing I knew, I was making $28 what felt like every 28 seconds. My phone turned into the ultimate dopamine dispenser (if it wasn’t already). I had to disable notifications.
The day after, sales jumped from $6k to about $40k, and during the time of this writing, sales are at $116,147 from 4,188 customers.
All from one. Single. Tweet.
One interesting decision was his pricing strategy: the set costs $28, significantly more than most are charging. He just had the confidence to charge a higher sum.
If I would have asked anyone what to price these at, most would have said $2, or maybe $5. One thing I knew for sure was that the people most likely to buy these were not the same people who were jailbreaking their iOS devices in the past. These are first time iOS customizers, so there’s no notion of what an iOS icon set should be priced at.
There’s of course an element of luck to all this, but the blog post is an inspiring read for anyone with the dream of creating something and making enough money from it to buy time to create more.
If you like the icons, you can buy them here, and you can read our illustrated how-to guide.
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