Launching a resource site, then growing it into a SaaS product

OVERVIEW

SVGBackgrounds.com is a self-serve design tool for generating customizable SVG backgrounds, icons, and website graphics, built and maintained solo over eight years.

OPPORTUNITY

Researching the various ways to embed SVGs on websites exposed a gap: existing resources were fragmented and overly technical. I decided to turn my initial experiments with one of the embed techniques, CSS Data URIs, into the resource I couldn't find.

CHALLENGE

SVG code is full of numeric properties and any useful editor needs a consistent way to manipulate them.

Interaction speed as a product principle

Early SVG tools paired numeric inputs with range sliders. The problem: users didn't know valid ranges and could input invalid values.

DECISION

I dropped numeric inputs entirely and made range sliders the only control.

• Dragging the slider gave real-time visual feedback
• Boundaries are built into the interaction
• Precision was sacrificed in favor of exploration speed

CHALLENGE

The demand was clear, but there was still no revenue model.

Getting from traffic to revenue

SOLUTION

Within two months, I:

• introduced a paid subscription tier
• expanded the library from 30 to 60 backgrounds
• launched payments using familiar tooling instead of custom infrastructure

I leveraged WordPress for authentication and integrated MemberPress to handle subscriptions and billing logic. Using existing systems allowed monetization to ship in weeks rather than months.

A subscription model solved two problems at once:

• avoided exposing premium assets upfront (hard to protect once rendered in the DOM)
• aligned payment with ongoing access rather than one-time downloads

OUTCOME

The project moved from attention to its first revenue signal without slowing product momentum.

The collection had to earn the subscription

CHALLENGE

Collection size too small to justify an ongoing subscription, learned from customer emails and backed by the retention rate.

SOLUTION

The fix was unglamorous: grow the collection.

Reaching 200+ backgrounds became the central objective. Brand refinements, marketing, and website improvements were all deprioritized. For a designer, that's a hard call. But nothing else would move the needle if the collection wasn't worth keeping.

As the collection grew, I experimented with drip-releasing content to monthly subscribers. Session recordings of users rage-clicking on locked backgrounds, combined with a rise in support emails, made the decision to switch back to all-access pricing easy. The noise stopped.

The pricing page nobody was reaching

CHALLENGE

I joined a mentorship program, which rasied questions about KPIs, leading me to track events and conversion paths. The paid tier existed but was nearly invisible. Funnel tracking revealed almost no one reached the pricing page.

RESEARCH

A quick review of how competing stock sites approached upselling, combined with an audit of my own funnel, revealed obvious gaps.

SOLUTION

The fix was on-page awareness. Bringing the pitch to where the browsing and interaction already happened.

Changes made:

• Added a pricing tab and a CTA "Unlock Pro" to the navigational header.
• Locked backgrounds were placed alongside free ones, clicking one opened a pitch
• Export flow included a pitch to the paid version.
• Added a homepage pitch by bringing key points from the pricing page.

OUTCOME

Doubled the conversion rate of subscription purchases from 0.25 to 0.5%.

The survey that questioned the product's direction

A grant let me hire a marketing agency, and a survey we ran together confirmed what I was already considering: customers reported a more frequent need for icons than backgrounds. I'd been ranking well for SVG-related keywords and had experience creating other graphic types, so expanding the collection felt like a natural growth path.

CHALLENGE

This meant an ambitious pivot. I'd need to design thousands of graphics quickly and build a new editor capable of handling variation in graphic types, sizes, and formats. This meant getting icons, blobs, and shape dividers sharing the same grid without breaking the layout.

The harder problem was within-collection variation: one cursor set mixed fill-only and stroke designs; one icon set was a three-in-one sprite. The editor needed to surface shared controls for the whole collection while still applying custom logic to individual sets.

SOLUTION

The grid used input ratio and max-width per collection type instead of hardcoded dimensions — one adaptive system for any SVG format added later.

For collection-wide controls, simpler cases (like toggling transparent backgrounds or triggering keyword search) were straightforward. The real lift was a targeting system that could locate specific attributes and apply rules collection-wide or to individual graphics via CSS classes and IDs, handling the edge cases each set required.

Outcome

The slow lessons of shipping for eight years

Reflection

Revenue has plateaued. A meaningful portion of users have one-time needs, not subscription behavior. It's an open question I haven't fully resolved.

What the plateau isn't: a failure. The $2k MRR funded the exploration of other products including TinyVectors and ImageFork. The asset library compounds. And the big return is the judgment built over eight years: knowing when to remove rather than add, how to watch users fail and redesign around it, and where it's safe to move fast.

Working solo meant design, engineering, product, marketing, and support were never separate phases, they informed each other continuously. The most valuable lesson wasn't learning SVG deeply. It was learning how to move from curiosity to product to revenue and ulitmately iteration without waiting for perfect conditions.

SVGBackgrounds represents a sustained practice in shipping, measuring, and refining software in the real world. I'm excited to bring that same systems thinking and ownership mindset into a collaborative environment tackling problems at larger scale.