We interviewed Gabriel Perales to learn more about Wicked Templates.
How did you start, and what are you building?
I started building things because I didn’t want to keep working for clients as a freelancer. A couple of years ago, I was thinking about starting something, and then I received an email from a friend’s sister who wanted me to join them to build a platform for YouTubers.
I tried to make it work for one year, but we had some internal team issues, and I ended up leaving the project. Meanwhile, I was promoting that project on Indie Hackers, and I met Michael Andreuzza, a fantastic UI designer who is now my mate for making products.
Right now, we are building several products under the Wicked brand. We have Wicked Blocks, a free website to get and copy some Tailwind CSS blocks for your websites. Wicked Backgrounds for generating SVG backgrounds for your websites or designs. And our main product is Wicked Templates, with premium HTML and Next.js templates with Tailwind CSS.
What was your motivation?
My motivation is to have some financial freedom and spend time learning the things I couldn’t because I had to work. Years ago, I have pretty focused on learning new programming languages and new programming paradigms. Then I realized that it was going to be challenging to be hired using that knowledge -and keep learning-because. I was based in a small city where nobody was working with those technologies, and the remote jobs weren’t like they are right now with the pandemic.
What is your overall mission?
Our mission is to make it easier to have a well-designed website to help you grow your business and sell more. Making a business is hard. Is not just about having a good product; it is also about marketing, copywriting, customer relationship, and many other things. We want to help out a little so you do not have to worry about the design of your website.
How have you attracted customers?
Our first customers came across Mike’s Twitter account and his posts on Indie Hackers, DevTo, and. I’m not good at writing or building in public. I’m trying to get used to it, but Mike is pretty good at it, so he has been doing it for a while and is attracting customers.
What are some challenges you have faced so far?
We’ve done several products on the top 3 of the day in Product Hunt. Not all the success we have had there it’s been converted to profit, but it seems like we are improving, and our products have more appeal. The challenge now is to make those products to drive traffic to our main project or start making any of those projects profitable.
Pricing is also challenging, it is pretty hard to know the correct price of a product. Ultimately, we all do the same, just to see what happens.
Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Joining Mike is a huge advantage. I don’t know where he gets time, but he works a lot and makes fantastic designs. I feel pretty unproductive comparing myself to him. He looks pretty committed to changing his way of living, and I’m sure it will happen sooner than he expects.
Can you tell us something unique or special about the company?
The team is what makes our company unique. We are two regular guys trying to live what we love, but we are committed to making that change happen. People can see what we do through Twitter, learning to make things by doing. Making mistakes and trying new things until it works. I think many like us are out there, and they appreciate that we share what we do and are open to sharing our statistics. It also pushes us to keep growing and fight to make our revenue slightly higher than last month.
What’s next for the company? Is anything exciting coming up?
We have a lot of things in mind, from making tools for Tailwind developers to making our own web builder and passing through making specific templates for launching products on Product Hunt.
Let’s see what we end up doing…
