The Dopler Method: Building products that stick

When I was younger, my dad told me something I didn’t understand until years later. He ran a computer electronics store, and one day he said:

“In the first year, barely anyone will come. In the second, you’ll start seeing a trickle of curious customers. But it’s the third year that decides whether you make it or not.”
—My dad :)

Back then, I thought the digital world was different. Faster. You see headlines about solo founders going from zero to millions in months, apps exploding overnight, products going viral out of nowhere. It feels like success happens instantly here. But it doesn’t. What you don’t see in those stories are the years of invisible work — the failed experiments, the unread blog posts, the products nobody cared about. Online, the rule is the same as in retail: persistence compounds. But there’s another layer to it. In a noisy, oversaturated world, it’s not enough to just build a great product. Most great products die quietly. If you want to build something that lasts — something that sticks — you need more than features, polish, and clever code. You need surface area, distribution, and leverage. You need a system where every release, every post, every community interaction feeds into the next — until your work becomes impossible to ignore. This chapter is about how to build products that compound instead of fade.

The two archetypes of business

Before we can talk about why products fail — or how to make them stick — we need to zoom out. There are really only two fundamental ways to make money online: You can sell your time, or you can sell your intellectual property. One scales linearly. The other compounds. Both have their place — but you need to know what you’re optimizing for.

Selling time for money (linear growth)

This is the most familiar path. It feels safe because the equation is simple: you work -> you get paid. But it also ties your income to your availability.

Agencies

You package your expertise and deliver outcomes for clients — branding, websites, marketing, whatever your skill allows.

Why it works:

If you’re good, you can land high-paying clients fast, and the first few wins give you cash flow and credibility.

Where it stalls:

Your income depends on constant client acquisition. Scaling means hiring, managing, and dealing with churn — which is its own full-time job.

Best for:

Founders who want quick wins and can leverage client projects to fund long-term bets.

Consulting

You don’t sell outputs — you sell knowledge. You help businesses avoid mistakes, optimize, and grow faster.

Why it works:

High hourly rates if you’ve built authority in your field. Companies will pay well to shortcut years of trial and error.

Where it stalls:

Authority is hard to fake. Without a track record, it’s difficult to land meaningful clients early on.

Best for:

Builders with deep, specialized expertise and a network they can tap into.

Coaching / Mentorship

A lighter-weight form of consulting — usually aimed at students, beginners, or early-stage founders.

Why it works:

Lower barrier to entry. You don’t need Fortune 500 logos to start; you just need to help people one step behind you.

Where it stalls:

Lower price points make it hard to scale meaningfully unless you productize (courses, workshops, group coaching).

Best for:

Creators who want to build authority and relationships while slowly stacking leverage.

Selling time is great for survival and credibility. It gives you case studies, testimonials, and early revenue. But here’s the trade-off: as long as your income depends on showing up, you’re not building compounding leverage.

Selling intellectual property (leveraged growth)

This is the model everyone dreams of: build once, sell forever. But while the upside is massive, so is the upfront effort — and most people underestimate what it takes.

Ecommerce

You sell physical goods — your own or sourced — and scale through volume.

Why it works:

Humans love owning things. Physical products still convert better than digital ones in many industries.

Where it stalls:

Logistics. Inventory, fulfillment, returns, refunds, customer support — every layer adds friction.

Pro tip:

Third-party tools like Shopify and print-on-demand made starting easier, but that ease also saturated the market. Differentiation is the real challenge.

Digital Products

Templates, courses, plugins, toolkits. Package your knowledge and sell it infinitely.

Why it works:

Near-zero marginal cost per customer. Global reach. Extremely high margins.

Where it stalls:

The low barrier to entry means fierce competition. Quality alone rarely stands out without visibility and distribution.

Best for:

Indie makers building in public, growing niche authority, and stacking small wins over time.

SaaS

The “holy grail” for most indie founders: recurring revenue, infinite scale, and asymmetric upside.

Why it works:

Software compounds — one codebase can serve thousands, even millions, without more work per user.

Where it stalls:

Distribution. You can build a brilliant app that solves a real problem and still fail if nobody knows you exist. Getting the first 100 paying customers is brutal.

Best for:

Founders willing to play a long game and invest heavily upfront.

Media

You monetize attention directly through sponsorships, ads, and partnerships.

Why it works:

Highest profit margins of any model — zero product, infinite scale.

Where it stalls:

Requires massive reach. Hundreds of thousands of engaged followers before revenue becomes meaningful.

Best for:

Founders already building authority and publishing content consistently.

Communities

Instead of chasing scale, you go deep. A small, engaged group of 100 people can sustain a business if the value is high enough.

Why it works:

Relationships are moats. People stick around for belonging more than features.

Where it stalls:

Monetizing trust is delicate. Push too hard and people leave; move too slowly and the community stagnates.

Best for:

Builders who care about depth, feedback, and collaboration over pure volume.

The hybrid play

Here’s the part most people miss: you don’t have to choose one forever. One of the most sustainable paths is starting hybrid:

Sell your time first to survive, build credibility, and gather insights.
Use that runway to build intellectual property.
Slowly shift toward leveraged products as traction compounds.
Slowly invest in multiple sources to stack leverage and surface area.

That’s exactly what we did with Once UI. We started by selling Figma systems, which gave us credibility and early revenue. Then, we sold design services while building the open-source ecosystem in the background. But the real goal was always leverage — to build something we could scale without tying income to our availability. Switching to Once UI for Next.js, shipping free templates, growing the Design Engineers Club, and stacking small wins along the way — that’s what allowed us to make the leap.

Why most products fail

Persistence matters. But persistence alone isn’t enough. The numbers are brutal:

80% of products never get ten unique sign-ups.
95% never land a single paying customer.
98% shut down within the first year.

It’s tempting to think these products fail because the founders aren’t technical enough, don’t ship fast enough, or don’t “hustle” hard enough. But that’s not the real reason. Most products fail because they’re built on assumptions — not just about what to build, but about how people will understand it. Here’s the pattern I see everywhere: You have an idea. You’re convinced it’ll change the game. You disappear into a bunker, building for months, polishing every detail. You launch, expecting an avalanche of attention. And then — nothing. Silence feels like rejection. But it isn’t. It just means nobody knows why they should care. That was us with our first product, Once UI for Figma. It was beautiful — compact, customizable, genuinely different from anything else on the market. I thought quality would speak for itself. I thought people would just “get it”. But the offer was too good to be obvious. The whole idea behind Once UI for Figma was simple: invest a little upfront, save 1,000 hours later. By spending time learning a system, you could scale, customize, and manage massive Figma libraries effortlessly. But I never taught that. I never showed why the initial friction existed, or why it was worth pushing through. Instead, I assumed people understood Figma as deeply as I did. I built for power users, then expected mass adoption. It wasn’t the wrong product. It was the wrong communication:

I didn’t share my thinking.
I didn’t educate the audience.
I didn’t build the trust needed for people to believe the payoff was real.

And without that, the launch was destined to fail. The silence wasn’t about quality — it was about surface area: If people never see you, never hear you, never understand you, you don’t exist.

“It’s not enough to build something great.”You have to make people care.
—
Lorant

Surface area: the missing multiplier

When we launched Once UI for Figma, we had no surface area. Nobody knew us, nobody trusted us, and nobody had a reason to care. Surface area is everything that changes that: content you put into the world that gives people a chance to find you, understand you, and trust you:

Your products
Your website
Your writing
Your open-source repos
Your community
Your social presence

Each one is a touchpoint. And touchpoints compound. When we launched Once UI for Figma, we had none of this. We built a beautiful product — compact, customizable, genuinely different from anything else — and expected quality to speak for itself.

The model was failing quietly, so I did what most founders do in this situation:I kept adding more features that I never documented or explained. I kept tweaking the landing page as if conversion was the biggest issue.

Later on, when I sat down to analyze the numbers, it turned out, conversion was actually good. The problem was visibility, track record and pricing:

We had very little organic reach: optimizing conversion without visibility is a waste of time.
We had average employment background: no reference, no network, no trust.
We priced the product on how we perceived its value, not based on traction. An overpriced offer made things even worse.

When we started working on Once UI for Next.js, we approached everything differently. We didn’t want to sell a product. We wanted to offer an idea. That idea was risky: at a time when everyone was building with Tailwind and shadcn, we decided to throw both away and rebuild everything from scratch — styling, components, layouts, templates. Normally, these layers are produced separately and stitched together by mature teams of designers and engineers. But we weren't shooting for teams. We were shooting for indie founders and solo developers, who don’t care about tech stacks. They want things that just work with the least friction possible. To get there, we needed a native system:

Every layer designed to work with the same logic.
Every decision optimized for low friction.

The same mental model that lets Apple sell MacBooks at a premium — not because of specs, but because they “just work”. Every product, every repo, every blog post, every tweet became another touchpoint. And those touchpoints compounded. People started to hear Once UI more and more. That’s how advertising works: the more you hear something, the more you trust it. Surface area builds familiarity. Familiarity builds trust. And once trust starts stacking... something interesting happens.

Momentum: the compounding effect

At first, you’re pushing. You’re tweeting into the void, writing posts nobody reads, building tools nobody knows exist. Every inch forward feels earned the hard way. Then one day, it flips. People start coming to you. They’ve seen the templates. They’ve read the posts. They’ve heard about the community. You’re no longer explaining what Once UI is — they already know. They’re waiting for what’s next. That’s momentum: the shift from pushing your product into the world to the world pulling it out of you. But momentum doesn’t just “happen”. You earn it by stacking small wins early, deliberately, and consistently. The strongest products don’t grow in the dark. They grow in parallel with everything around them. While you’re building the product, you’re also building the ecosystem around it: your personal brand, your audience, your community, your distribution. None of these pieces work in isolation — each reinforces the others. Your product gives you authority. Authority grows your audience. Audience drives community. Community validates the product. It’s a loop — and the earlier you start it, the faster it compounds. That’s what we got wrong with Once UI for Figma, and what we finally got right with Once UI for Next.js:

We shipped small tools openly.
We wrote about design systems.
We invited people into our process before we had anything to sell.
We gave away free templates like Magic Portfolio to show the experience rather than describe it.

When we launched Once UI for Figma, the silence was deafening. Nobody cared. Nobody even knew why they should. But by the time we launched Once UI Pro, it was the opposite: people weren’t surprised — they were waiting for it. They’d seen the thinking, the examples, the results. Trust had been compounding quietly in the background.

Distribution: the technical leverage

Building is fun. Distribution isn’t. But ignoring it quietly kills more products than bad design ever will. Distribution is everything that happens after “the product exists” but before “the product grows”. It’s the invisible machinery most founders underestimate:

Authentication and payment systems
Documentation that makes it easy to start
Automations that onboard new users smoothly
Emails and reminders that bring them back when they drift away
Analytics loops that tell you what’s working and what isn’t

It’s uncomfortable, sweaty work. There’s no dopamine rush here. It’s hours spent integrating tools you’ll pray you never have to touch again, only to realize that without them, nobody buys.

The results are delayed.You’ll spend three days automating a two-sentence follow-up email and see nothing change tomorrow. But a year later, that same system might be responsible for hundreds of customers and reduced churn.

You can start simple. Gumroad, LemonSqueezy — they’re perfect for validating early demand. But shortcuts have trade-offs: you look like just another generic store, you can’t customize the experience deeply, and you don’t own the relationship with your customers. For example, developers are used to GitHub. When you force them to download zips, you introduce friction, and friction is the #1 enemy of momentum. That’s why we invested in our own stack early — Supabase + Stripe with dynamic access control. It was harder upfront, but it gave us freedom later:

We provide the code through git repositories.
We control onboarding, pricing, and account management.
We know our customers directly instead of renting them from a platform.
We can build exactly what we need without waiting for third-party roadmaps.

But here’s the trap most founders fall into: distribution doesn’t matter if you don’t have a good deal. When we launched Once UI for Figma, we priced it at $160/year. We believed the value was worth ten times that. On paper, it made sense. In reality, we were asking too much from people who didn’t know us, didn’t trust us, and weren’t convinced they needed what we were selling. The lesson? Price for demand, not value. Your first 100 customers aren’t buying what it’s worth. They’re buying trust. Lower friction wins. When we launched Once UI Pro, we applied that lesson. We priced it at $64/year — intentionally underpriced. It included pre-built blocks, templates, the original Once UI for Figma, and the promise to expand the offer over time. And because we’d built trust, people believed us. We locked everyone in at that price forever — a thank-you to our early supporters and a signal that we’d honor what we promised. Distribution isn’t just technical. It’s emotional. It’s about owning the systems and reducing friction so trust can convert into growth.

What actually makes products stick

It’s tempting to think success is about one thing — the perfect product, the viral post, the one big launch. But products stick because of interplay, not isolation:

Intellectual property: the thing you’ve created.
Surface area: the ecosystem of touchpoints around it.
Momentum: the people who amplify, validate, and sustain it.
Distribution: the systems that carry it to the right people.

If one of these is missing, the others collapse. A great product without surface area stays invisible. Surface area without distribution fades into noise. Distribution without momentum burns out. Once UI only started compounding when all four aligned. The open-source repos brought people in, free templates lowered friction, the Design Engineers Club built trust, and our distribution stack kept users engaged. Suddenly, growth wasn’t random anymore — it became inevitable.

The takeaway

Great products don’t succeed just because they’re great. They succeed because they’re seen, understood, and trusted. That doesn’t happen overnight. It compounds — post by post, tool by tool, touchpoint by touchpoint. Surface area isn’t a metric. It’s inevitability. Intellectual property gives you leverage. Surface area makes that leverage visible. Distribution turns visibility into growth. Start small. Build in parallel. Grow in public.

Your next steps

Follow the next steps for predictable growth:

Build IP early

Start small. Ship something opinionated — a component, template, or tool.

Expand surface area

Share demos, code snippets, wins, lessons. Create content: documentation, blog, social media.

Offer a deal

One that sounds crazy. Underprice your offer until you have surface area and trust.

Create momentum loops

Invite people to your process before you're ready to sell. Build a community around the problem, not just the product. Put your community in the spotlight.

Build momentum deliberately

Start with Gumroad or LemonSqueezy to validate demand. Migrate to your own stack as demand grows and own your distribution system.

Play the long game

Measure progress in touchpoints, not MRR. Focus on compounding: every post, repo, and interaction stacks.

Products fade. Brands stick. Movements grow. Culture lasts. Don't miss it next week, sign up now:

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