Our August 2024 Update
Declassifying our old Friends and Family updates
Hey there, this is Daniel at Onlook!
If you’re receiving this update, it’s because either myself or Kiet Ho wanted you to know about what’s going on with Onlook.
As a reminder, Onlook is building an open-source product studio that turns any product team into an engineering team. We make it easy for anyone to visually design and edit websites and apps without writing any code themselves.
TL;DR
Second Hacker News launch: We launched again on Hacker News, gaining ~700 GitHub stars and ~200 new users with 25 daily downloads.
Contributor growth: We now have 16 external contributors working on features and improvements, significantly expanding our capabilities.
More non-technical users are getting into code: Tools like Cursor are encouraging more non-technical users to contribute to codebases, validating our vision of how software will be built in the future.
The editing experience continues to get better: We added drag-and-drop functionality for more intuitive design and development, hotkeys, right-click, collapsible panels, and component detection.
Announcements
We did a second Hacker News launch over the Product Hunt launch, rescheduling Product Hunt to the end of September.
The product is still more suited for a technical audience, so we opted for doing an update on Hacker News instead of launching in front of a broader crowd. Our second launch led to another major boost in visibility and engagement. The project’s GitHub stars jumped from ~1.6k to ~2.4k, thanks to the community's interest and support, and we got ~200 new users with ~25 people downloading the product a day since the launch.
This also brings more members to our Discord channel, and many people self-contributing issues, bug reports and pull requests.coming weeks.
Contributor Growth
The open-source initiative is proving effective. We now have 16 external contributors on the project, tackling a lot of issues from UI changes to adding entirely new features. The community's involvement is invaluable in helping us refine and expand Onlook Studio's capabilities, and it continues to be a huge boost to our roadmap, especially as there are so many nuances for making a great editing experience.
Riding the Cursor wave
The increase in popularity of Cursor has lowered the barrier for many non-technical people or semi-technical people to try contributing code. In fact, many users who try Onlook tell us that they’re designers and are looking to get more involved in shipping code. This feels like the start of an inflection point where the best designers are starting to adopt more frontend developer tools to help build.
Product
Drag-and-Drop + Write to Code
We've continued to advance our direct manipulation thesis. Users want the ability to adjust and refine alongside AI, not just prompt it, so we’ve shipped the ability to drag and drop elements directly on a page, then save those changes to code. This feature allows for more intuitive design and development and is a critical interaction model to match other design tools. AI is still excellent for translating more difficult changes in code, but this is an important part of the overall editing experience.
Component Detection
We’ve enhanced the ability to detect components within the interface, making it easier for users to work with complex UIs. This feature is particularly useful for developers who need to quickly identify and manipulate elements in a design, especially with our “Open in Code Editor” feature that helps users quickly find elements in code. This is also the foundation for letting people drag and drop components into an interface.
Hot Keys / Right-Clicking / Collapsible Panels
We’ve added a host of small improvements that make a big difference in the user experience. Hotkeys, right-click functionality, and collapsible panels have been implemented to streamline workflows and make the interface feel more familiar to first-time users.
Onlook for Windows
Now Onlook has a dedicated Windows app so even more people can use Onlook. Through our Signup list, we've found that about half of the people installing Onlook are Windows users, so this is a great step
"Open in Cursor"
Because of all of the demand for Cursor, we built the ability to open a selected element in Cursor. Our bet is the tight relationship between what you code and what you see will be a great medium for helping users build more apps and get value out of Onlook.
Challenges
Product Led Growth vs Sales Led
For the past few months, we’ve attempted to do a bit of a sales-led approach for our product but continue to fall-flat on conversations as Onlook’s functionality continues to be developed. On the other hand, we continue to recruit casual users to the platform from our Hacker News launches and the content we put out.
This is much more aligned with how other popular design tools started to grow their product in the early days – when the functionality was good enough for casual users to adopt. With that in mind, we’re going to pause our Sales Led experiments and continue to invest in PLG for the next few months.
Still getting a handle on retention
While the feature set is becoming more useful with many of the features we made above, we’re still gauging our retention of users who push code using Onlook. It’s a balance of bringing more people into the product, resurrecting users who tried the product, and continuing to make Onlook more complete. Because our latest Hacker News launch was just a few days ago, we’re still tracking who has retained and continued to use the product – we added in metrics, we just need to see how the latest volume of new users retains.
Riding the AI wave
The interest in Cursor as a way for nontechnical people to start getting into code has got us thinking – how do we make sure we don’t miss the AI wave. Our editor experience still needs some baseline standard features to match what other design tools offer, but we’re closing in on reaching that goal. The bigger unknown for us is how to make the most of the opportunity that AI presents. Much of the tool is designed with AI in mind – we’re just uncertain about what the form factor looks like as of now.
Next Month
Wrap up Onlook Studio v0
We have a roadmap of features and issues we’d like to have implemented as our “baseline editor functionality”, and we think when that’s ready we’ll be better prepared to do more broader marketing for getting users into the tool.
We are planning our Product Hunt launch by the end of September
This will be a significant step in expanding our reach and bringing Onlook Studio to a broader audience besides the Hacker News developer / technical crowd. We’re excited about the potential this launch holds for driving more interest and adoption. If you are on Product Hunt, please sign up to be notified when we do launch! We’d very much appreciate your support.
Thanks & Asks
Thanks to Hari at autopilot.fund for onboarding his team to Onlook!
Thanks to Jack McCloy for his continued support and mentorship.
Thanks to all of our friends on this list that helped boost our Hacker News launch.
If you know of any early-career developers who are interested in contributing to an open-source project, please feel free to introduce us. We have many many good first issues for junior developers to pick up, and we’d greatly appreciate the help.
We’re going to write more regularly weekly newsletter posts on how we’re building Onlook on our Substack. If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to get these posts.
Thanks for your ongoing support – things are already feeling like they’re picking up with the most recent launch adding a new cohort of users to the product, so we’re already looking forward to the next update.
Enjoy your September (start thinking of your Halloween costumes... if you'd like to go as the unnamed Onlook bird, let us know), and we’ll catch you next month!
Daniel & Kiet
Cofounders of Onlook
Check out our other declassified updates to read more about our progress from the first year of building Onlook:
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