One designer, 11 products: the AppSumo Originals design system
For most of eight years I was the only designer behind AppSumo Originals, a family of 11+ SaaS products with about 1M registered users. A team that size can't redesign each product by hand, so I built shared systems that let a four-person core team ship new products in weeks.
At a glance
- Role
- Designer and front-end developer for every product: brand, UI and markup
- Team
- Me, a lead engineer, a product and ops lead, and the Originals lead
- Products
- TidyCal, SendFox, KingSumo, BreezeDoc, FormRobin, SleekBio, ShortySMS, EmailBadge, Email Templates, AppSumo Connect, Business Idea Generator
- Results
- $7.41M lifetime sales across the portfolio · 9+ products taken from 0 to 1 · 682 merged PRs
The problem
AppSumo Originals launches products fast and sells them as lifetime deals. Each launch brings in tens of thousands of buyers within days, and those buyers judge the product on its first screen.
The constraints made one-off design impossible:
- One designer, many products. By 2022 I was maintaining six live products and starting new ones every few months.
- Repeated work everywhere. Every product needed the same pricing page, plan tiers and marketing patterns. Every pricing change meant edits in six codebases.
- Products that didn't help each other. A user of one product had no idea the others existed, even though AppSumo already had their trust.
The system
I treated the portfolio as one product with many front doors. Each shared layer was designed once and rolled out everywhere.
Pricing framework, 2022
One pricing controller and a single feature-config file in our shared app template. I rolled the same pricing page, with a sticky plan bar, into six products in four days. After that, a pricing change was a config edit, not six redesigns.
Cross-product navigation, 2025
An animated navbar and footer in every app, including products no longer on sale, to turn users of smaller products into TidyCal and BreezeDoc users. A second version added a guest banner, hover descriptions and a shared logo set. An earlier version sent 534 sessions to TidyCal and 291 to BreezeDoc in about a week.
Component library, 2026
For TidyCal's redesign I built a utility-first library: cards, badges, status labels, segmented controls, a spacing system, and an admin page documenting every component, wired from Figma to code. I'm now proposing to extend it to AppSumo as a whole, because a brand rebuilding trust benefits from one consistent visual language everywhere.
Results
- $7.41M in lifetime sales across the portfolio
- 9+ products taken from 0 to 1
- One pricing page shipped into six products in four days
- A four-person core team launching new products in weeks