His Coding Experiment Turned Into a $30K/Month Business

🇪🇸 Alvaro Trigo is the Spaniard behind fullPage.js, a JavaScript plugin that helps you “create beautiful fullscreen scrolling websites”

Alvaro wrote in a recent interview…

fullPage.js alone makes around $12K/month nowadays, and its maximum was $20K in one month.

He has built multiple similar plugins and says…

The whole business makes around $30K/month.

🚀 How Alvaro got started…

When I was working as a web developer, I had to create a simple site, and I was suggested to mimic a PowerPoint style.

So, looking for inspiration, I came up with the idea of making a full-screen scrollable site.

I was surprised to find out there were no components for web developers to speed up this process, so after building the page, I thought it would be a great idea to create my first plugin.

That first plugin took him a couple of weeks to build with ~300 lines of code…

That was when my first product came out. In fact, it wasn’t even a product, as I didn’t charge anything for it. The component was fully free for about 3 years.

Soon after launch…

some people sent me emails asking for specific customizations… I would deal with them one by one by email and provide them with a quote to create a custom version of the component for them.

Then 👇

I started to notice some people were asking for exactly the same changes or features as others.

So I thought I could probably create those as extensions to the main component. This way they could just purchase and use them right away without any direct contact with me.

He adds…

In the first month, I released about 3 extensions and made more than $1K. I was impressed! I didn’t expect it to work out that well!

I’m sure it helped that the main plugin was free for people to use, so it could gain popularity 📈 and send more potential customers Alvaro’s way.

His plugin is still freely available on GitHub for open-source projects. For commercial projects, people have to pay for a license, with prices ranging from $15/month to $477 one-time.

3 years after Alvaro released the first version of his plugin – “with no experience and as an experiment to improve my skills” – he was able to quit his day job and now runs his own business with a small team 💪

I love how he got the idea for his plugin while working as a web developer.

Keep an eye out for problems and pain points you encounter in your daily work 👀

Could you come up with a solution for one of those and turn it into a business?

Get 10 more business ideas in your inbox each week