Icon Set (by James Traff)

James Traff's path to this sudden windfall actually began seven years earlier, in 2013, during the iOS jailbreaking era. He created his first icon set for Cydia, the unofficial iOS app store, and sold it for 99 cents—netting about $15-17 over a year. That early experience taught him the power of digital leverage: create once, sell infinitely. Fast forward to late 2021, when iOS 14 made it possible to customize app icons natively using Siri Shortcuts. James noticed people on Twitter sharing beautifully customized home screens and decided to try it himself. His aesthetic sensibility—honed by seven years of design work and a DeviantArt portfolio dating back to 2013—gave him confidence his icons would resonate.

James uploaded a screenshot of his customized iPhone to Twitter without any intention to monetize. The tweet began to gain traction as people commented asking about the icons. Rather than sit on the momentum, he immediately packaged them for sale. Using no-code tools—Gumroad for payments, Notion for content, and Super (a tool he was building himself) to turn Notion into a custom website—he built and published everything in about 2 hours. The website included installation tutorials, showcases, and mockups. He priced the icons at $28, staying consistent with Lightroom presets he'd been selling on Gumroad. When he woke up the next morning, he had made $6,000.

But the real explosion came days later when MKBHD (Marques Brownlee), a tech YouTuber with 13 million subscribers, featured the icons in a video. The video reached 6 million views, and the day after it dropped, James made $30,000 in sales—his best day to date. Riding this wave, he wrote a blog post titled "Six Figures in Six Days," explaining the full seven-year backstory. The post went viral on Hacker News and Indie Hackers, driving the second major spike in sales. He even created a custom MKBHD-themed red-and-black icon variant after seeing someone suggest it, which generated another 200,000 impressions and brought traffic back to the original set.

James attributes his success to the intersection of preparation, opportunity, and action. The preparation came from seven years of design, a habit of sharing work on Twitter for 6-8 months before this moment, and deep familiarity with no-code tools. The opportunity was iOS 14's native icon support combined with MKBHD's massive reach. The action was his willingness to tweet the screenshot, quickly build a proper product page, write a transparent blog post, and create derivative products to extend the hype. He was also honest about imperfections—the icon set didn't include every app, and he acknowledged it wasn't his best work—but understood the founder principle of "good enough" over perfection. What didn't work as well: the pricing was partially a whim; he charged $28 because it matched his Lightroom preset price, not through deep market research. The icons themselves, in his own words, had drawbacks and weren't the most affordable option.

Without ever hiring employees or raising capital, James generated $280,000 in revenue from over 10,000 orders in roughly 5-6 weeks. The spike was driven entirely by organic virality and influencer discovery, with the bulk of revenue coming from two moments: MKBHD's video and the viral blog post. Rather than chase more products or venture funding, James was optimizing his newfound capital for freedom—using it to reduce client work and buy time to focus on things he genuinely wanted to build, like Super. His philosophy reflects someone who has run startups before (he co-founded Airborne and went through Y Combinator in 2014) but chose the indie hacker path for autonomy and creative control.