Learn UX

Greg Rog had spent years working in UI/UX design and education, building a deep expertise in both fields. He noticed a critical gap in the market: while many UI/UX design resources existed, most lacked the quality, logical structure, and current tooling knowledge that aspiring and professional designers needed. The tools in the space—Sketch, Framer, Principle, Adobe XD—were constantly evolving, and designers struggled to find materials that kept pace with these changes. Rather than chase trends, Greg identified this as a genuine problem worth solving, drawing from his own frustrations as someone who had spent years searching for quality educational materials himself.

Greg took a deliberate, product-first approach. He spent approximately 1,000 hours—roughly six months of full-time work—creating the foundation of Learn UX before publicly launching anything. This wasn't a quick MVP; it was meticulous content development. He recorded tutorial videos covering UI design tools, wrote detailed Medium articles, and created a beautifully designed website that itself served as a case study in UX principles. Recording proved to be one of the toughest parts: his English was imperfect at the time, requiring multiple takes and re-records. He hated the studio work, the repetition, and the marketing setup. But Greg believed that if something felt this painful, the results would be worth it—and that luck alone rarely carried projects through.

He validated the idea incrementally before the big launch. Greg posted Medium articles and uploaded YouTube videos, embedding them strategically to enable Google pixel-based remarketing. On Medium, he found immediate traction. He launched a YouTube channel with just four videos and saw roughly 5,000-6,000 subscriptions accumulate within a month, with one video hitting 100,000 views. This early validation confirmed that his content-first, quality-focused approach resonated with the UI/UX designer community.

Greg's growth came primarily through earned media rather than paid acquisition or influencer outreach. He reached out to design influencers before launch, spending weeks on personal outreach that he later realized was mostly wasted effort—"no one really cared." His actual breakthrough came from a different direction: he decided to enter his website into design contests, including CSS Design Awards. This decision paid off dramatically. When CSS Design Awards recognized Learn UX, he received approximately 8,000 hits in a single week from high-quality, design-focused traffic. These visitors were exactly his target audience—UI/UX designers hungry for inspiration and knowledge. He ranked in the top five on Product Hunt at launch, but even that generated less traffic and fewer qualified leads than the design awards.

What worked spectacularly: content quality, website design as a portfolio piece, and community recognition through design awards. Greg's focus on 10x better content meant he could win with just four YouTube videos rather than needing hundreds. The website itself, thoughtfully designed with attention to layout and detail, attracted designers browsing sites like Dribbble and award platforms for inspiration.

What didn't work: the pre-launch hype campaign reaching out to influencers, the countdown timer launch strategy, and big "launch day" thinking. Greg spent time and energy building momentum that never materialized. He stressed about the launch countdown with only ~10 people on the website when it went live. He learned that consistent, ongoing launches of new features beat the false drama of a single launch day.

Today, Learn UX generates over $10,000 per month in recurring revenue while Greg works roughly one day per month maintaining the business. He's achieved this through aggressive automation: Zapier and Integromat glue together his email marketing, customer service (Intercom, Chat Fuel), and payment systems. He uses no-code tools extensively, despite being able to code himself, because the time savings matter more than the technical challenge. He rerecords all content roughly every two years to keep the tools and processes current—a task that now takes one month instead of 1,000 hours because he's optimized his workflow.

Greg rejects the "passive income" myth while embracing its spirit: he defines success as the freedom to choose when and how much he works. Rather than pour all energy into scaling Learn UX infinitely, he's designed his life around multiple smaller projects, each generating $1-10k MRR with minimal overhead. His teaching extends beyond Learn UX—he runs a large Polish-language education website and works with ~100 authors in his Polish studios, believing that local markets and native-language education offer sustainable competitive advantages against massive global players. The fireman who took his early Flash course and built a mobile app development agency exemplifies the long-term impact: some bottles cast into the ocean eventually return messages.