The intersection of what he loves
Mattia Pomelli had been coding for about eight years and had always carried a passion for design alongside it. Eventually he realized that building design tools sat at the perfect intersection of the two things he loved doing. So that is what he built — not once, but repeatedly.
In the year before Sleek, Pomelli and two friends built four design tools. Four. Most founders would call that a graveyard of side projects. Pomelli treated it as an education and, more importantly, as inventory. Each tool taught the team something about the space, and each one left behind code, components, and instincts that would compound later.
The last of those tools became the main focus: Sleek.design, an AI tool for designing mobile apps. The premise is disarmingly simple. You chat with AI, and it helps you design a beautiful mobile app — what Pomelli calls vibe designing. It is aimed squarely at app founders and developers who lack design skills or cannot afford to hire a designer, a group that anyone who has shipped software knows is enormous.
The market timing did quiet work here. More and more people were getting into building mobile apps, and good design mattered more than ever. Yet compared to the web, there were far fewer coding and design tools serving mobile. An exploding market with an underserved tooling gap is about as close to a free lunch as startups get.
Three weeks, because nothing was new
Here is the part founders should underline. Sleek was not built from scratch. Pomelli's team repurposed one of their previous design tools for mobile, and version 1.0 shipped in about three weeks.
Three weeks, because they were not starting from zero. The authentication flows existed. The canvas rendering existed. The AI integration patterns existed. What changed was the target surface — mobile instead of web — and a tightened focus on the chat-driven workflow. Everything else was inventory being put to work.
This reframes the four earlier tools completely. They were not failures or distractions. They were rehearsals. Each one compressed the build time of the next, until the team could ship a credible v1 of a real product in less time than most teams spend debating their tech stack.
The stack itself tells the same story of pragmatism. Next.js as the main framework, Supabase for database and backend, Vercel for hosting, PostHog for analytics — which Pomelli has said he loves — Stripe for payments, and Resend for emails. Nothing exotic. Every choice optimized for shipping speed over architectural elegance, because the elegance that mattered was in the product experience, not the infrastructure diagram.
$10k MRR on a $0 marketing budget
Within a month of launch, Sleek reached $10k MRR. Within six weeks, the milestone was the headline. And the marketing budget behind it was zero dollars.
That last fact deserves a pause. No paid acquisition, no growth team, no launch agency. Just a product landing in a market that was waiting for it, at a moment when AI-assisted creation was the most exciting story in software. The Indie Hackers feature on Pomelli's journey makes the mechanism legible: the right product, in an underserved niche, during a wave, shared where builders actually hang out.
It is worth being precise about what zero marketing spend means here. It does not mean zero distribution effort. It means the distribution came from the product's fit with the moment rather than from purchased attention. App founders and indie developers are chronically online in exactly the communities where a tool like Sleek gets discovered, discussed, and demoed. The team built where their users already lived.
The broader lesson is about leverage. Pomelli's eight years of coding, the year of design-tool experiments, the repurposed codebase, the mobile gap, the AI wave — none of these alone explains $10k MRR in six weeks. Stacked together, they made the outcome look inevitable in retrospect, which is usually the signature of good positioning rather than luck.
Compound interest on side projects
Strip away the specifics and Sleek's story is a study in compounding. Skills compounded over eight years. Code compounded over four tools. Market insight compounded over a year of building in the same space. When the team finally pointed all of it at the right target, the result looked like overnight success.
For founders, the uncomfortable question is what inventory you are building. Pomelli's earlier tools looked like side projects going nowhere. In hindsight they were the reason v1 shipped in three weeks and the reason the team understood mobile design pain deeply enough to nail the product. Most founders kill their experiments too early to ever collect this kind of compound interest.
The second question is about the beach you pick. The AI design wave was obvious; everyone saw it. What Pomelli saw was the emptier part of the beach — mobile, not web — where the same wave would hit with less competition. Timing is a commodity. Positioning within the timing is the skill.
Sleek is still early, and Pomelli has said the team is excited to scale from here. But the first chapter already contains the whole lesson: build where your obsessions overlap, reuse everything, pick the underserved niche, ship on boring tech, and let a product that fits its moment do the marketing for you.
The playbook
- Build where skill meets obsession — Eight years of coding plus a genuine passion for design made building design tools the obvious intersection. The best ideas sit where skill meets obsession.
- Reuse code aggressively — Sleek's v1 was a repurposed earlier product, shipped in three weeks. Starting from 80 percent done beats starting from zero every time.
- Pick the emptier beach — Web design tools are crowded; mobile design tools are not. Same AI wave, emptier beach. Timing plus an underserved niche did half the marketing.
- Ship on a boring stack — Next.js, Supabase, Vercel, PostHog, Stripe, Resend. Boring, proven, fast. Novelty belongs in the product, not the infrastructure.
- Let the product be the marketing — $10k MRR in a month with zero marketing spend means the product and the moment did the talking. When the intersection is right, distribution finds you.