This September makes it 7 years building Chakra UI! We've gone from 0 to 6.1 Million Monthly Downloads in a year. Not only that: 40,700 Github stars 250,000 website visits/month 114 components 413 contributors 4 major versions
But they don't really tell you what building an open source project and community for seven years looks like.
So, I want to take you behind some of those numbers and into what building Chakra and its community over the years has actually looked like.
Chakra started because Segun Adebayo was trying to solve a problem he had himself.
The frontend ecosystem was obviously very different in 2019 as there were already component libraries and several styling solutions.
However, there were things Segun wanted from the experience of building interfaces that he wasn't quite getting.
I remember him walking me through the first drafts of Chakra components even before the name came. I loved it and was extremely excited.
The launch story has been written a few times. If you're not familiar with it, I'll happily recount it again.
On the 4th of September, 2019, Segun pulled the trigger and announced the launch of Chakra UI publicly. The buzz was everything we didn't see coming in this tweet.
There was very little 'strategy' to the actual launch. More work was done on the product than actual developer education and developer marketing.
From the reactions we got from Twitter, GitHub and our Discord communities, it didn't take me long to realise that we had to invest time to educate developers and build the community.
I just saw a gap to feel - I really wanted to contribute and educate developers in order to drive the adoption of Chakra UI.
These were small tips showing people things they could do with Chakra. I didn't want anything too overly produced.
I just wanted to share useful information on how a Developer could get from point A to B using Chakra.
I had seen something similar in the Flutter community and loved how they took one widget at a time and made it easy for people to see what it could do. I thought, why don't we do something like this for Chakra?
I'd figure out what I wanted to show, put the visuals together, animate everything in Canva, record a voiceover, edit the video and put it out on YouTube.
I was spending so much time with one component every week, so naturally I was learning the APIs better, finding interesting use cases and thinking more deeply about how we explained things to developers.
Better at taking something technical and turning it into a short video someone would actually want to watch.