Wie Mockuuups ein selbstfinanziertes Mockup-Imperium aus Frustration aufbaute

The founders picked the name Mockuuups in 2014 by tripling a vowel because the obvious domains were taken. Designers misspelled it from the first week, with two, three or four U's in every combination, so the team ended up buying variant domains such as mockuuuups.com just to catch the mistyped traffic. Checking the redirect stats years later, over 1,300 people a year were still arriving that way.

“The confusion started immediately. People misspelled it. Two U’s, four U’s, every combination.”

A throwaway domain hack for a side project turned into a permanent tax on word of mouth and search once the hobby became a business, and the founders had no answer for it.

“Those three U’s became a challenge we didn’t know how to face.”

Before hiring anyone, the two founders tried to fix the brand themselves several times over the years. None of the in-house directions held, and nothing was ever built into a system that carried across both the product and the marketing.

“Over the years, we tried a few different directions. Nothing dramatic, but nothing that stuck either.”

Being designers themselves made it harder, not easier: each in-house attempt treated the brand as a visual refresh when the real blocker was that the identity could not stretch past devices.

“Each attempt was trying to solve the wrong problem.”

Support tickets kept asking for print mockups, posters, billboards, t-shirts and mugs, and the team had the photography skills and infrastructure to shoot them. They could not ship the category because the whole identity and generator were built around screens.

“The real issue? Support tickets kept requesting print mockups. Posters. Billboards. T-shirts. Mugs.”

Everything from the placeholder system to the visual language assumed a device screen, so print had nowhere to sit in the product or the brand.

“We were device-only. Our mockup generator covered phones, tablets, laptops, watches. Everything built around screens. Print didn’t fit.”

Mockuuups launched its first plugin on Sketch in 2017, when Sketch was the dominant UI design tool at around 70 percent usage. When Figma took the market, the Sketch plugin kept working but stopped getting attention, and the Figma plugin became the company's most-used product.

“Our Figma plugin became the most-used product in our lineup. The Sketch plugin stayed functional but fell behind.”

The bet was on a platform, and the platform lost share fast. The founders followed the usage numbers rather than defending the earlier channel.

“Figma at 90% and Sketch in single digits”

The Figma plugin, the company's biggest distribution channel since 2019, ran for years without feature parity with the desktop app. Users noticed the missing features and the different workflow and said so.

“it couldn’t do everything the desktop app could. Missing features. Different workflows. We heard the feedback.”

Each surface had grown its own implementation, so keeping the plugin level with the desktop app was never a small change. Supporting print alongside digital finally forced a rethink of the plugin architecture.

“We spent the past few months closing that gap.”