How Jack is providing value to the Svelte community

Meet Jack Landon.

Jack is a developer, Svelte enthusiast and the creator of the SvelteKit.io blog and Aceternity Svelte Library.

This is how his project got traction.

The story told by Jack Landon

Learning to code

I used to abuse Wordpress and no-code tools like Bubble to get them to do things that definitely shouldn’t be done with them.

I strongly held the opinion that most business logic could be achieved with no-code tools and that startups were usually wasting their money employing developers.

Then I learned to code. And I realize that my time would’ve been much better spent shutting my mouth and learning Javascript instead of staunchly defending Wordpress’ extendability.

In any case, Covid lockdowns and the government shutting down my business served as a good springboard to learn a new skill. I admired developers, so I gave freeCodeCamp another shot.

This time it worked better than prior attempts and I was off to the races, programming every day.

After a year of making small projects and app-clones with React, I finally felt competent enough to start freelancing.

By mid-2023 I’d had a gut-full of the weird behaviors of React.

A mapping app (Breezy Maps) I was building at the time had me so enraged and building jank code to get around React that I was seriously motivated to take on the lifestyle Svelte was offering.

Time for Svelte

I’d read nothing but exceptional reviews of the Svelte framework, and despite having tried it before, I half-assed any attempt to use it in production. The Svelte ecosystem didn’t have my comfort libraries like tRPC and React Query so I never took it outside the official tutorial.

So I left myself no option but to accept the growing pains and go all-in on Svelte. Doing so meant endless hours of agonizing confusion.

It became clear that the Svelte community was in serious need of detailed guides and tutorials. I kept on running into problems which I couldn’t find answers for. As someone new to the framework, it was incredibly discouraging.

At the time, there was one Svelte blog that helped me enormously - Okupter. This was a huge inspiration for me to start writing Svelte guides to extend on the type of content he was publishing.

Launching SvelteKit.io

After getting over the main hurdles of the Svelte-specific nuances, I began to love it. I selfishly wanted more people to use it so that we had a more vibrant ecosystem.

So I decided to get involved in helping make Svelte the go-to framework. I took it upon myself to make the best overall resource for Svelte and SvelteKit developers by the end of 2025.

For starters, I set myself the goal to write 100 Svelte posts in 2024, and on January 2nd I set up the “architecture” of SvelteKit.io.

The next day I wrote the first post - a 4,000 word piece comparing React against Svelte.

The day after, I wrote another 4,000 word article.

Each day for the remainder of the first week I wrote and published a new extensive post.

By the end of the first month, I had published 15 articles about Svelte, and I was still getting less than 10 visitors a day.

This changed in February 2024, as site traffic went from ~6 daily visitors to ~150. Given that I had no inbound links or online presence (not even a X account at the time), this was way above my expectations. I wasn’t expecting that level of traffic until month 4 of starting the blog, and it happened in under 50 days.

It was around that time that I wanted to start porting interesting React libraries over to Svelte.

I found Aceternity UI, which was a shadcn-inspired animated component library built with Framer Motion for React. I was impressed and thought this would be a good starting library to bring to the Svelte community.

What got me across the line was a reddit post where someone offered to pay to have the components ported over to Svelte. So I decided to do it regardless and put it out for free to the public.

All-in-all, setting up the site and porting all of the components to Svelte took 5 days. Then the week after I published Aceternity Svelte. Fireship and a number of high-profile programming Youtuber’s made a feature video (below) about the original library, which spiked website traffic enormously.

After the initial hype, traffic went way down and now (July 2024) it gets around 3,000 visitors a month. Definitely nothing major, but I often see those components used in Svelte apps and often receive DM’s about it.

Marketing SvelteKit

The marketing for SvelteKit is almost entirely non-existent. It’s just been making helpful content and notifying search engines. Giving search engines what they want will serve it to people when they most need it anyway. So until I start adding richer functionality to the site, this is likely where my time is best spent.

I still haven’t made a logo yet and the favicon is the standard computer emoji. I subscribe to the idea of not getting carried away with branding before providing value, but I’ll admit it’s well overdue to tidy it up and make it brandable.

Monetizing

I have open-sourced everything to do with SvelteKit and haven’t monetized it yet.

I’m toying with the idea of building a free interactive academy for Svelte devs to learn and eventually get jobs by “proving themselves” - where SvelteKit can monetize on the backend through “referral” fees. Or better yet, users can earn money by completing SvelteKit bounties.

I’m open to ideas, so long as I stick to the mission of free information for everyone and only value-adds.

More recently, Jack has been busy building Taffy Finance - a gasless Defi protocol on the Saakuru chain. Keeping up the pace with this has meant content production for SvelteKit has been slow.

But he is still committed to meeting his targets by the end of the year, and into 2025.

Want to know about Jack Landon and his projects? You can follow him on X.