We made $1,052,000 in 2018 selling UI Tools. Here is what we learned

Yep, there is no right answer in this. In our case, a partnership where we built something together or on top of a framework is working very good for us, as we create new products. So we have 2 options, we either work on new products from scratch or we partner to create something better. Don't know if Paul Graham talked about this way of working, I think he was thinking of partnership = "a big enterprise said something about you". Hope I understand right his tweets.

The problem I’ve had is filtering out the time wasters, there are so many that I eventually started saying no to everybody who approached with an “opportunity”.

pg is naturally opposed to any business model that isn't the one he promotes through YC. It's not particularly interesting to here the details of that.

>> Who buys stuff like Bootstrap templates?

If you are a mid range developer, your per-hour consulting fee could be $200 to $300. A typical Bootstrap template for purchase is ~$30 in my experience, so effectively 10 to 15min of your time.

If you can mark up a good template that quickly (all the various pages, color combos, etc you get) -- you're really good and your bill rate should be much higher :-)

If not, it is better to purchase than waste precious time.

If you want to learn or enjoy the art, that is a separate story, and you should absolutely do it yourself.

For me, i'm primary a back-end and algo developer, so I like to find something that works well, buy it, and move onto working the engines.

The Bootstrap Templates are just 1 part of what we deliver. We also have React, Vue, Angular, Laravel, React Native, Node.js, Photoshop, Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD in our products lists. So if you take into consideration an agency who will deliver for his client a website + web app and they buy a "React + React Native + Sketch" combo from us and pay let's say 150$, that will be over 5.000$ for them if they have to build it from scratch. Also don't forget that we spend many months on building and testing our products on many devices (phones, tablets, tvs, desktops etc) Hope this makes sense.

Just so you know, articles like these are a form of marketing disguised as information.

Time is money, sometimes the cost to purchase somethings COTS is a no brainer (especially if it offers support!).

Bootstrap has the other advantage of being pretty well designed so if your template isn't quite right they are easy to change, something which I've found to be rare with other COTS solutions.