Founder Fridays: The Side Project that Became a Startup People Needed with Steve Ruiz of tldraw

Infinite-canvas infrastructure is becoming a commodity—and Teal Draw’s rise shows how a developer-first “side project” can turn into a startup people actually need. Steve Ruiz built Teal Draw as an open-source SDK for creating whiteboards and similar infinite-canvas experiences on the web, betting that what used to require expensive, specialized teams would eventually be expected as a plug-and-play feature inside productivity tools. That thesis mattered because map-like complexity and design-tool UX patterns (resizing, interaction behaviors, canvas mechanics) are notoriously hard to get right—and even when teams solve them, users rarely notice the underlying platform. Teal Draw aimed to make that hard foundation reusable so smaller teams could ship creative, canvas-based products without years of engineering.

Ruiz’s path to product-market fit didn’t start with a grand plan. He arrived at the idea through earlier experiments in “pressure sensitive digital ink” and arrow/ink algorithms, then consolidated those efforts into Teal Draw around 2021 as an open project. Building in public wasn’t just marketing; it mirrored studio practice—sharing work-in-progress, soliciting feedback, and connecting with people who might become users, customers, or collaborators. The open-source framing also changed the demand curve. Once Teal Draw shifted from scattered prototypes to a coherent SDK, developers and companies began emailing for early access, asking to sponsor work on GitHub, and in some cases offering money for access to the code.

The inflection point came when larger organizations started treating the SDK as a strategic dependency. Ruiz described corporate interest tied to upgrading conferencing and collaboration tools—essentially, replacing or enhancing whiteboard capabilities with something built on an infinite canvas. Sponsorships accumulated quickly (over $200,000 before fundraising), and the project’s public release (MIT-licensed code) triggered strong responses from both individuals using the demos and startups building canvas-based apps. That traction was enough to justify a seed round completed in about three weeks, even though direct revenue lagged for roughly a year and a half.

Teal Draw’s business model has evolved through multiple iterations, but the current structure centers on licensing for production use. Developers can use the SDK in development without paying, while deploying it into production requires an annual license—priced as a license rather than based on user count or team size. Ruiz emphasized that “business model fit is hard,” and there’s no simple template to copy.

Community growth, in his view, leans more “vertical” than “horizontal”: fewer community members than followers, but a steady stream of updates, experimental features, and customer projects shared over time. AI became a major accelerant. A designer at Figma, Sawyer Hood, used Teal Draw to turn a drawn website into HTML/CSS via GPT-4 with Vision, then embedded the result back onto the canvas. The workflow evolved into markup-on-top-of-generated websites, which went viral in late 2023 and helped non-technical users experience “draw → software” for the first time.

For founders, Ruiz’s core advice is to keep the surface metrics clear—shipping on time, closing deals, tracking deal size—while allowing the path to be messy. Early on, the most reliable strategy is to try things quickly, abandon them fast, and “worm” toward what connects with real demand rather than over-committing to a single plan.