Manu Arora

Manu Arora is an Indian software engineer and founder best known as the creator of Aceternity UI, a library of animated React and Tailwind CSS components that became one of the most copied sources of landing-page design in the Next.js world. He also runs Aceternity, a design and development studio for startups, and makes YouTube videos about design engineering.

Arora is self-taught: he started coding at 18, learning from YouTube, Udemy and search, and freelanced through college before taking a full-time engineering job. He has described building Aceternity, first a solo web-development agency, from the ground up while still employed, before leaving his job to work on his own products. One early product was Algochurn, a free platform for front-end interview practice that he built in about 40 days in 2022 and launched in public on X and Product Hunt; a Starter Story case study listed him in Jaipur at the time. He also built Tailwind Master Kit, a collection of Tailwind templates.

Aceternity UI launched at the end of 2023 with copy-and-paste components built with React, Tailwind CSS and Framer Motion (now Motion). Its eye-catching effects spread quickly through X and YouTube, and the site now advertises more than 200 components, blocks and templates, a paid All-Access plan and an MCP integration so AI coding agents can install components directly. Arora's own site reports about 3 million page views and 200,000 visitors a month for the library, 44,000 followers on X and more than 33,000 YouTube subscribers.

Around the library he has built a small product family: Acebuilder, an AI landing-page builder with exportable code (2024); Vibrant, a curated gallery of well-designed websites; and Acelearn, a course on micro-interactions. The Aceternity studio lists work for companies including Cursor, Neon, Strapi and Fireworks AI.

Arora is a clear example of the design-engineer route to indie income: give away striking components, build an audience around them, then monetize with templates, courses, client work and sponsorships.