Who is Traf?

The Cydia theme opened a long stretch of designing digital products, including DeviantArt profiles from seven or eight years earlier that he points at as proof of how long he had been assembling home screens. Around 2014 he was hired as the designer on an app called Airborne. Over one weekend somebody on the team floated something else entirely: send a person an anonymous gift, no sender, just a package and a note on the doorstep. They put up a landing page charging $25 and fulfilled orders by hand. The weekend project did better than six months of the original app, so they applied to Y Combinator with a company a week or two old and got in, by his account one of the youngest YC had taken. It became Spoil, a mobile gifting app. There were four co-founders, the product got rebuilt again and again, some paying B2B work pulled the roadmap sideways, two of the four had families and needed steady income, and the money ran out. He dates his preference for small bootstrapped businesses to that contrast: inventory, investors and payroll on one side, a file he can upload once on the other. In 2017 he built The Boring Token, a working Ethereum token named after Elon Musk's The Boring Company, sold from a page that said plainly nobody was going to make money on it.

By early 2020 he was publishing Notion pages to the web, and putting a real domain in front of one meant wiring up Cloudflare Workers. He wanted a version he could use himself, then sell to people with the same problem. He went back to a developer he had met during the 2017 crypto run, Jason Werner, who had built a mobile wallet, and pitched it as a straight split: "I'm a designer, you're a developer, this is perfect." Werner was already a Notion user. About a month later, on 1 May 2020, Traf posted Super to Indie Hackers and Product Hunt as "a simple way to add custom domains, fonts, and analytics to your public Notion docs", aimed at people making portfolios, resumes and blogs without code. His view of the underlying product was blunt: Notion is a dream CMS, because adding a thought to a page and having it show up on the web feels like nothing else does. When Courtland Allen asked why product/market fit had come so fast, he put it down to being deeply integrated with the growing Notion community, and pointed at the tutorial content a no-code education partner had built around Super: selling digital products through Gumroad and a Notion page, bolting memberships on with MemberSpace.

His own description of the icon launch stack was one sentence: he uploaded them to Gumroad and embedded them on a Notion site using Super. The $28 price was deliberate. Icon sets normally sold for a few dollars, but the buyers arriving from iOS 14 customization threads had never bought an icon set and had no reference price. The Twitter thread did a hundred thousand impressions on day one and close to a million on day two. He kept shipping into the demand. When someone asked for an MKBHD version, he spent maybe another half hour making a red and black set, quote tweeted it at the original tweet, picked up around 200,000 more impressions, sold about $2,000 of it and pushed all of that traffic back at the main pack. On 3 October 2020 he posted that 40 new icons and 2 new colorways had been added. The pack on Gumroad now holds 140 icons in 4 colorways at 1024 by 1024, still $28, with more than 16,000 sales recorded and 509 ratings averaging 4.6. He also wrote the run up as "Six Figures in 6 Days", the post Indie Hackers linked in its show notes when he came on to explain the numbers.

In January 2023 he worked with Jack Butcher on Checks, the Ethereum art project that opened as an $8 edition on 3 January and minted 16,031 identical pieces before a migration mechanism for turning them into fully onchain artwork went live on 12 February. That March, Framer co-founder Jorn van Dijk wrote up Traf's work as design inspiration, pointing at the icon pack and at Checks. He kept building inside Framer: on 4 October 2024 he published Logofy, a free plugin that drags any of 3,000-plus SVG logos from simpleicons.org onto the canvas, and on his YouTube channel he walks through rebuilding Linear's website in Framer. On 9 September 2025 he opened the mint for Aeons on Base, a 24-hour open edition at 0.0025 ETH. Each Aeon has a fixed lifespan and is destroyed when it expires, unless the holder collides it with other tokens to merge lifespans and climb through six visual stages, or pays a scaling fee to freeze it permanently.