By making digital products that sell as you sleep, you can start to build a recurring income that can scale almost infinitely.
The difference between a client project that gets you $5,000, or a product that gets you $50, is that the product can be sold again and again and again.
When I started building online products, which were first posters and then cv templates, nothing really sold that well. But now that I've been building Webflow templates for about 8 months, I've had interesting and varied results. I'm now up to 15 templates, so I'm going to share my numbers and what I’ve learnt from making and selling Webflow templates.
How much you can make off of Webflow Templates
When you build your first template, you're essentially working at $0 an hour since you don't know how much money you're going to make until you release it, and since I was going through the process for the first time, the first template was both the one that took me the most time and had the most revisions to be done to it until it could be released.
It took me about 45 or so hours to design and build my first template, which was at $0 an hour since I hadn't been paid anything for it yet, and in the first month it generated around $1,100 USD.
With $1,100 generated out of 45 hours, that means my hourly rate for the work so far was about $24/h. This is quite low, but since the work is already put in, that number can now scale as much as it wants.
Doing the math, I thought if 1 template could get me $1,000 a month, then 10 templates would get me $10,000, but it hasn't scaled that way. With 15 templates, the monthly income from it is about $3,500 a month, which means the growth is not exponential, or even linear, it's more or less linear with a dip.
Why Webflow Templates don't scale well
From what I've found, each time you build and release a template, there will be an initial surge of sales, and then it will dip off to being only a couple of sales a month, which means the name of the game for Webflow templates is volume.
If I were to stop making templates and just live off the ones that I’ve already built, I can probably expect the revenue from it to cap at about $2 to $3,000, because commissions from templates go from 80% of sales to 60% if you don't submit a template every month.
Creating and submitting a template every month isn't too difficult, but it's good to keep in mind that when you submit a bunch and then stop for months, your sales from templates won't stay consistent.
The time it takes to create each template varies for me, but I'll usually put aside at-least 40 hours a month to work on a new template, and if I finish one quicker than that then I will just start on the next one.
My stats for my Webflow Templates
As a template designer, you aren’t given specific stats on your templates and what you are making month on month, so I had to make my own. In Notion I've charted my sales for each month, and also the amount of templates I have in total.
This way I can keep track and also forecast how much I might make months down the line. So based on my current numbers, I'm making about $200 a month per template, plus $800 from the sales of when a new one is initially released.
Since overall I've made about $18,000 in 8 months, and on average it takes about 30 - 40 hours to make a template, that means my current calculated hourly rate for all of my templates is actually only $35 an hour.
Even though having a source of recurring income is great, it doesn't actually come close to exceeding my hourly rate for clients. But, the positive is that I could stop working on templates, and that hourly rate would slowly increase over time without having to do anything.
