€20,000/Month 1-Woman Template Business

They Got Acquired reports 👇

In June 2014, graphic designer Jimena Catalina Gayo offered to help her brother with his final college project. An hour later, she’d created “a more than decent template” in Google Slides […]

“I was surprised at how little effort it took, and naturally felt pretty pleased with myself,” she wrote. “Which led me to the following thought: Could I offer free templates and make money?”

The answer was yes: Jimena went on to launch SlidesCarnival, which offers “Free PowerPoint templates & Google Slides themes for your presentations”

Jimena apparently “designed the WordPress site in under a day” 🚀

You can see an early version of it here.

Based in Spain, Gayo initially shared SlidesCarnival with her friends, who shared it with their networks and on their blogs. She also invested about 50 euros in LinkedIn ads. It gained even more attention when it was hunted on Product Hunt, a site that features new tech products.

After that, SlidesCarnival began ranking on Google, and it grew organically through the years. It often ranked No. 1 for popular keywords like “free PowerPoint templates,” “presentation templates” and “Google Slides templates.”

Jimena’s monetization strategy was to give away all the templates for free and monetize with Google Adsense 🤑

That worked out well…

In its later years, SlidesCarnival logged 2 million monthly website visits and 12 million monthly pageviews. For Gayo, this translated to 20,000 euros/month, or a little over $20,000/month — which works out to about $240,000 in annual revenue.

(€20,000/month = approx $22,000 USD)

Then, in March 2023, Jimena announced that she’d sold SlidesCarnival to Canva for an undisclosed sum 🥳

Apparently that sum was enough for her to retire…

This tweet also serves to announce that I’m retiring. Working has had its moments but I’m getting off here. I will continue designing from time to time but as a hobby, without clients or deadlines.

Jimena wrote in 2017, back when the site was earning €5,500 per month…

The truth is, I didn’t devote much time to the launching SlidesCarnival and it could have as easily ended up with the rest of my side projects: in the cemetery of ideas that never materialized. 

Quite honestly, I didn’t have much faith that this one would work any better than my many other projects that never saw the light of day.

One takeaway from this: you never know which projects will take off, so it’s good to dabble and try new things.

Just try to not go too far and end up constantly distracted by shiny objects 😱

Another takeaway is that templates can make you a lot of money.

A bunch more template success stories I’ve featured in this newsletter…

• $100,000+ Selling Notion Templates
• $5,000+ Selling No-Code Templates
• $1 Million Selling Notion Templates in a Single Year
• $18K/Month Selling Templates, Plugins & Courses in the Spanish Market
• $10K/Month Pitch Deck Templates
• $2.5K/Month Selling Resume Templates
• $601,530 PowerPoint Template

Do you already have experience using or making a particular kind of template?

Or have you been looking for a specific template but can’t find one good enough?

Perhaps there’s a business there 🤔

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