🗂 Overview

If you’ve ever thought about selling digital products, you’ve probably thought about selling templates. But then you get discouraged because there are millions of templates available and standing out from the crowd feels impossible.

This is where SaaS comes into play - an increasingly popular business model for digital entrepreneurs.

Now with no-code platforms like Webflow and Bubble and the advancement of AI technology, creating subscription “SaaS” sites has become much more accessible to people without a coding background.

Combining these two digital business formats together can offer enhanced functionality and unparalleled advantages when it comes to selling templates. It’ll be slightly more work upfront but it will help you stand out and increase your value, whilst allowing you to bring in recurring revenue.

👀 Things worth checking out

📊 Stats

More than 90% of businesses say email marketing is important to their company's overall success. (source)
The average expected ROI is $40 for every $1 you spend on email marketing. (source)
Total spend on social media advertising is projected to reach $268 billion in 2023. (source)
The average landing page conversion rate across all industries is around 2.35%. However, the top 25% of landing pages convert at 5.31% or higher. (source)
Figma has over 4 million users. (source)
Notion has over 30 million users. (source)
Webflow has over 3.5 million users. (source)
Framer has over 24k active sites but is growing fast - as can be seen in the search trend below. (source)

📈 Trends

Interesting to see Webflow decrease at the same time Framer saw an increase

⭐️ Examples

Flowbase provides resources, templates, and assets for Webflow designers. It's essentially a marketplace and resource hub. While it offers digital products and resources, it operates with a SaaS-like model where users can access a collection of assets. Relume is similar to this. Both these companies make well over $1m a year.
CreativeOS just had a facelift. A few days ago they just sold Figma templates for high-quality, professionally designed ad creative. But since Wednesday they have launched their SaaS-like subscription platform.
Creatopy is similar to CreativeOS but more advanced and focuses less on the template aspects but is a good example of how you can improve upon CreativeOS in terms of features and functionality. They do offer ad templates but focus more on the automation aspect.
Beautiful.ai is a cloud-based presentation software designed to simplify the creation of visually appealing presentations. They offer a platform that automates many of the design decisions, ensuring the end result is visually appealing.

👎 The Problems

The problem with selling templates:

Templates are a great way to make passive income online but the barrier to entry is relatively low so there is lots of competition.
Templates don’t allow you to get recurring revenue so you have to keep finding new customers.

Problems customers face:

Buying a template can be risky as it might not have everything they need.
Customers don’t have the skill or time to make their own at a high quality.
Not all templates are created equal. Some may be high-quality, while others may lack polish or functionality.
Templates on sites like Canva and Adobe Express can be overused, making it difficult for buyers to stand out.
Some templates might require additional purchases, like specific fonts, plugins, or software licenses.
If issues arise, the template creator might be unresponsive or lack the expertise to assist.
As businesses grow, a template might not scale well to accommodate that growth.

💡 Opportunities

Templates on steroids

As mentioned in the examples section, CreativeOS used to just sell static social media ad templates as Figma files. They were branded really well and the founder had a good-sized audience on Twitter. But this week they relaunched as a SaaS. Now they have a filterable database of templates and they add new ones every week, they have courses, and a few more features.

It’s nothing revolutionary but it’s a great way to differentiate from other people selling ad templates and it builds immediate authority in their niche. It also allows for recurring revenue and should over time see them earn far more assuming their retention is good.

This is essentially what Canva did but more niche, higher quality and with more authority (created by experts).

Based on their homepage they are also planning on adding landing page and email templates in the future.

You can apply the same logic to other template formats (like Flowbase with Webflow) or if you want to create ad templates too, you can improve upon CreativeOS.

For example, you could add:

Video templates (currently they are just static templates)
Ad library features (like Foreplay)
AI functionality (like allowing users to automatically create templates based on any ad they want using AI - for example ads they’ve found on Foreplay)
Automation like Creatopy (auto-resizing for all aspect ratios, also auto-translations, auto-branding, etc)
Scheduling (you could allow users to auto-publish their ads via your platform).
More design platforms (currently only Figma but what about Canva, Photoshop, etc)

There’s a lot that can be done but as I said it could also be applied to other design types, like emails.

Email marketing is a massive industry, pretty much every brand sends emails to their customers, employees, and prospects. A SaaS for email templates that can be easily added to existing email providers like Klaviyo would be massive.

If it’s technically possible, a Chrome extension that allows for drag-and-drop (or at least easy copy-and-paste) sections of predesigned HTML email templates could be one way to do it. This essentially brings high-quality and versatile designs to people who are otherwise stuck with the basic features of the email tool of their choice.

Other template options:

Landing pages - you could even choose a particular platform (like Replo with Shopify) Carrd or Framer would be good ones to try.
Presentation templates - Beautiful.ai are a great example of this.
Ebook templates - You could make something similar to Book Bolt but way better and more focused on high-quality templates. There’s a big audience here.
3D models - Like Blenderkit
YouTube Thumbnails
Spreadsheets

🛠 How to build it

Start small - creating a SaaS can be time-consuming at first. create an MVP to validate the idea before committing to spending time and money on building the full thing.
Build an audience first - This isn’t necessarily vital but will definitely help when it comes to launching, validating and testing. If you have an audience you have a better idea of what people want, you’ll have a community of people willing to test your products, and you’ll have an audience of people willing to buy on launch day.
Research - Create templates in a niche or platform you’re familiar with. For example, don’t go creating Framer templates if you’ve never used Framer. Do your research first and understand the platform and what you could implement into your SaaS/templates that others aren’t or that others will find beneficial.

🚀 How to grow it

Build an Audience: Build an audience on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and/or LinkedIn. This will increase your authority and trust whilst making it easier to acquire new customers.
Email Newsletter: Creating a newsletter will also help build authority and get you in front of an engaged audience regularly. The creator of CreativeOS runs a newsletter called NiceAds where he breaks down 3 ads every week.
Run Ads: Run Google Ads on relevant search terms and Social ads to get in front of a new audience.
Community: Find people posting about their struggles with finding templates or designing for the platform you focus on. Use this tool to monitor social media for these posts (not affiliated).
Influencers: partner with experts in your niche to create templates or just to promote your SaaS.

👍 Tips

Make templates for platforms or niches that you have experience in.
Make sure you target the right audience. For example, expert designers probably don’t need templates, but beginners and non-creatives would.

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