My Road To 20k MRR: Combining Digital Products with Productized-Services

Hey there, Indie Hackers! 👋🏽

I recently hit the milestone of $20,000 Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) with my theme shop, LayeredCraft and I thought I’d share the story of how I made it happen.

My road to $20k MRR, like that of many others, has been long and winding. Much of it was not planned; success certainly didn't come overnight, and luck didn't play a significant role. However, I've undoubtedly found that there are many shortcuts that can be gleaned from reflecting on my journey, and I'd like to share some of them with you. I'll be going into detail on everything I've found relevant to growing the business that currently requires less than 20 hours per week to sustain and costs me precisely $38 per month to run.

Warning: There is no mention of AI or ground breaking technology in this article. It’s a mostly “old-school” approach that I believe anyone with an expertise or niche can reproduce. Let’s dive in!

The Journey

I began selling HTML and WordPress templates on ThemeForest in 2010 — I was an early entrant into the theme-selling market for sure. Among the eventual 20 themes I would release on ThemeForest over the next decade, only about half would generate sales exceeding $10k throughout their lifetime. This journey was undoubtedly a trial-and-error process, with several items outright rejected without ever seeing the light of day, even after weeks of work — a frustrating experience to say the least 😩

In 2012 and 2013, I found my stride and introduced my most successful WordPress themes. Throughout those years, my annual recurring revenue (ARR) averaged around $100k. For marketing, I solely relied on the network effects of the marketplace, avoiding any external promotion. Instead, I remained focused, dedicating my time to producing as many high-quality themes as I could manage as a one-person operation.

Around 2015, the market for WordPress themes had become oversaturated. A small percentage of "all-in-one" themes dominated the majority of WordPress theme sales on ThemeForest. Subsequently, in the following years, you could observe a steep decline in revenue, despite releasing new themes during that period.

Out of frustration and the allure of other full-time opportunities knocking at my door, I took a break from producing themes between 2016 and 2019. During this time, several new platforms gained popularity, including Webflow, Framer, and Notion — all of which began developing vibrant communities of creators.

In my case, I discovered the Ghost platform, and for the second time I recognized the chance to get in on the ground floor with creating themes for Ghost. I’ve gone on to release 7 Ghost themes and subsequently became a certified Ghost expert. Overall, in my tenure on ThemeForest I amassed 16k theme sales and over $500k in lifetime revenue.

I also managed to maintain a mailing list of from around 2,000 customers from the most recent years (I had a much larger list, but I decided it was best to consider anyone older than 1 year as cold and purged them).

With this list as a starting point, I started sending monthly “build in public” reports consisting of theme updates, what I did for marketing and some business metrics from the previous month.

Today, I’ve streamlined my entire operation to essentially; producing themes for various niches, writing organic content that speaks to potential Ghost users in those different niches, and finally upselling custom Ghost services to all theme purchasers.

Revenue and Expenses Breakdown

• $20,000/mo. MRR
  • $5,000/mo. in theme sales
  • $15,000/mo. in productized service sales (Ghost theme customizations / custom builds)
• $17/Mo. MailerLite subscription (for monthly newsletter and automated sequences)
• $21/mo. Digital Ocean (2 droplets, one for theme demos, one for client staging sites)

TL;DR

• I created digital products and listed them for sale on a marketplace. I believe digital products are excellent. low-ticket items and can work well as lead-magnets to build awareness and start a funnel for future upsells. I kept trying different niches, categories and types of products until I found some traction. There are so many options in the digital products space today, Notion Templates, Framer Templates, Canva Templates — just to name a few, with equally as many marketplaces to sell them on.
• Built a mailing list with my customers, sharing monthly “build in public” updates with them.
• Created a website to sell products directly and slowly migrated off (and become a no-exclusive seller) on marketplaces where my products were listed.
• Started a blog to build domain authority and organic traffic. Focused my content strategy mainly on creating tutorial and educational content based on my workflows, methods and personal experiences.
• Offered a productized-service in the niche of my successful products.
• Upsold the productized service to customers who purchased my products.

I don’t run and paid ads, nor am I particularly active on social media. I simply leveraged the network effects of marketplaces (in the early stages), organic traffic, and upsells.

I’m sure one with experience in the realm of paid ads and social media outreach could benefit greatly from these channels, but it’s not my strong suit, so I tend to focus on the areas that I’m more naturally versed in.

What’s Next

I plan to continue running LayeredCraft as a solo founder for the foreseeable future. But I also feel as though I’ve accomplished most of what I set out to with themes of all varieties over the past decade. Now, it's time to leverage the experience I've gained in this realm and channel it into a new endeavor: crafting the next evolution of website builders. This platform is called Siimple and it has the singular goal of making the process of creating, customizing, and managing a website truly, simple.

I hope my journey offers a bit of inspiration and encouragement to my fellow solo-founders out there. I’d be happy to go into more detail on any part in particular that might resonate with where you are now or where you're aiming with your own ventures. Also, feel free to drop by on X and say hi! ✌🏽