Next.js templates, months of work, $0 in revenue. Here is what I got wrong.

I build developer templates. Course landing pages, a dental clinic site, a dev portfolio, a web3 payment UI kit. Five products, all live on Gumroad.

Here are the honest numbers so far: about 92 total visits, 10 free downloads, and $0 in paid sales.

For a while I told myself the products were the problem. The design, the price, the copy. So I kept polishing. New screenshots. Better descriptions. Another demo.

None of it moved the needle, because I was fixing the wrong thing.

The products are fine. The problem is that almost nobody sees them. 92 visits total is not a conversion problem, it is a distribution problem. You cannot optimize a funnel with no water going into it.

So I am changing the plan. Instead of polishing in private, I am building in public every day: real numbers, the war stories from years of freelance payment work, and the demos, on the platforms where the people who would actually buy this stuff already hang out.

The goal is boring and specific: one sale a day. I am nowhere near it. But I would rather chase a real number in the open than keep perfecting something nobody is looking at.

If you sell to developers or founders, how did you crack distribution early? What actually brought you your first 100 real visitors?

Demos, if you are curious:
Dev portfolio: dev-portfolio-template-iota.vercel.app
Course kit: edulaunch-kit-premium.vercel.app