Papergens

About a year ago I built Papergens as a simple side project — a clean, no-signup site where anyone can download printable paper templates as PDFs.

No fancy tech, no viral launch. Just SEO and templates.

Here's where it stands today:

- 300+ templates (graph paper, lined paper, dot grid, music sheets, calendars, and more)

- 50k+ monthly visitors, mostly organic search

- Built with Next.js, fully static where possible

- Monetized with AdSense (low CPM, but it covers costs)

What worked:

The main insight was that this niche has real search demand but most existing sites are old, slow, or cluttered with ads. A fast, clean experience was enough to rank.

Japan turned out to be a surprisingly good market — high search volume, low competition for Japanese-language queries, so I've been slowly adding localized content.

What I'm working on next:

- Backlink outreach to teacher and education blogs

- A premium tier with more customization options

- Fixing crawl budget issues from editor URL parameters

Happy to answer questions about SEO for niche tools, Next.js performance, or Vercel quota optimization — those have been my main technical challenges.

Still early, but it's growing steadily. Building in public from here.