Zlides
Create beautiful pitch decks and tell amazing stories
Almost a year! Running a super mini side project to help startups and busy designers succeed.
We gained a lot of sales since being actively building in public.
Celebrating small wins with Zlides
💰 $1,417 in revenue since Mar 2020
🍕 1,120 downloads
🕺 10 productized services
Full article is coming soon
Get your slides on Zlides
Crossing 1,000 downloads
I have been selling presentation templates for a year. It is not only boring, also not an innovative idea, and a big red ocean.
But it is very fun!
I am glad to have helped nearly a thousand busy entrepreneurs and designers.
Today is a special day. Launching the Lollipop presentation kit. A cup of coffee saves you hours of working time!
"Why do you sell presentation templates?" "It's not innovative at all?"
I get these questions frequently.
But a year ago, I decided to practice and showcase my presentation design skills. This project started based on my experience as a founder, venture builder, and seed investor now.
I believed a great presentation is a mixture of content, design, and storytelling. I really enjoy the design part.
Since then, I've been selling templates on my website and showcasing design inspirations on Instagram every week.
This is a small project that I enjoyed putting an hour or two every week. And it's now covering my Starbucks budget :)
I'm also glad to share a few major updates:
- Crossed 800 downloads (free + paid)
- Move from Squarespace to Carrd earlier this month
- Using Gumroad was a huge success and I have no regret
- Currently developing another affordable template to cater more business needs
#madebyzlides
Also my 9th month of running Zlides - a side project in presentation designs that keep me awake every week!
I'm a big fan of pitch deck designs. Since I launched Zlides, I've been following a routine:
- Weekly design inspiration on Instagram
- Regular projects on 99designs
- Drive traffic and downloads for my template - just crossed 500 :)
To celebrate the little success, I updated my website. Would love to hear your feedback: https://www.zlides.co/
It's been a long slog to get here, but Zlides just passed 250 downloads! This has been the result of several efforts, including blogging, social media marketing, listing, and partnership.
I have stuck around 100 signups for a long time, but what really turned the tide for us was Instagram stories and constant contribution to Quora. I have created a weekly and daily routine to get in touch with real customers. Now I'm just hoping that a lot of them will convert to paying users soon. 🤞
Zlides is now making $200 a month, enough to cover my marketing experiments, and coffee meetings.
Probably the biggest thing that helped me get here was launching a premium service. I charge companies around $150 - $200 per project.
This is super exciting, because it means that I can theoretically go further with Zlides.
Converted Zlides - a passion project into a downloadable content.
Not your typical presentation kit (yaaaaa, but better!), Zlides is built to help entrepreneurs create beautiful presentation slides!
Excited to take this idea forward.
10 Comments
The product looks really nice, what are your goals for 2021?
Thank you @dagorenouf - I'm thinking of ways to further productized the project instead of being a templates seller :)
Any advice?
Nice! I love productized services :), here's my 2 cents.
I assume that your target customer would need to make slides from time to time, so a subscription can make sense to them.
First, I would see if you can get people to pay $5 or $10 a month for "unlimited access and updates", like https://www.ls.graphics is doing.
If it succeeds, then try to build a simple platform where people can edit their presentation directly online, and export it in all major formats. You could increase the price for that.
Great work Felix! Can you write in the next article more about marketing / getting traffic on Zlides? We have the similar products and I'm very interested in that!
Yes! I will put up 8 tactics I used for this project :) Coming soon here and on my Twitter! @kapustin
Awesome!
Awesome looking site and I like the idea. I do think however that there are other needs your audience has next to good looking and functional slides that could generate way more revenue for you. Nothing comes to mind right away, but there has to something. These slides could be a good start for a funnel.
One question; with what site builder did you create this website? It looks beautiful!
Hey @Jopha! Thank you so much for your feedback - it's built with the legendary Carrd
No way! You did an amazing job with that. What is the font that you used? And how did you put that light shadow behind the tiles of the 'presentation kits'?
It should be Arial haha I like system font
Shadow is a default feature, no CSS needed