The truth about selling Squarespace templates (it's not passive income).
Selling Squarespace templates looks like the dream from the outside — build it once, sell it forever. Olga has been doing it since 2020 and she's here to set the record straight: it is not passive income. It is a second business running alongside your services business, and if you go in without understanding that, you will probably give up before it works.
In this episode Wayne asks Olga everything — the misconceptions, the marketing, the support load, the client surprises, and the moment a template buyer becomes a custom design client. Olga has been selling templates for almost six years, is closing in on Squarespace Circle Platinum status largely on template installs alone, and has made pretty much every mistake so you don't have to.
The biggest thing most designers get wrong? Launching a template before they have an audience. Olga's honest benchmark: you probably need at least 2,000 monthly blog visitors before a template shop makes sense. That means 50 to 100 blog posts and a real understanding of SEO before you list a single product. Skip that step and you're building a store nobody can find.
They also get into how templates and services feed each other as a funnel, why Olga scrapped 18 individual template courses in favor of one simple guide, how she designs for a niche that almost always surprises her, and why the designers who quit at three templates are the ones who were closest to it working.
In this episode: the passive income myth — how long it actually takes to build template sales — blog traffic as a prerequisite — how many templates to launch with — building your first audience vs. building your first product — support, documentation, and where to draw the line — how templates become a pipeline for custom services — designing for a niche and getting surprised by who actually buys — Squarespace vs. Showit vs. Webflow vs. Shopify template markets — why Olga still hasn't given her Showit shop enough love — and what she would do differently if she started over (spoiler: not much).
","author_name":"Olga Dorovskykh"}