Growing a Digital Product Business to $10K/Mo

Hey — It's Nico.

This week I bring you an interview with the founder of an info-product business in the startup fundraising niche. Here's BaseTemplate's story.​

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While in university, Maximilian built his first big company: StudyHelp. His idea was to bridge the gap between offline and online tutoring. The company scaled quickly to +200 cities and +1M website visits/month, while raising several funding rounds.

When first raising capital for the company, Maximilian didn't know how to fundraise or build a pitch deck, but he managed to do so using online resources, including a pitch deck template he purchased from a website called BaseTemplates.

Time after Maximilian left StudyHelp on an operational level, he met BaseTemplates' founder and got to know he was interested in selling the website. After checking the numbers, Maximilian decided to acquire the business.

Maximilian had one crucial competitive advantage: he had been a BaseTemplates customer, so he perfectly knew who the business's potential customers were and how they felt.

Since the acquisition, Maximilian has grown BaseTemplates from $500/mo to +$10,000/mo. These were the four main strategies:

1. Create useful articles and guides related to fundraising. "If people like the content, they will convert at some point into paying customers."
2. Side-project marketing (a.k.a Engineering as Marketing). He has created several small tools and directories that help founders throughout the fundraising process.
3. Partner with other websites visited by early-stage startup founders (through an affiliate program that gives these websites a commission per sale on BaseTemplates' products).
4. Build more digital products. Initially, the website only had pitch deck templates. Nowadays, BaseTemplates also sells a financial model template and a Notion fundraising dashboard.

Maximilian's plans are to keep expanding the product range (strategy 4) and keep working on their distribution channels (strategies 1, 2 and 3).

Besides that, he wants to build a whole ecosystem for the founder and VC space, where BasteTemplates will be only one of the building blocks. They have already launched some side projects, such as FounderResources, VCStack, and Startup&VC.

​Here's the link to BaseTemplates' interview.​

Besides the articles, here are my 3 recommended resources of the week:

• ​Cash—Kingmaker or Killer?: There's a heated debate around whether a moat can consist of cash. This article analyzes for which kind of businesses (market and models), cash is indeed a competitive advantage.
• ​The Ownership Economy 2022: This article analyzes the current status of web3, or what the author calls the ownership economy, as it is formed by products and services that turn users into owners.
• ​What is Churn? How Can It Be Negative?: This is a great guide by ChartMogul about churn rates, which is one of the key metrics every SaaS founder should track.

Short newsletter this week. I've been busy with university exams, which are finishing tomorrow. A lot of new stuff should come in the following weeks ;)

Cheers,

Nico