This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Katya Varbanova, the 30-year-old owner of Viral Marketing Stars, about her Canva template business. It has been edited for length and clarity. Varbanova’s revenue has been verified by Insider.
After graduating from Liverpool Law School in July 2013, I was offered a position in banking and signed a two-year contract with Santander in the UK. In July 2015, I started watching Periscope streams. It was fun, so I started streaming.
Periscope is an app specifically for livestreaming. It’s the same as going live on other social-media networks.
I began livestreaming my life, and my audience grew to 1,300 regular viewers in three weeks.
I started a Facebook group for Periscope streamers in early August 2015. The goal was for us to help one another grow our followings.
Someone suggested I charge for access to all the valuable tips our community offered. In late August 2015, I launched my first membership.
The Periscope membership started at $15 a month for the first 20 people, $25 a month for the next 20, and then a standard $35 a month.
Members got access to guest training, collaborative calls, daily events where people would collaborate to grow their audience, and access to a private Facebook group.
In September 2015, I registered my membership as a business. It had grown to 60 paying members, but it was hard managing work and this side hustle.
By October 2015, my membership income matched my $26,000-a-year salary at Santander, so I handed in my notice.
I wanted to go all in on the business. I expanded to coaching and consulting for other social-media platforms.
I had insights from my experience in sales at Santander and marketing from working as a campaign manager in a marketing agency while at college.
Over the next four years — from 2015 to 2019 — I built an audience of more than 100,000 entrepreneurs on my social media and email platforms.
I explored ways to help these entrepreneurs with their marketing and social media. I did coaching, consulting, workshops, free books, videos, and digital information products.
I wanted to grow my business while working less.
In late 2019, I decided to ditch free guides and coaching and focus on creating self-study digital information I could sell.
I started by selling a guide about engaging live videos and a PDF guide with content prompts, but I wasn’t satisfied.
In 2019, I noticed the kind of content that performed well on Instagram was shifting. Posts with valuable educational graphics, carousels, and reels were going viral.
Many of my clients were struggling to adapt. They didn’t have the design skills or the marketing expertise to know how to create these graphics.
I’ve been using Canva to create my social-media graphics since 2017
I loved making these kinds of assets and put a lot of effort into the visuals for my business.
I saw an opportunity to design and sell Canva templates that replicated this viral Instagram aesthetic that my clients could customize.
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If I was going to pivot my business and spend time creating these templates, I wanted to see whether there was a demand for them. I decided to presell my Canva templates to ensure it was a viable product.
Before creating any templates, I asked my followers whether they’d buy a pack of 100 templates to help them create viral business content.
I gave my team — which was just me; my fiancé, Jamie; a Facebook ads manager; and a finance manager — the go-ahead on the presale.
We created a basic checkout page where people could preorder the template pack.
We got 100 preorders within a day. In the first few days of opening presale in December 2019, we sold 255 Canva template packs for $7,647.00.
Another week passed, and we sold 779 for $23,362.00. By the third week, we made more than 1,300 sales — all organically from my social-media following.
We took $1,000 from our sales and bought Facebook ads, which made $6,000 in sales. The demand was bigger than we ever could’ve realized. The first set of 100 Viral Content Templates was born.
We researched what templates were on the market already and what content performed best on our accounts and other people’s.
I created the first iteration of the Viral Content Templates alongside Jamie. Neither of us did graphic design.
We spent a few weeks making the templates on Canva before we released them on December 23, 2019, to our preorder buyers.
Some of our preorder customers loved the templates and asked to become affiliates. They shared our templates with their friends and followers, and we gave them a small commission on each sale through their affiliate link.
From December 2019 to April 2020, we made $105,013 in revenue and spent $36,502 on ads. After paying out affiliate commissions, we made a $52,619 profit in the first five months.
Customer success stories rolled in like Jessi Romero, who built an account to more than 40,000 followers in a year, and Annie Kaszina, who built her account to more than 100,000 followers in 18 months using our templates.
People asked us for more templates, so we started the Viral Content Club membership.
The membership is $499 a year or $57 a month. The idea is that with the tools and templates we provide, members can create 30 days of social-media content in one to two hours a month and revamp their online presence.
We grew to 1,500 members in the first 13 months. Since its launch, it’s made $688,957 in revenue for my business.
Since the templates launched in December 2019, my template business has brought in $1.4 million in revenue and continues to grow.
My hours deceased over the next two years. In 2022, I’ve worked about 10 hours a week because of health issues.
I worked for about an hour the other day, and we still made 23 template sales totaling $2,444.89 — all from social-media engagement.
We have 13,000-plus customers and more than 1,000 affiliates sharing our templates and the membership.
I am the sole owner of my business. I have a lean team: my fiancé, who does operations; a freelance designer who does all things design, branding, and templates; a finance manager; and a few freelancers on the side for ad hoc jobs.
Nobody is a full-time employee.
Templates are a significant part of the business, but we now offer more. We have courses, workshops, training, and consulting.
I’ll always be glad I found Canva because it’s a resource that’s helped me build a $750,000-a-year business.
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