How I got started selling Squarespace plugins
I'm typically interviewing guests but today I pull back the covers on how I got started selling Squarespace plugins.
It's a messy story but I hope it serves you.
Comments, and feedback welcome
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A very rough Transcript via Rev.com
Welcome back to another episode of the Squarespace entrepreneur podcast. My name is Omari Harebin. I'm the founder of sq SP themes. And this show is for entrepreneurs who have either built a business on the Squarespace platform or you've built products or services for the users of this platform. So each week or each episode, I typically speak with someone about their story and their journey, as a Squarespace entrepreneur. but this week after eight or nine episodes, I'm going to share my story a little bit. And today we're going to talk about, how I got started selling Squarespace plugins. Now it's been four years since we launched our first plugin and by we I'm talking about me and, the developer Dimitri, and we've also recently crossed half a million dollars in revenue from this particular product line, which is kind of mind blowing to me as well.
This wasn't something that I set out to do. In fact, I started, as QSB themes in 2015 with the intention of selling Squarespace templates. up until that point, I had been freelancing for about a year and a half doing a bit of videography photography, social media content. and I do a website occasionally for a client. If they're in a crunch and really needed something, Squarespace was like the best solution for that. I remember I had a client once who had spent like thousands, almost $20,000 on a, on a WordPress website and the day before launch, they still weren't able to get certain kind of features or functionality that they wanted without, you know, pouring a whole bunch of more money into it. And so I volunteered, I said, Hey, you know, I can probably, take what you guys have and recreate it in Squarespace, you know, in time for your launch.
And so I whipped it up overnight and, I would do that occasionally. It was, it was always fun. call it a whipping up a Squarespace website because you didn't have to worry about too much technical stuff. It was really, you know, you start with a template and you customize that thing and make it fit your liking. And my style was my personal style was always really minimal. and it really served that well, but, because I was also doing photography and videography, it was perfect for portfolios and for big images and that kind of thing. So I had built up a login for the platform and, I was in their specialist directory. So I would occasionally get projects, related to Squarespace. some of which I couldn't fulfill because I didn't have the technical skills. but I did that for about a year and a half and, towards the end, I, I, I wasn't really getting anywhere.
I hadn't really, I wasn't really building a business per se. I was more so going from opportunity to opportunity client, to client, mostly just trying to survive, and, and looking back, trying to recreate the comfort of a job. That's what I, that's what I was trying to do when I looked back. And I w w you know, I wasn't able to do that because I really didn't want the comfort of a job anymore. And so, I, I remember getting really down at a certain point. my wife had gone back to work. I was at home with our one-year-old son, and I'd wake up in the morning, S some semi depressed. I'm actually very depressed, because I was broke and I felt like I had basically failed as, as a man and as a father and a husband and so forth, because I had, you know, gone and taken this leap of faith of, of leaving my career's engineered to be this creative who, who was failing.
I remember talking with a friend and he was like, you know, what, what are some of your accomplishments? And I was like, well, I don't have any, like, I've, I've, I got these degrees, you know, I've, I've held these, these roles. but they're not things that I'm necessarily proud of because, I was kinda just going with the program all the way up until that point. And I didn't feel like I had anything that I could really like, put a stake in the ground and say, Hey, you know, I did this. So, but that was also a positive because it meant that I could start from scratch. And I, because I was doing this freelance and I was really immersed in this whole digital marketing world, because I wanted to know how these people were making this money online, these, these six figures and all of this stuff.
And so I was signing up for all of the email lists, watching all the webinars, any, and every kind of thing out there on making money online, legitimately, cause there's a thin line. I consed it. And so one of the things that I knew was like, all right, well, I'm going to need to find a niche. And I had trouble doing that before, because I didn't want to box myself. And I didn't want to be known as, someone who just did one thing. I wanted to be valued for my wide range of creative abilities. so I was very reluctant to niche down and, and I remember I spoke with someone, who's like a freelance expert teacher, coach, and a mentor in they're like, you know, I, I was looking at finding a niche is like some type of long-term commitment, which I think it is.
But, they were like, you know, you can, you can be pal polyamorous with your niche, right. You don't have to just have one, you can start with one and kind of build out. So, so that, that kinda made me feel like, okay, I kind of get that. I could start with a niche and build that up and then move on to another niche that made sense to me. So I decided that, Squarespace was going to beat it because I had the positive, experiences. Well, they weren't all positive, but I mean, I had a positive experience, which is creating these websites. probably because I had been doing it since like the eighth grade, obviously not Squarespace, but, since I was a kid I'd always been making some type of website and some type of platform, I just never, never took it as something that I could actually make a living doing.
So I never even attempted or tried or, or put too much into that until I had reached this ground zero. So from ground zero, I'm like are, I've got this niche Squarespace, I need a product. And so the product idea that I had was to sell Squarespace templates, hence the name of the domain, ask USB themes. And, I didn't get too far with that initially because I didn't have the design skills that I imagined in my head were needed for templates. And I also didn't have, too much money to hire or to, to, spend on it. But, in the process of trying to figure that out and trying to create templates, I had to learn, some CSS and JavaScript. Cause I, I decided I was going to learn the developer side of the Squarespace platform and, in doing so I picked up enough skills where I could offer just that as a service.
So the service became Squarespace tweaks, and it was just, customizing people's websites, according to whatever little tweaks they needed. And I made it a, a product tie service where, you know, you can pick the number of tweaks that you wanted. Let's say you had five tweaks, you can get the five tweak bundle. And, and it was great. It was efficient. I was able to quickly build up, build up a business with this particular service. Now, remember, I set out to sell, sell templates, but I also created this site to be, to serve as a sandbox so that I could experiment and test different marketing strategies, different SEO strategies, everything that I had been learning the year before as a freelancer, working with different clients. I wanted to be able to take complete ownership and, and just have something that I could play with and know that are, you know, good, bad, whatever, like this is on me.
Right. There's but so much, experiments you could run with a client, right? So I needed the sandbox. And so I had this sandbox and, and really quickly I pivoted to selling the service. And, the service was, was, somewhat successful because it allowed me to, allowed, allowed my work, my wife to stop working, again, allowed us to, to move out of where we were living. And I started to feel like, okay, I've, I've, I'm starting to accomplish or reach these, you know, these online business goals that I had. But when I didn't know, I realized at the time when it was still very, very time intensive and I would spend hours researching and trying to figure out these little custom tweaks that, I was decent enough, but I wasn't, I wasn't like the best. I wasn't really like an expert master wasn't really like my thing thing was just a thing that I was good at enough to make some money with.
and the thing that I really still wanted to cultivate was these market and skillsets, particularly with content and SEO and paid traffic. So, I would still consult on the side and I had this client who, had a product, a physical product that, and they had a Squarespace website. So, I took it on in as kind of like, I, I was doing it, doing it, playing all the roles against doing a little video, a little, product photography. but really I was, trying to grow this thing and put these skills to work. And, it was a successful project in the span of about, maybe six to eight months. We're able to take that product from a handful of cells to, well over like a hundred thousand and cells. and I felt like, all right, I've got this, this, this tweak service that I'm doing, is it starting to wear on me?
however, I've been able to prove out this digital marketing skillset, this kind of holistic all in one, you know, take you from zero to a hundred type of thing. Let me do this for myself, right. Let me take this skill set and let me apply it to myself. The problem is I was burnt out at this point with the tweaks, because like I said, I was, I was doing more than I should have been done and, the way that I was pricing at the time, it just didn't make sense. then it makes sense. So I quit that. I was like, let me just hang up this and let me take these, these skills that I've, I feel like I've polished and let me apply them to, let me try to sell a product of my own. I still didn't have one yet, but I figured I could start with some affiliate offers and just double down on the content marketing with these affiliate offers and, eventually launched my own product.
And I had a baby on the way at this time, my second. And, so it wasn't necessarily the smartest or wisest of decisions. however, I, I felt like I needed to do this, so, it didn't work out. I probably made a hundred bucks as an affiliate, that fall over the span of like three months. and I try to, I try to launch a product, a product, a info product on creating info products that bombed completely. And, I didn't even, I didn't have anything at that point. I was kind of done, what I had built and created a until then, the website had expired. I couldn't afford to turn it back on. you know, my baby was, maybe four weeks away from being born. I was kind of on my last leg in the sense of like, I didn't have anything to, to fall back on, try to go back and get an engineering job, try to, get some public assistance, that didn't work out.
, and I ended up selling my story. I ended up pre-selling or yeah, put in, put in my story on pre-sale and selling that for 10 bucks, directly via PayPal, to friends and family and, made enough money that month. And, my daughter was born and, it was skip, skip some of that. And, a couple months later I'm like, all right, I tried, I tried doing this dropship and thing. I'm like, all right, maybe, you know, again, all I needed, I felt like all I needed was a product. And, I could, I could just take it. but the drop shipping thing didn't work out, ended up being an issue with like, like scam customers. Like people would scam the website, it was bad. and so I said, all right, let me, let me go back to the last thing that worked, the last thing that, that I was successful with, and that was the tweaks.
So I decided to give the tweaks one more chance, or I don't know if it was one more chance, but it was a chance. but this time around, I knew that I couldn't do it myself. And so I went in, I went on Upwork and I hired a developer to help me out with a project that basically I had to clean up some code that I had written the year before, and he helped me clean it up. And, then he helped me with a few more projects and I was like, this is it. he was efficient. he was, he cared a lot about the details and, he didn't give up. He was very persistent as well. and he's also very Frank and just, you know, easy guy to communicate with. So, I started noticing some trends with the tweak requests that we were getting.
And so I asked him, I said, Hey, what do you think about packaging, some of these, as plugins. And I told him, I say, listen, I'm really a marketer. And, you know, I can handle the marketing. if we, if we package these things and he was like, yeah, sure, let's do it. And so we've been working together like this ever since. and it's been a blessing for me. A thing has been a blessing for him as well. and so now, selling digital products has become my bread and butter, but largely indirectly as an affiliate, selling Squarespace templates as well. So we've kind of come full circle where, taking this other path has led me back around to achieve in my initial goals. but if I were starting all over today from scratch, I'd probably again go really deep with a niche service, a deep meaning, allow some deep enough to get to know like what the reoccurring problems are, and then figure out how to create some type of do it yourself version of that solution.
Templates are, do it yourself. design solution, plugins are, do it yourself. development solution, courses are, to it yourself, perhaps consultant or coaching, and so on. So, you know, figuring out what those reoccurring problems are within a particular space that haven't been met yet, where there's still a gap where there's still a hunger for a solution, and doubling down on those solutions and making them available where they're most needed. So that said, if you'd like to learn more from this particular experience of selling digital products on Squarespace, going from zero to a hundred, then definitely check out this my latest mini course, which is called productize and automate too, which captures the playbooks that I developed, over the years of, of running this digital product based business. I'm talking about, from coming up with product ideas, to get into your first 10 cells, to building out content and SEO systems, to ensure that, some sustainability to even building out in the affiliate program and what's entailed in that, a lot more, you can check it out, Pomare heroine.com and if you go to learn or courses or whatever it says there, they'll take you to the course where you can, you can sign up.
I also have a few more coming down the road, but I think I'll talk about those in some future episodes. but, if you're listening to this in real time, so it's currently July, 2021, you can check out productize and automate one, which captures how I was able to, create a service, a productized service in the first place and create a business off of that. that's all I got for today's episode. I'm looking forward to seeing next time, thanks as always for tuning in. It's been real
