I made $1.4 million in revenue selling Canva templates. Here's how I scaled my business in less than 3 years.

An as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with a woman about her business. It has been edited to make it clearer. The revenue of Varbanova has been verified.

I signed a two-year contract with Santander in the UK after graduating from the law school. In July of 2015, I began to watch streams. I streamed because it was fun.

It's an app for live video streaming. The same goes for live on other social-media networks.

My audience grew to 1,300 regular viewers in three weeks as a result of my live stream.

In August of 2015, I started a group on Facebook. We wanted to help one another grow their following.

I was suggested to charge for access to all the tips. My first membership was launched in August of 2015.

For the first 20 people, the membership cost 15 dollars a month, followed by 25 dollars a month, and then 35 dollars a month.

Members received access to guest training, collaborative calls, daily events where people would collaborate to grow their audience, and access to a private Facebook group.

I got tired of working at my 9-to-5 banking job and running my membership

I registered my business as a member. It had grown to 60 paying members, but it was difficult to manage and make ends meet.

I gave in my notice because my membership income matched my salary at the bank.

I wanted to do everything I could to help the business. I began to work with other social-media platforms.

I had learned a lot from my experience as a campaign manager in a marketing agency while I was a student.

I built an audience of more than 100,000 entrepreneurs over the course of four years.

I tried to find ways to help these entrepreneurs. Free books, videos, and digital information products were some of the things I did.

I found coaching or offering free resources to be exhausting

I wanted to work less.

I decided to focus on creating self-study digital information in order to sell it.

I didn't like what I saw when I first sold a guide about engaging live videos and a PDF guide with content prompt.

There was a shift in the type of content that performed well. Posts with educational graphics were going crazy.

Many of my clients were trying to learn a new language. They didn't know how to make these graphics.

Immediately, I turned to the online graphic design tool Canva

I use Canva to create my graphics.

I put a lot of effort into making these types of assets.

I saw an opportunity to design and sell templates that mimicked the look of the popular photo sharing site.

I wanted to know if there was a demand for the templates if I was going to pivot my business. I sold my templates to make sure they were viable.

Before I created any templates, I asked my followers if they would buy a pack of 100 templates to help them make more money.

Within a day, 100 people said they would pay for my templates

I gave my team, which was just me, my fiancée, Jamie, and a finance manager, the go-ahead on the pre-sale.

People could pre-order the template pack on the checkout page.

Within a day, we got 100 pre-orders. In the first few days of opening the pre-sale, we sold 257 Canva template packs.

We sold 779 for a total of $23,362. We made more than 1,300 sales organically from my social media following.

We made $6,000 in sales by buying Facebook ads. The demand was larger than we thought. There was a set of 100 templates.

When we started making the templates, we asked preorder customers what they wanted

We looked at what templates were on the market and what content performed best for us.

The first version of the template was created by me and Jamie. We didn't do graphic design.

We made the templates before releasing them to our buyers.

Some of our customers wanted to be affiliates. We gave them a small commission on each sale they made after sharing our templates with their friends and followers.

We also invested more in ads

We spent $36,504 on ads from December to April 2020. We made a profit of over $50,000 in the first five months.

Annie Kaszina, who built her account to more than 100,000 followers using our templates, was one of the customer success stories.

We started the club because people asked for more templates.

There is a yearly or monthly fee for the membership. 30 days of social-media content can be created in one to two hours a month with the tools and templates we provide.

The first 13 months saw us grow to 1,500 members. It has made $688,000 in revenue since it was launched.

My template business has brought in over one million dollars since it was launched in December.

Over the next two years, I will no longer be working. I work about 10 hours a week because of health problems.

I spend most of my time creating marketing material

I worked for about an hour the other day and we made 23 template sales totaling $2,444.89.

More than 1,000 affiliates share our templates and memberships.

My business is owned by me. I have a lean team of my fiancée, a finance manager, a designer, and a few other people.

There is no one who is a full time employee.

We now offer more templates than before. There are courses, workshops, training and consulting.

I'll always be grateful that I found Canva because it's helped me build my business to $750,000 a year.