How much money have I made selling website templates since the age of 16!!

4 min readSep 19, 2022

At the age of 14, I started learning web designing cause I wanted to implement my business idea (which I am not proud of) through a website.

The idea was simple, I create a website with only HTML(cause that’s what I knew at that time), add a google AdSense advertisement to it and pay users half of what I earned when they click repeatedly on the advertisement. Ingenious, Right?

I remember being so proud of coming up with this idea that I was scared to tell it to anyone (my classmates in 9th grade) as they can snatch my idea and redeem my chance to be a millionaire or maybe a billionaire!! God, I was stupid!!

Anyway, I did not become a billionaire even with my genius idea as I found out so uncountable things wrong with my idea which I don’t really remember and also in case someone is thinking of doing it. It is Illegal.

For the next 2 years, I researched all the ways you could earn money online without showing your face and only having knowledge of HTML and CSS (That’s right, I learned CSS too). Then I found out about selling Website Templates and creating passive income through a get-rich-quick blog.

So I started making website templates all day long for the portfolio genre as they were in demand at that time. And I finally made one (In four months), I remember being so proud of my template. I showed it to my best friend, he loved it too! I got all the validation I needed!!

The next day, I sent my template for review to themeforest.net. I was confident that they will approve my design as it was so cool and better than many of the designs listed there. I waited for their review without any patience, checking my mail every 8 minutes. Finally, they send their review. My heart stopped as I opened the mail. Their review was as follows:

HARD REJECTION!!

That’s it, No explanation! nothing!! I was furious!!

I made some changes that I knew were to be made but was lazy to address and submitted it again.

HARD REJECTION!!

I kept on submitting and they kept on rejecting. I finally lost all hope when I got the same rejection for the 11th or 12th time.

Then I came to know about templatemonster.com. All the people who fail to get approved by ThemeForest go here. It didn’t have half of the traffic ThemeForest had, but I didn't care. so, I submitted my design there and within 4 days it got approved!! I was so so so happy!!

check out the website template:

https://winkthemes.tech/themes/templatemonster/theme-clean/index.html

The next obstacle was making the first sale. Cause, who would want to buy a digital product with zero sales? It had no social proof!! I thought many times about buying my own product but I didn’t have any money or a bank account. So, after spending my 4 days checking my sales page every 7 minutes. I got my first sale!!

I felt like I was on top of the world. I kept imagining this day but still was unable to process it. It was a very big deal, for a 16-year-old Indian boy to earn money online and that too in dollars!! I got 20$ in the sale. which was at that time around 1500 rupees. (I had monthly pocket money of 500 rupees at that time)

Fast forward 2 years. I am 18 now and I have listed 12 products on template monster. I stopped making templates when I was 17 but I still earn from my products. Here’s the graph of my earnings through the year 2021