Trying to sell templates

Back with my journey on selling on Etsy, so let’s get right into it. There were two kinds of templates I was looking at. At the start, I tried selling desktop wallpapers. I thought it would be a good fit, especially with some form of organisation built into it. I created an Instagram account and filmed some videos, and I also created a brand for it called b.uniq, carrying it over from my shirt business (teuniq). I made about 10 different wallpapers, each with different layouts for things like work, personal use, games, etc., and put them up on Etsy. After a while, I realised that you actually have to pay to list items on Etsy. Because of that, I stopped and moved everything over to Gumroad instead. As of today, I’ve earned exactly $0 from it... and yes, the files are still sitting on Gumroad. To be fair, I probably didn’t put in enough effort. It was very much a low-effort experiment. That said, I’m still using a variation of my own wallpaper on my desktop today because it genuinely helps make finding apps easier. If you’re curious about what kind of wallpapers I made, you can still find them here ↗. While writing this post, I actually tried to log into my Gumroad account… and realised I couldn’t find the account anymore 😅 I think I created a new Gmail just for this, but oh well. Some of the wallpapers there are free, so if you’re reading this and just want to try one out, you can head over and download it. Another thing I tried or attempted to try, since I never really published it was creating a board game.

This idea came from my time in NS, and also later when I joined a startup where we had board game Fridays. Thinking back on that, I decided to create a board game for fun called Police and Thief (inspired by Payday). But with my very limited board game design experience, it didn’t really work out.

Building on that idea, I decided to expand further and create more casual games instead such as a more fun version of Snakes and Ladders, Battleship, and matching card games. We (partner and I) spent around 3–4 weeks working on different themes, reskinning the games, and targeting them at couples.

As a side note, we targeted couples because at that time I was also thinking about creating a couple subscription box in Singapore… but let’s leave that story for another post.

The timeline here might not be 100% accurate since I tried a lot of things at different times, but let’s just go with this. In the end, even though we created quite a number of game themes, we never launched them. We knew we hadn’t done enough market research, and honestly, we got a bit lazy when it came to product shoots and actually launching the games on Etsy. So now, the games just live in our Canva rent free. That said, I’ll probably print them out and play them with my partner one day.