My Framer journey | The Monthly Log #9

One year ago I had no idea what Framer was. This week I got my first payout from the Framer Partner program and it totally blew my mind 🤯

I’ve talked many times about Framer in my previous monthly logs. I was mainly sharing the templates I was creating and how I made my first $$$ selling those templates. Today I’ll share my Framer journey over the past year in this post.

The early days

Back in November last year I decided to be more active on Twitter/X and I kept seeing tweets from designers mentioning Framer and how amazing it was. The Framer hype was already very real at the time and the FOMO hit me instantly.

I didn’t jump on the Tumblr bandwagon. I didn’t jump on the Webflow bandwagon (and many others I guess). But this time, I felt it, I knew I had to jump into Framer right away.

Over the Christmas holiday I did this YouTube crash course to learn the basics. The interface was so similar to Figma that I felt right at home from the start and couldn’t believe I had built a fully functioning landing page in a couple of hours.

There were not too many courses available at the time so there was no way to end up in tutorial hell. Straight after finishing the course I decided to practise by recreating two HTML/CSS templates I had coded at the time. One of them is still one of my most downloaded free templates to date.

Building a business around Framer

In March I released my first template, a minimal portfolio called minilio, and got it added to the Framer official marketplace. I got 3 sales on the day it was listed and something clicked in my mind. It was my first real internet money made with a digital product. From that moment I knew I had to work on releasing more templates.

Over the past 8 months I released 6 more templates, some free and some paid, bringing the total to 8 templates that are all available on my store.

In June I decided to be more strategic about the templates I was building and released a free landing page template for Notion creators to sell their templates, called Notor. 

100 downloads in the first 24 hours. 
3,500 (and counting) downloads to date. 
The strategy worked! But that’s a story for another monthly log.

Giving back to the community - Frameplate

This gets its own part because of how amazing this community is. The community has grown massively over the past year and it’s great to see how designers and developers are supporting each other.

Back in March I decided to launch Frameplate to help creators from the community to get their templates discovered, as an alternative to the official Framer marketplace. 

As of today, Frameplate is listing over 200 templates and has been visited over 10K times. I’m currently working on growing the platform with a better curation of tools built around the platform and more resources for the community. Watch this space!

Let’s talk about $$$

In the past year I’ve earned a couple of thousand dollars from Framer. And the beauty of it is that there are so many ways to create income sources around it too.

Framer Partner program - this is what brings the most money in for me. But it’s a patience game, as with most affiliate programs it takes several months between a referral being made and the money actually hitting your bank account.

Selling templates - as most of my current templates are free this is a much smaller income stream for me. All the free templates have a name-your-price option which brings some revenue in and some have upsells setup with Figma files or template bundles.

Client work - this is not something I’m focusing on right now so I only built a website for one client this year. But client work alongside the partner program can be a great strategy to build a strong income source, so I may revisit this next year.

And now what?

I believe it’s only the beginning - the Framer team is dropping feature after feature at a crazy pace and the hype keeps on growing. 

This is my plan to grow my Framer business next year
- Build and release more templates
- Grow my audience as a Framer designer/developer on X
- Turn 88 Pixels into a studio offering templates, components and design/development services.

This post ended up being much longer than what I had expected but I didn’t want to end without some words of support for anyone considering starting their Framer journey:
- Just do it. Don’t think further.
- Join the Partner program from the start
- Build templates, components 
- Join the online community and engage with its members on X too.

---

Thanks for reading this log - you can find the previous ones here if you fancy checking them out. And if you liked this post please consider sharing it :)

You can also follow my journey on Twitter/X where I share updates regularly and sign up for my newsletter to get the next Monthly Log in your inbox.

Until the next one 🫡