Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?

Hey, my name is Max, and I am a maker, entrepreneur, and investor based in Berlin. I have been building internet projects and businesses since I was 13 years old. Back then, I started making and selling websites, graphics and also built a browser game.

My first bigger startup was in the educational space. These projects had one thing in common - they allowed me to combine my passion for building things, sharing knowledge, and enabling growth for the people around me.

Right now, I am building Wizard Ventures. We build, buy and operate online businesses like:

- BaseTemplates (https://basetemplates.com) ► The best startup templates
- Tona (https://tona.so) ► Competitor Monitoring on Autopilot
- Magic Design (https://en.magicdesign.io) ► All of your designs in one monthly subscription
- Startup&VC (https://startupandvc.com) ►Venture Capital Job Board
- VC Stack (https://vcstack.com) ► Tools for VC investors

But this article is all about BaseTemplates.

How did you start this business? Take us through the process.

In 2019 I was still operating my education startup, but was always attracted to test out new ideas. With one of these ideas, I wanted to participate in a contest. As I needed to build a pitch deck quickly, I searched for a great-looking and easy-to-use template.

And somehow, I found BaseTemplates Pitch Deck Template, bought it, and won the competition.

Some weeks later, I found out that the guy who had initially created the product wanted to sell the whole business, and I was on fire right away. So I jumped into the numbers right away and talked a lot with the founder about what already worked.

And in the numbers, I found some exciting things. Firstly, sales were coming in every day without spending a dime on marketing, and secondly, there were two spikes in revenue when the founder launched the templates on ProductHunt.

After seeing that, I wanted to buy the business even more because I thought to myself: “How cool would it be to have a business that generates money while I was asleep without spending money on marketing”.

Besides that, I was always interested in fundraising and was responsible for our seed-funding in my previous companies as well. As a result, I made an offer right away, and luckily, we quickly agreed.

How did you get your first initial customers?

When I took over BaseTemplates, just one product and a small content section existed. But there was already a regular stream of customers.

The first thing I did was create a plan that made it possible to 10x the business.

Part of this plan was to migrate the website to a new CMS, develop and improve the content, and finally find new marketing channels for the additional products I was planning to build.

Almost four years later, BaseTemplates now offers a wide range of products and several free resources and tools. Not only was I able to massively increase the number of users who are coming to the website every day, but I was also able to increase the revenue massively.

And the best part about this is that I have helped tens of thousands of founders with their fundraising and ultimate build great stuff.

Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?

In my opinion, building something is the easy part, but selling it is hard. If you can do both, you are unstoppable.

When I took over BaseTemplates, there was mainly organic traffic which came from a couple of blog articles. Besides that, I already had some larger websites that referred to the pitch deck template.

At that point, I decided that it would be a great idea to produce more content around startups, fundraising, and pitch decks. So, I wrote 30 new blog posts and created specific pages for long-tail keywords like “Pitch Deck Business Model Slide”.

As a second building block, I started building little freebie products and resources. The first of that kind was PitchDeckHunt (https://pitchdeckhunt.com) - a collection of 150+ pitch decks from industry-leading startups worldwide.

We launched it on ProductHunt, got over 1,000 Upvotes and a ton of initial traffic. Furthermore, we acquired a ton of backlinks by reaching out to other websites that were linking to pitch deck collections. With this tactic, we managed to get plenty of links because most of the other collections were not as good as PitchDeckHunt.

PitchDeckHunt still drives a considerable amount of traffic to BaseTemplates every day. So to bring more customers over to BaseTemplates, I additionally created the “Investor Pitch Training” (https://www.basetemplates.com/investor-pitch-training) and a “Fundraising Checklist” (https://www.basetemplates.com/startup-fundraising-checklist).

The third and most important thing was to leverage the power of ProductHunt. At the beginning of my BaseTemplates journey, I had never launched something myself or even know someone who had. But I tried it out myself, and it not only drove thousands of people to our page for the days of the launch but, more importantly, created backlinks and features all around the web. These helped me to increase the revenue to a new level after every launch. So, I decided to launch every product I had built, and the community loved it.

And the love of the community is the most significant growth hack you can think of. If someone loves the stuff you are building - they will post about it and tell their peers.

That’s what happened with BaseTemplates and is still happening. You will find us spread all over the web - from forums to Twitter posts.

The last growth strategy for me was acquiring affiliate partners. I asked myself where founders spend their time and found interesting pages like OpenVC (https://openvc.app) - I reached out to the makers and cut them a fair revenue share deal. Using this technique, I onboarded five partners that account for 5-10% of the total revenue at the moment.

How does your business make money?

BaseTemplates still makes most of the revenue through digital product sales - on top of that, we sell services like custom pitch deck designs.

The business right now is making 15k+ per month on amazing margins. The beauty of a digital product business.

Where can we go to lean more about you and your business?

The easiest way to learn more about the stuff that I am working on is to follow me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/maximilian-fleitmann/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@maxfleit),

Take a look at my personal website (https://maxfleit.com), or check out Wizard Ventures (https://wizardventures.co).