"I Had a Job w/ 100 Bosses!": From Freelance Burnout To Thriving Template Business (‪@31palms‬)

Before templates were her business, Tamara spent eight years grinding through freelance graphic design work, with clients found through a flyer on her gym's bulletin board that grew into lawyers, doctors, and small business owners around town. But freelancing turned into its own trap, dreading her inbox every morning, finishing one project only to have to go hunt down the next, and realizing she basically had a job with a hundred bosses. She'd already escaped one soul crushing 9 to 5 at a print shop, and now she was watching herself rebuild the same treadmill as her own boss. In 2019, right as Canva was taking off, she made the leap from one on one client work to selling templates on Etsy, and the timing, helped along by a pandemic that sent a wave of new business owners looking for exactly what she was making, took off faster than she expected. Today she runs 31 Palms, a self built, fully owned WordPress site with over 15,000 sales, selling one off Canva, Shopify, and Wix templates alongside her all access membership, the Business Template Collective. In this video, you'll learn what finally pushed her to quit client work for good, how she built and runs 31 Palms entirely on WordPress instead of handing her business over to a platform she doesn't own, the plugins and tools running her shop, membership, and email list behind the scenes, how AI is and isn't affecting her sales and why she thinks AI slop ads are backfiring on the brands that use them, and what she's expanding into next, including more collections and eventually WordPress website templates. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:38 Discovering graphic design 03:47 Freelance career 05:29 Starting template business 09:17 Selling on Etsy 12:41 31 Palms name 13:29 Launching on WordPress 14:32 Website walkthrough 15:34 Learning new platforms 16:30 Who buys templates 17:02 Ghosted by designers 19:02 Shopping process 22:30 Video tutorials 24:00 Business Template Collective 27:33 Website plugins 29:17 Email marketing 30:12 Canva creator program 31:02 Life after freelance 31:54 Time management 33:46 Membership pricing 37:40 Finding new customers 38:53 AI's impact 40:57 Life lessons 42:01 Standout customers 44:16 Future product plans 44:50 Social media traffic 46:41 Long-term career plans 47:31 AI search traffic 48:23 Closing thoughts Launch your own membership and course site w/ MemberPress: http://www.memberpress.com/pricing Learn more about MemberPress: http://www.memberpress.com 31 Palms: https://www.31palms.com 31 Palms on Instagram:   / 31palms   #graphicdesign #canvatemplates #membershipsites