Side Hustle: Turn your personal workflow into a paid template (and avoid the cringe)

The Template Gold Rush

Everyone is selling templates now. Notion templates. Spreadsheet templates. Email templates. Workflow templates. The promise: package your expertise once, sell it forever. Passive income from knowledge you already have.

The reality is more complicated. Most templates fail. Not because templates can’t work, but because most template creators make predictable mistakes. They either undersell generic systems or oversell personal quirks. They cringe in one direction or another.

Understanding why templates fail—and why some succeed—requires examining what actually makes a workflow transferable versus what just works for you specifically. The distinction is subtle but essential.

The good news: there’s a path between “generic nonsense anyone could create” and “my specific setup that works for nobody else.” Finding that path is both the challenge and the opportunity.

My cat Winston has a workflow for demanding attention. It’s highly optimized for his specific context: one human, one apartment, one food schedule. His workflow would fail entirely as a template for other cats. The specificity that makes it effective for him makes it useless for others. Many human template creators make the same mistake.

Why Most Templates Are Cringe

The template marketplace is filled with products that range from embarrassing to insulting. Understanding the common failure modes helps avoid them.

The Obvious System

Many templates package common sense into impressive-looking structures. A project management template that amounts to “list your tasks, assign due dates, check them off.” A content calendar that’s basically “write down what you’ll post when.”

These templates aren’t wrong. They just don’t add value. Anyone who needs project management or a content calendar could create these systems themselves in minutes. The template seller is charging for packaging work that provides no genuine insight.

The cringe factor: pretending basic organization is secret expertise. Buyers feel insulted when they realize they paid for common sense with fancy formatting.

The Overspecialized System

The opposite failure is templates too specific to transfer. “My exact system for managing my freelance graphic design business while homeschooling two kids and training for a marathon.” The specificity that made it work for that one person makes it useless for everyone else.

These templates confuse “this works for me” with “this is valuable to others.” The creator’s specific circumstances, constraints, and preferences are baked into the system. Buyers must either have identical circumstances or extensively modify the template—at which point they might as well have built their own.

The cringe factor: assuming your specific life is a template others want to follow. It’s subtly arrogant without providing actual value.

The Guru Performance

Some templates are sold not on their utility but on the seller’s personal brand. “The exact system I used to 10x my productivity and achieve seven-figure success.” The template becomes a performance of expertise rather than a tool that helps.

These templates often contain basic ideas wrapped in excessive branding and self-promotion. The value proposition is aspirational—buy my template, become like me—rather than practical. Buyers are purchasing access to a lifestyle fantasy, not a useful system.

The cringe factor: the template is about the seller more than the buyer. The guru energy is palpable and off-putting to anyone who sees through it.

What Actually Makes Templates Valuable

Valuable templates share characteristics that distinguish them from the cringe categories.

Domain-Specific Insight

Good templates encode insight that isn’t obvious to people outside the domain. A freelancer’s invoicing template that handles the weird edge cases clients actually present. A content creator’s planning system that accounts for platform algorithm realities.

This insight comes from experience. You’ve solved problems that others will face but haven’t yet encountered. Your template saves them the learning curve you already climbed. The value is real because the insight is genuine.

Appropriate Abstraction

Good templates abstract the right things. They remove specific details (your client names, your prices, your schedule) while preserving structural insights (how to categorize clients, how to think about pricing tiers, what schedule considerations matter).

The abstraction level matters. Too specific and the template doesn’t transfer. Too abstract and the template doesn’t help. The skill is identifying what aspects of your workflow are specific to you versus what aspects represent generalizable patterns.

Clear Scope

Good templates promise specific outcomes and deliver them. Not “organize your life” but “track freelance client communications and payment status.” Not “be more productive” but “plan content across three platforms with consistent scheduling.”

Scope clarity helps buyers assess whether the template fits their needs. It also helps creators focus on delivering genuine value rather than vague promises. The constraint of clear scope forces meaningful content.

How We Evaluated

To understand what makes templates succeed or fail, I analyzed approximately sixty commercially available templates across multiple categories, plus interviews with template creators about their development process.

Step 1: Template Categorization

I sorted templates into categories based on their value proposition: domain insight templates, organizational templates, aspirational templates, and basic utility templates. The categorization revealed patterns in success and failure rates.

Step 2: Customer Feedback Analysis

I examined customer reviews, refund rates where available, and repeat purchase patterns. The feedback revealed what buyers actually valued versus what sellers thought they were providing.

Step 3: Creator Process Documentation

I interviewed template creators about how they developed their products. The successful creators followed different processes than unsuccessful ones, with key differences in how they identified and validated market needs.

Step 4: Longevity Assessment

I tracked which templates remained available and actively sold over time versus which disappeared or stagnated. Longevity indicated sustainable value rather than initial hype.

Key Findings

Templates succeeding long-term shared characteristics: specific domain focus, real problem-solving insight, appropriate abstraction level, and honest scope claims. Failed templates typically exhibited at least one cringe factor: obvious content, excessive specificity, or guru positioning.

The Skill Erosion Connection

Templates connect to broader themes about automation and skill erosion in unexpected ways.

When you use someone else’s template, you skip the learning that created it. The template works, but you don’t understand why. You haven’t developed the judgment that would let you adapt when circumstances change.

This isn’t inherently bad. Standing on others’ shoulders is how progress happens. But it creates dependency. Template users often struggle when templates don’t quite fit their needs. They lack the understanding to modify effectively because they never learned the underlying principles.

Template sellers face an interesting ethical consideration: should templates explain their logic or just provide structure? Explanation builds user capability but reduces dependency on the template seller. Pure structure creates ongoing dependency but doesn’t develop user skills.

The best templates—from a user development perspective—include reasoning. They explain why the structure works, not just what the structure is. This enables users to adapt the template to their needs and eventually create their own systems. It’s less profitable but more honest.

Creating Without Cringe

If you want to turn your workflow into a template without becoming insufferable, certain approaches help.

Validate the Problem First

Before packaging your solution, verify the problem exists for others. Your workflow solves a problem you had. Does anyone else have that problem? How do they currently solve it? Would they pay to solve it better?

This validation prevents the overspecialization trap. If only you have the problem, only you need the solution. Template-worthy problems are shared across identifiable groups.

Abstract Intentionally

Go through your workflow and identify what’s you versus what’s generalizable. Your specific client names, your personal schedule, your individual preferences—these are you. The structure of how you categorize things, the questions you ask to make decisions, the triggers for actions—these might be generalizable.

The abstraction process is where templates are won or lost. Too much abstraction produces generic unhelpfulness. Too little produces specific untransferability. The skill is finding the level that preserves insight while enabling adaptation.

Test With Real Users

Before selling, have people actually use your template. Not friends who’ll be nice. Real potential customers who’ll tell you where it breaks. Where do they get confused? What do they need to modify immediately? What did you assume that wasn’t true for them?

User testing reveals assumptions you didn’t know you were making. Every assumption is a potential cringe point where your template fails for users with different circumstances.

Promise Specifically

Define exactly what your template does and doesn’t do. “This template helps freelance writers track client projects and payment status. It doesn’t help with finding clients, pricing services, or managing creative workflow.”

Specific promises prevent guru positioning. You’re selling a tool for a specific purpose, not a lifestyle transformation. The honesty is both ethical and practical—clear scope attracts appropriate buyers and reduces refunds.

The Automation Trap in Template Creation

Template creation faces a peculiar automation trap: the temptation to automate the creation process itself.

AI can generate templates. Ask any AI assistant for a “project management template” and you’ll get something functional. The output is decent, generic, and immediately reproducible by anyone else asking the same question.

This creates a race to the bottom. Templates that AI can generate aren’t worth paying for because buyers can generate them themselves. The market value is in what AI can’t produce: genuine expertise, hard-won insight, domain-specific knowledge that comes from experience.

The irony: template creators who over-automate their process undermine their own value proposition. The human insight that made the template valuable gets abstracted away, leaving generic structures that AI competitors can match instantly.

Preserving value requires preserving the human elements: judgment about what to include, insight from real experience, understanding of actual user needs. These can’t be automated without being commoditized.

Pricing Without Cringe

Template pricing is where many creators lose their way. The failure modes are instructive.

Underpricing Signals Low Value

Templates priced too low signal that they’re not worth much. A $5 template suggests the creator doesn’t value their own insight. Buyers suspect—often correctly—that cheap templates contain obvious or generic content.

Overpricing Requires Justification

Templates priced high need clear value justification. “This template saves you X hours” or “This template prevents Y costly mistake.” Without justification, high prices feel like guru arrogance. With justification, high prices can be accepted as fair exchange.

Value-Based Pricing Works

The best template pricing connects to value delivered, not effort expended. A template that saves a freelancer ten hours per month is worth more than a template that saves one hour, regardless of creation difficulty.

Value-based pricing requires understanding your buyer’s context: what problems do they face, what’s the cost of those problems, what’s a fair price for solving them? This understanding comes from the same user research that prevents other cringe factors.

Generative Engine Optimization

Template marketplace content presents interesting dynamics for AI-driven search and summarization.

Most content about selling templates is created by people selling courses about selling templates. The advice optimizes for course sales, not template quality. AI summaries of “how to create templates” reproduce this commercially biased content.

When AI systems summarize template creation advice, they tend to emphasize marketing and positioning over actual value creation. The genuine insight—how to identify transferable patterns, how to abstract appropriately, how to test with real users—is underrepresented.

Human judgment becomes essential for navigating template creation advice. The ability to recognize when advice serves the advisor rather than the advisee requires critical evaluation that AI summaries don’t provide.

Automation-aware thinking means understanding that AI recommendations about templates inherit biases from commercially motivated content creators. The meta-skill is identifying advice that serves your actual goal—creating genuinely valuable templates—rather than advice that serves someone else’s sales funnel.

Winston’s Template Business

Winston has just demonstrated his template for acquiring evening treats: positioning near the kitchen during dinner preparation, making periodic eye contact, and executing a precisely timed vocalization when treat dispensing seems most likely.

His “template” works beautifully—for him. It’s optimized for his specific human, his specific apartment layout, his specific dinner timing. As a commercial template for other cats, it would fail completely. The specificity that makes it effective makes it untransferable.

Perhaps the lesson is that templates require the right level of abstraction. Winston’s underlying principle—identify optimal timing and positioning for desired outcomes—might transfer. His specific implementation definitely doesn’t.

The Long-Term Perspective

Template businesses can generate meaningful income, but the ones that last share common characteristics.

Continuous Improvement

Templates that survive update based on user feedback. The initial version is hypothesis; user experience reveals truth. Creators who listen and iterate build better products over time. Creators who publish and forget see their templates become obsolete.

Community Building

The best template businesses create communities around them. Users share modifications, ask questions, help each other. The community becomes valuable beyond the template itself. This social layer is hard to replicate and creates sustainable competitive advantage.

Authentic Expertise

Sustainable template businesses come from genuine expertise, not template-as-marketing-funnel strategies. The creator knows their domain deeply. The template encodes real insight. The value is obvious rather than manufactured.

This authenticity requirement is actually good news. It means template businesses are available to people with real expertise, not just marketing ability. The skills that make you good at your actual work can become the foundation for a template business that doesn’t require you to become someone you’re not.

The Non-Cringe Path

Turning your workflow into a paid template without cringe is possible. It requires honesty about what you’re offering, clarity about who you’re serving, and humility about the limits of your expertise.

The template market has room for genuine value creation. The cringe comes from pretending to offer more than you do, packaging less than buyers need, or positioning yourself as more important than your product.

Focus on the product. Build something that actually helps people with problems you genuinely understand. Price it fairly. Explain it clearly. Update it based on feedback.

This approach won’t generate viral sales or guru status. It will generate sustainable income from genuinely satisfied customers. That’s the non-cringe path: building real value for real people, without pretending to be something you’re not.