People often ask me how we come up with template ideas. They assume it’s a flash of inspiration — a sudden realization that the world needs a better content calendar or a more elegant CRM. The truth is messier. Most templates start as a problem we’re wrestling with in our own work, something that feels awkward or clunky, and a half-formed idea that it could be better. Then we spend weeks turning that idea into something we’re proud to sell.
In this post, I want to take you behind the scenes of how we design a template from scratch. It’s not a linear process, but there are four phases that always show up: research, prototyping, testing, and polish.
## Research: Steal like an artist
The first thing we do is look. We look at other templates, of course, but we also look at how people actually work. I’ll spend hours watching YouTube videos of people showing their Notion setups, reading Reddit threads about productivity, and interviewing our own customers. We’re not copying — we’re looking for patterns. What are the common pain points? What features do people always ask for? What do they love about their current system, and what drives them crazy?
## Prototyping: Get something ugly on the page
The fastest way to kill an idea is to think about it for too long. So we build a rough prototype within a day or two. It’s ugly. The colors are wrong, the properties are inconsistent, and there are placeholder names everywhere. But it’s a starting point. We start using it for our own work immediately. If it’s a content calendar, we move our own editorial schedule into it. If it’s a client portal, we use it for our next client project. This is the fastest way to find out if an idea has legs.
## Testing: Break it on purpose
Once the prototype feels usable, we hand it to a small group of beta testers — a mix of our email subscribers and a few trusted friends. We ask them to test it for a week and tell us everything that annoys them. And they do. We get feedback like “the date filter doesn’t work” or “I don’t understand what this property means” or “can you make it pink?” We take all of it seriously, but we’re also ruthless about scope. We’re not building a tool with a hundred features; we’re building a tool that does a few things really well.
## Polish: The last 10% is 90% of the work
When the feedback is in, we start the polish phase. This is where we obsess over the details: spacing, typography, color contrast, the wording of instructions. We make sure the template works not just in theory, but in practice. We test every button, every filter, every view. We write the setup guide, then we follow it ourselves from a clean account to make sure it’s foolproof. This phase usually takes twice as long as the first three combined.
## Launch and listen
A template is never really finished. After we launch, we watch how people use it. We read every support email, every comment, every review. Sometimes we discover a use case we never imagined, and sometimes we find a flaw that only shows up in the wild. We send updates to everyone who bought the template, so they get the improvements for free. That’s the beauty of digital products — they can get better over time.
Next time you buy a template, remember the journey it took to get to you. It probably started as a half-formed idea in someone’s notebook, survived a gauntlet of testing, and got polished until it felt just right. That’s the process we love, and it’s why we’ll never stop making templates.