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I've often thought about writing some website templates which could then be sold through a marketplace such as wrapbootstrap or themeforest. I've been too busy to invest any time into this, but would be interested to hear if anyone else has had success doing this.

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I've done some. https://wrapbootstrap.com/user/acesubido. In it's lifetime across 3 years I got around 5000USD~. Back then when bootstrap was still new it was lucrative to write website templates, since it was easy and there were few templates going around (circa 2012-2013). The process was:

- Look for a famous template

- Rewrite it in bootstrap

- Get it approved

As of 2016, the front-end ecosystem has grown big. Material Design and other UI/UX innovations (fancy modals, fancy sidebars, scrolling animations, etc.). This causes the market/buyers to look for themes that will allow them to look like the next AirBNB or Google. Theme marketplaces are looking for bootstrap/foundation templates jacked full with these javascript libraries and fancy stuff, increasing the barrier to entry for stuff to get approved.

Here was my experience writing a template last year:

I spent 2 months of weekends and weeknights to scout out the competition and worked on an admin theme. Made it with fancy charts, animations and a few javascript libraries embedded in that the market would probably want. I proceed to try and get it approved. Then, I found out I'll have to fight through other big agencies that crank out these themes like pancakes for a living while they price it 20-30% lower than mine. These agencies also sell these themes in other marketplaces that make them very popular choices over others since they can support customizations and what not.

Do you have link to the template?

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