Eric Alli is a San Francisco product designer and engineer who has been quietly selling website themes since 2010. His shop, LayeredCraft, sells premium Ghost themes as digital products and then upsells custom Ghost builds and customizations to the people who buy them. In August 2023 he wrote that the business was doing $20,000 a month, with $5,000 from theme sales and $15,000 from productized services, while taking under 20 hours a week to run and costing him $38 a month in tools.

The path there was long and far from linear. He started listing HTML and WordPress templates on ThemeForest in 2010 as an early entrant, releasing around 20 themes over the next decade. Only about half ever cleared $10k in lifetime sales, and several were rejected outright after weeks of work. In 2012 and 2013 he found his stride with WordPress themes and averaged roughly $100k in annual revenue, relying entirely on the marketplace's own network effects rather than any outside promotion.

Then the market turned. By 2015 WordPress themes on ThemeForest were oversaturated, with a small group of all-in-one themes taking most of the sales, and his revenue fell sharply despite new releases. Worn out and pulled toward full-time roles, he stepped away from theme-making between 2016 and 2019. During that gap he noticed Ghost gaining momentum and saw a second chance to get in early on a platform before it filled up. He released his first Ghost theme in May 2019, eventually shipped seven of them, and became a certified Ghost expert. Across his time on ThemeForest he tallied roughly 16,000 theme sales and over $500k in lifetime revenue.

The model that carried him to $20k a month is deliberately old-school, with no AI angle. He treats low-ticket digital products as lead magnets that pull buyers into a funnel, keeps a customer email list of around 2,000 people warm with monthly build-in-public updates, and writes tutorial and educational blog content aimed at Ghost users in specific niches to pull in organic search traffic. The real money is in the upsell: custom Ghost theme work sold to people who already bought a theme accounts for $15,000 of the $20,000, dwarfing the product sales themselves.

His takeaway is that a niche operator does not need a breakthrough product to build a healthy solo business. Pairing cheap digital products with a higher-value service, owning your own audience by email, and compounding organic content over years can get a one-person shop to strong monthly revenue without ads or outside funding.