Thomas Frank has always wanted to know more.
He went to college in 2009, a year in which the U.S. was struggling to recover from a nation-wrecking stock market crash and recession. His dad lost his job; his friends lost their jobs. He and his college peers were faced with a huge task: Graduate in four years, into a world of economic insecurity, and succeed.
“I went to college thinking, ‘OK, the world’s on fire. I’m going to have to be as competitive as possible to get literally any job because I just watched everyone lose their jobs,” Frank told Mashable. So he read every college prep book and blog, from LifeHacker to Hack College. Eventually, he applied for a job to write at Hack College, but was rejected.
“I was like, ‘I know how to start WordPress sites, so let me just make my own instead,'” Frank said. “I just ran this little college success blog throughout all of my college career and eventually learned how to monetize it and then added a podcast and added YouTube and built up this whole business from what started off as a side project.”
It’s been a decade since Frank enrolled at college, and his podcast has since been retired. He hasn’t posted on his old YouTube channel, which now boasts about three million subscribers, in nearly a year.
In 2018, he started playing around with Notion, a digital productivity app. In 2020, he launched a YouTube channel called Thomas Frank Explains, which is dedicated entirely to teaching Notion. Now, he pretty much makes a living off Notion templates, explainers, and productivity tips.
Eager to learn how he did it, I sat down with Frank over Zoom. He told me how he makes hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling Notion templates, how he battles burnout, and why he’s getting back into Magic: The Gathering.
Mashable: When did you start really making an income from your Notion templates and tips?
When I first started the channel, I didn’t know how I was going to monetize it. I figured maybe I could do courses in the future or something like that, maybe consulting. It just seemed like it would just be a cool thing to exist in the world; a place you could go to learn all this stuff.
Because I was getting so many questions from people and I was having fun building on my own templates. So I started that channel. It was kind of cathartic because I had been running my big channel for years and every single video was sponsored. So every single video felt like this very high pressure affair. It’s like, ‘It’s gotta do well, it’s gotta get lots of views, it’s gotta perform well for my sponsors.’ And over here on my little tiny side channel, I can just do a video about coding up a little automation to open up Notion in the browser instead of the desktop app or vice versa. I can do it in an hour or two and then put it out there. So it was fun; it was low pressure. And then I took this cohort-based course that was very ironic and meta; it was a course for course builders to learn how to facilitate cohorts and build a curriculum and all that kind of stuff. And I learned a ton from that thinking I was going to monetize by building a cohort-based course. But throughout the process, I kept getting these little realizations that I didn’t wanna run that. I wanted to build tools.
So I got this idea like, well, I built this really great tool for our whole YouTube planning process, why not turn it into a template and sell it? And the funny thing about selling Notion templates is there’s no real distribution and anti-piracy mechanism in Notion. You just turn on public, and [it] can be duplicated. What I sell is basically just a URL that I hope people don’t share. But, as it turned out, it did really well the first month. I think we made like 15 grand or something on that tool, which is a bit more niche; it’s a creator focused tool. And then we followed that up with the Ultimate Brain template, which is my more personal productivity focused template for task management and note taking and goal tracking. And that’s the template that has bumped us up to about $100,000 to $120,000 per month on average in sales.
Have you had a big problem with other people stealing your URLs?
Definitely.
What do you do?
Basically, I have a community on a platform called Circle and what people are really buying is an invitation to that community. Within the community, that’s where I have my template links. So the reason I do that is less to protect the template links because once people have them, they can very easily share them. What I’m trying to protect is access to our active support because I have a wonderful head of support. His name is Alex, he’s a rockstar and I really don’t want to inundate him with support requests from people who did not buy our templates.
I’ve asked Notion to have some features down the line, but for now what I’ve noticed is the people who do this stealing are not really your customers. They were not gonna buy your template in the first place. So what I focus on is on distribution and accessible free content. If I make a tutorial that teaches people something, it gets a hundred thousand views, I’m going to get customers from that. I’m going to make more money than I would save by worrying about anti-piracy. But for the smaller seller, the piracy matters more. So I really want more anti-piracy tools.
Was there a big learning curve with switching from other project management tools to Notion?
It was incredibly gradual. We were using Asana and we got really annoyed by Asana, and then we tried Click Up and my team was like, ‘No, we don’t like it. Get away.’ We didn’t switch all the way to Notion for project management at first. We were looking for a company software where we could have documentation for processes and we were trying at Google Docs for a while and it just didn’t work very well. And then I found Notion, I was like, ‘Oh, this is super easy to use.’ We started there and then we were using Todoist for our task management alongside it.
There was this brain blast moment for me as a YouTuber where I made a database for the different shots and animations and b-roll items I wanted to put in a video. And one of my biggest workflow pet peeves for years has been the fact that when you construct a video, you have a chronological order of how a video’s going to be. And in my style, there’s a talking head layer. I might cut that down to 10 minutes and then I might go through and get ideas for all the pictures and animations and stuff. Well, the tension is when you’re editing, you wanna go chronologically, but when you’re gathering, you don’t always wanna do that. You might have five or or six shots in location A and then some in location B, and they’re all kind of interweaved.
So for years I would make my chronological shot list and then I would have to give them little symbols so I could know: OK, here’s for these five shots. On Notion there’s filters and I can just do another view of this database so I can have one for chronological; one for batching the shot; one for gathering. It was just a very gradual process from then on of adding more and more stuff into Notion until we got this system where literally from idea to publish everything is there.
Do you still mess around and make new templates? Or do you really stick to the two that you’ve created?
I make new templates. I have a few free ones that I gave away, and that’s part of my marketing strategy. Some of them are almost like pieces of the paid ones for free, and some of them are just standalone. Then people can get on my email list and they can buy the premium ones that they want.
I love building stuff in Notion, even if I’m not personally gonna use it that much. Right now, the payment provider I use is called Gum Road. And they’re increasing their prices to an insane degree. So we decided to build a template that has every single site or tool you could use for selling your own digital products. And we’re adding every feature it has. And then you could put in how much monthly revenue you’re earning and see what each platform would cost you. Because depending on what you’re doing, the costs really differ from platform to platform. Some are good for beginners, some are good for high volume sellers, that kind of thing.
How do you make money off Notion?
For me, it’s purely selling templates and purely selling them one time. I don’t have any kind of subscriptions that I sell.
When I got started there weren’t a lot of people selling templates and everyone who was selling templates was selling them for $5 at most. I think there was one exception: William Nutt’s Bulletproof Notion Workspace, which was a little more expensive. There was this sentiment I saw online of like, ‘nobody is going to buy a Notion template.’ But I was like, ‘No, I think this process that we built legitimately helped us be more productive as a content creation business. This is almost bespoke software. This is a tool that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Let’s try selling it for $100, a couple $100, and see what happens.
Number one, I wanted to do a pay once model and I figured I could additionally monetize through selling new products down the road. I also wanted to have active support. So one thing we do is we have a support forum where anybody who wants support can ask questions. When I launched the templates, I was spending like eight hours a day doing support just because that’s what I wanted to exist.
I wanted people to never have to run into a roadblock they couldn’t get past. Another thing we do, which is pretty uncommon, is we offer refunds. There’s no way to return a template, but I never wanted to have anybody feel like they were out the money they spent and the thing’s not gonna work for them. About 5 percent of our sales go to refunds every month, but I think that makes the customer experience better and it probably increases sales.
Did it just launch off in the beginning? What did you have to do to get people to start buying these templates?
It did kind of just launch off.
Well, that’s good!
So, Creator’s Companion is a more niche product and I also did a really, really bad job marketing it. I think I launched one email to a waitlist of like 300 people. What I really don’t want to do is go super hard on launch marketing and get a ton of customers and then get buried in support. I want to make sure that the template is bulletproof before we really ramp up support. I stuck to that mindset for about eight months and never really marketed that template very well.
For Ultimate Brain, I did it a little bit differently. I pushed my waitlist a little bit better. I think we may have had a launch waitlist of about 450 people. We sent a launch email to those people and I considered that the beta period.
One thing to note about Notion templates is that I can’t push over-the-air updates to someone’s template. So that was definitely a concern. Any additional upgrades are going to be more like nice-to-haves rather than, ‘oh there’s a big bug, we need to fix this.’ Because the only way to fix a bug is just to tell people, ‘Hey, fix this bug.’
So we did that and then I launched the template to my entire Notion Tips email list. I think at the time it was 35,000 subscribers; it’s about 55,000 now. And then we made a YouTube video a month after that and that’s what really kind of just exploded sales.
As someone who makes a living off tools to increase productivity, what do you make of the idea of toxic productivity?
I’ve talked about it on my channel. I’ve talked about burnout. I’ve talked about work-life balance. Within the productivity realm, I’m friends with most of the big people like Ali Abdaal and Matt D’Avella, and they’ve all talked about this as well. There definitely are some figures who I would consider to be maybe actually toxic in terms of the messages they put out there. There are people who will just say, ‘hustle grind all the time, never rest.’ But also you need to be balancing what you want in your life.
I think the big issue is that messages that are more extreme always get more distribution and are always more memorable. You might see one video from me or one video from GaryVee and the sound bite that just is like, ‘Hey, never sleep, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is’ is what gets spread out there. And people tend to see that kind of sound bite from everyone who does have a big platform in this space, right? And so it amalgamates into, ‘Oh, there’s this toxic productivity problem.’ Whereas I think when you dig into the body of work of most of the people who I respect in this industry, sometimes they are like, ‘Here’s what you need to do if you need to get a lot of work done.’ And then another video will be like, ‘Here’s how to balance your life,’ or, ‘Here’s how to actually focus on the goals that matter to you and not chase the cloud or chase the numbers that you see other people getting.’ That’s the nuance that gets lost.
What do you do, personally, to counter toxic productivity?
If I’m feeling burnt out, it means either I’ve been working too hard or I’m doing the wrong work. I’ve been through both of these. I’ve had times where it’s like, ‘OK, let me just actually take a vacation or actually take a few days off,’ and that can definitely help. I went through many periods of burnout on my main channel, where I was basically failing to admit to myself that I’m not doing the right work anymore. And the reason I’m doing it is both ego and fear.
It sounds like you spend a considerable amount of time online, especially on YouTube, when you’re working. What was the last YouTube rabbit hole you fell into?
The current one that I’m in right now is Magic: The Gathering, which I was very into 10 years ago and I’m starting to get back into it again. I’m just falling into YouTube rabbit holes of people’s deck lists and how they synergize their cards and everything. The parallels between business and Magic — there’s so much strategy, there’s so much customization. I think every business person should play Magic.
