Most people think you need coding skills to build a tech business. Thomas Frank just proved you can make $2.1M selling... Notion templates.

Yeah, those boring productivity documents nobody talks about at parties.

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While everyone's fighting over the next AI wrapper or SaaS unicorn, Thomas Frank quietly built a $2.1M empire selling what most people consider digital paperwork.

His business? Notion templates.

Pre-built productivity systems that people pay $50-200 to duplicate into their Notion workspace. No coding required. No complex tech stack. Just well-designed organizational frameworks that save people hours of setup time.

His flagship product, Ultimate Brain, combines tasks, notes, projects, and goal-tracking into one template. It's essentially a productivity system in a box. And people are throwing money at it.

Currently pulling $120K/month from template sales alone, plus another $15K from YouTube ads and affiliate deals. That's $1.62M annually from selling organizational systems most people could build themselves if they had the patience.

The irony is beautiful: he spent a decade building a 2.9 million subscriber YouTube channel teaching productivity... only to discover the real money was in packaging that knowledge into copy-paste templates.

Notion exploded from 30 million users in 2023 to 100 million in 2024—that's 233% growth in twelve months. Meanwhile, 50% of Fortune 500 companies now use it for internal operations.

Here's what makes this timing perfect: Notion deliberately designed their platform to be infinitely customizable, which is powerful... and completely overwhelming for new users. People open it, see a blank page, and panic. They want someone to hand them a functioning system they can start using immediately.

The company itself recognized this. As Notion's leadership admitted, their tipping point came when they "moved away from asking people to build software to providing them with simple templates." They literally built their go-to-market strategy around templates saving people time.

This created a weird economic reality: Notion is free, but the knowledge to use it effectively is worth six figures. The platform's flexibility became its friction point, and template creators became the oil that makes it all work smoothly.

The company is now valued at $10 billion with $300M in annual revenue. Every new user who joins represents someone potentially willing to pay to skip the learning curve. And with 70 million new users joining in a single year, that's a lot of people looking for shortcuts.

Thomas Frank didn't wake up one day and decide to sell templates. He spent 10 years building expertise the hard way.

Back in 2010, during the financial crisis fallout, he started a college productivity blog called College Info Geek. By 2012, it was paying his bills. By 2014, he'd launched a YouTube channel. Hit 1 million subscribers in 2018. Eventually grew to 2.9 million.

For years, he was making about $50K/month from brand deals and sponsorships. Solid income, but he was burning out creating weekly videos just to maintain cash flow. The publishing schedule was relentless, and he felt trapped by his own success.

Then in 2021, he discovered Notion while building a content planning system for his team. The platform clicked. He started using it to manage his entire video production pipeline—ideas, scripts, shot lists, calendars. His team loved it. He got obsessed with it.

Here's where it gets interesting: Instead of making yet another course teaching creators how to use Notion, he just... packaged up the system his team was already using. Added polish. Called it Creator's Companion.

Launched it to 434 people on his email list. Made $12,858 in the first month. Not bad for repurposing internal documentation.

But the real money came from his second template, Ultimate Brain. This one took a month of focused building—turning Notion into a complete personal productivity system with tasks, notes, projects, and goal-tracking. He launched it in April 2022 to 3,201 people on his waitlist.

First month? $88,241.

He followed up a month later with a broader email blast to 35,000 subscribers. Another $66,830.

By the end of 2022, he'd done over $1 million in template sales. In two years, he crossed $2.1 million. Currently averaging $120K/month just from templates, with another $15K/month in affiliate revenue and YouTube ads bringing the total to around $135K/month.

The kicker? His development costs were essentially zero. Building a Notion template is free. Distribution through Gumroad is free except for transaction fees. Even his hosting and email marketing tools were stuff he already had.

His only real investment was opportunity cost—he took one month off from making YouTube videos (roughly $24K in lost sponsorship revenue) to build Ultimate Brain. That template has since generated over $1.5 million.

But Thomas Frank isn't the only one printing money in this space. Jason Chin, known online as Easlo, turned this into a full-blown empire while still in school.

Jason was an 18-year-old college student in Singapore when he discovered Notion in 2020. He started using it to organize his lecture notes, got curious about customization, and began building his own setups. Then he started tweeting screenshots of his Notion dashboards.

People went crazy for them. So he did what any smart entrepreneur would do: started giving away free templates. Budget trackers, habit trackers, study planners—all free, just to build an audience. He studied popular productivity Twitter accounts, mimicked their content style, and grew his following organically.

By summer 2021, he was regularly dropping free templates and building serious traction. Then in November 2021, he made the switch: started charging for new templates through Gumroad. First month? Over $3,000 in revenue.

By the end of 2022, Easlo had made $239,000 selling Notion templates. His most successful product? The "Second Brain" template, inspired by Tiago Forte's productivity system. That single template generated over $100,000.

Today, Jason's making approximately $20K/month, has over 356,000 followers on Twitter alone, and has crossed $500,000 in total revenue. His audience spans Twitter, Instagram (390K), and TikTok (412K). Not bad for templates he started building as a college student.

And here's what makes this even better: You don't need a massive audience to make money. Paola, who writes The Mindful Planner newsletter, started selling Notion templates in July 2024 as a complete beginner.

First two months? Zero revenue. She was ready to give up, thinking the market was too saturated. But she kept going. By end of August, she made her first $50. By end of September, she'd crossed $250.

Her take? "The secret to selling Notion templates is that it's basically a zero cost business. You can literally create everything from your computer without investing a single cent." She's using Gumroad, which takes a 10% commission, but otherwise keeps almost all revenue.

That's $250 in three months with no audience, no marketing budget, and no previous experience. Just persistence and decent templates solving real problems.

Here's the beautiful thing about this business model: the barrier to entry is stupid low. You're not coding software. You're designing organizational systems in a drag-and-drop interface.

Thomas Frank's entire tech stack costs less than most people's monthly coffee habit:

Total startup investment: $0-$200/month depending on whether you go fancy with email marketing and community platforms.

You can literally start with just Notion (free) and Gumroad (10% commission). That's it. Build your first template, set up a Gumroad page, start selling. Everything else is optional polish.

But here's where AI becomes your unfair advantage in 2025: building Notion templates used to require hundreds of hours learning formulas, relations, and database structures. Now? ChatGPT can write Notion formulas for you. Claude can help you design database schemas. AI tools can generate the initial structure of your template in minutes.

Thomas Frank actually uses AI extensively now. His latest workflows include Notion Voice Notes and Notion Voice Tasks—automation systems he built using JavaScript and Pipedream. These aren't separate products; they're features that make his templates more valuable.

The modern template creation process looks like this:

The entire process—from idea to first sale—can happen in 2-4 weeks if you're focused. Thomas took a month to build Ultimate Brain, but he was also building the most comprehensive productivity system possible. Simpler templates can be done in a weekend.

The cold, hard numbers show this business has three distinct revenue phases:

Thomas Frank's trajectory shows this clearly. Creator's Companion made $12,858 in month one, then grew to $49,019 by end of year one. Ultimate Brain launched even stronger at $88,241 in month one, but that was because he'd already proven the model and had a larger audience.

Easlo followed a similar pattern: $3,000 in his first paid month (November 2021), growing to $239,000 by end of 2022 (14 months later). He's now stable at around $20K/month.

The pricing sweet spots break down like this:

Low tier ($8-$19): Simple, single-purpose templates. Budget trackers, habit trackers, content calendars. These sell in volume but require constant marketing.

Mid-range tier ($40-$80): Complete systems for specific use cases. Project management dashboards, creator content systems, student productivity hubs. This is where most template creators make their money.

High tier ($100-$250+): All-in-one mega-templates like Thomas Frank's Ultimate Brain. These sell fewer units but at much higher margins. Usually includes bonuses, community access, or additional resources.

According to multiple successful template creators, mid-range templates ($40-80) offer the best balance of perceived value and sales volume. People will pay $50 for something that saves them 10+ hours of setup time.

The hidden costs to factor in:

The actual math for a mid-level success looks like this: Sell 50 templates/month at $60 each. That's $3,000 in gross revenue. Minus 10% to Gumroad ($300), minus 5% refunds ($150), minus $100 for tools. Net: $2,450/month, or about $29,400/year.

That won't quit your job, but it's a solid side income stream that compounds over time as you add more templates and grow your audience.

This weekend, your job is stupid simple: build one template that solves one problem.

Friday night (2 hours):

Saturday (4-6 hours):

Sunday (3-4 hours):

That's it. By Sunday night, you should have a live product that people can buy. It won't be perfect. It definitely won't be as polished as Thomas Frank's $200 Ultimate Brain. But it'll be real, it'll be yours, and it'll teach you more about this business than reading 100 more case studies.

Start with the problem you already solved for yourself. Thomas Frank sold the content planning system his team was using internally. Easlo sold the organization systems he built for his college life. Your best first template is probably already sitting in your Notion workspace right now—you just need to polish it up and put a price tag on it.