Thomas Frank: Notion templates and tutorials at $175K a month

Thomas Frank sells Notion templates and tutorials to people who want to be more productive and organized, reaching $175K a month in revenue that he reported himself in a December 2023 interview.

How it started

The business began in June 2010, while Frank was still in college, though it did not look like a Notion business for another decade. He started college in 2009, during the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis; his father had lost his job, along with a number of people the family knew, so Frank arrived expecting to work extremely hard simply to compete for work. He read the college-prep books in his city's library, read productivity blogs as a freshman, applied to write for one of them (HackCollege), and was rejected. He took the article he had written as part of that application and used it to start his own blog, College Info Geek.

The blog reached what he called "full-time" income in 2012 — enough to pay his bills in a shared apartment in Iowa — and he decided to go all in on it rather than look for a job. He paid off his student loans, started a podcast, and began making YouTube videos in late 2014. The channel passed 100,000 subscribers in 2015 and 1 million in early 2018. From 2017 to 2022 he published regular videos, nearly all of them sponsored through his agency Nebula, which he later co-owned; revenue sat around $50K a month at that stage, mostly from brand deals.

Two things pushed him toward templates. Burnout arrived around 2021: the money was good, but he wanted to learn new things and the publishing schedule left no room for that. At the same time, a growing team needed better systems — Notion started as a company wiki, then became the place where the team captured ideas, wrote scripts, organized shot lists, and ran its editorial calendar. That internal system became a product: a first premium template in late 2021, then Ultimate Brain in 2022.

What it sells and how it charges

Everything here comes from the official website, fetched 2026-09-30. Frank describes himself this way: "I create in-depth tutorials and templates for Notion that help people be more productive and organized." The paid center of the business is two templates — Ultimate Brain, which turns Notion into a personal productivity system with tasks, notes, projects and goal-tracking, and Creator's Companion, drawn from the system he uses to run his YouTube channel (described on the site as a 3-million-subscriber channel).

Around those sit free material: the Notion Fundamentals beginner series covering pages, links, blocks and keyboard shortcuts; deeper free courses and guides on databases, formulas, permissions, automation, and the Notion API; and free templates for tasks, notes, habits and expenses.

Charging is one-time purchase per template. At the time the site was fetched, the homepage carried a single promotion — "Get $50 off Ultimate Brain 3.0 with code SUMMER50" — and no separate pricing page was present, so individual template prices are not listed here because the website did not state them.

How it got its first customers — and what kept growth going

The first customers came from a small community, not from advertising. Frank posted summaries of his videos to a small subreddit, r/getstudying, where, in his words, "I built up a helpful reputation that caused the community to be ok with me essentially doing self-promo."

What sustained growth afterward was YouTube. In his words: "Since the initial launch, our primary strategy for growth has been YouTube." The dedicated Notion teaching channel, Thomas Frank Explains, launched in 2020 and reached 203,000 subscribers and 8.7 million total views, with most views coming from suggested and browse placements rather than search — a surprise to him, since he had expected the channel to be entirely search-driven. The tactic behind it was coverage: teach everything someone might want to know about Notion, from links and pages up to the API, including a free two-hour API course video.

Two mechanics carried most of the commercial work:

Free assets feeding the newsletter. Notion Fundamentals and the free template released alongside every build-guide video both prompt a signup for his Notion Tips newsletter; the paid template is pitched the day after someone subscribes.
One long, complete product video. After watching another creator's 80-minute video that walked through every ingredient of his own product — and buying it — Frank made a long video covering every part of Ultimate Brain and offered it at the end. It became the most-viewed video on the channel: nearly 1,000,000 views, 12,000 subscribers gained directly, and $6.6K in AdSense revenue. Daily sales moved from roughly $2,000–$2,500 to roughly $4,000–$5,000 and stayed there.

The numbers

The founder reported the following in the Starter Story interview dated 2023-12-17, so all of it is self-reported and tied to that date rather than to today:

Revenue: $175K a month. In the same interview he described the parts separately — template sales averaging around $120K a month, plus roughly $15K a month from additional sources, mainly affiliate deals and YouTube AdSense — and about $2.1 million in total sales across the two templates in roughly two years.
Affiliates: around $1,200 a month at the time, with affiliates receiving 33% of customer payments for the first 12 months, under a partnership with Pipedream.
Team: 1 founder and 3 employees, based in Denver, CO.
Starting costs: none were given for the template business, so none are claimed. He did say he was putting around $22K a month into Flylighter's iOS development, which, combined with months spent building free Notion automation workflows instead of publishing videos, produced the first unprofitable months in the history of his business.

How it compares

The following come from 1M.chat's analysis of founder-reported revenue cases in Starter Story interviews — 1,997 businesses published between 2015 and 2026, a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed rather than a random sample of all businesses. Within the Courses & education category, 118 businesses reported revenue:

Measure (1M.chat analysis)	Value
Median monthly revenue	$20.4K
Share at $1M a year or more	26%
Median employees	1.0
Share started by a single founder	80%
Top growth channels (of the 87 businesses with channel data)	Organic social media 61%, SEO & organic search 45%, email & newsletters 33%, word of mouth & referrals 32%

Against that backdrop, Frank's December 2023 figure is roughly nine times the category's median monthly revenue, and a team of one founder plus three employees sits well above the category median of 1.0 employees — though he did start alone, as 80% of the category did. His mix also maps onto the category's most common channels: a dedicated YouTube channel and an email newsletter match organic social and email. That is a pattern match, not evidence that the pattern causes the outcome; the sample includes only founders who agreed to be interviewed.

What a founder can take from it

Ship before it feels finished. Frank traces almost ten years between starting his business and launching his first real product to perfectionism, and his stated rule now is to make something that works, ship it, and tighten your feedback loops — early buyers tolerate rough edges.

Own one surface and cover it completely. A separate channel dedicated to a single topic, taught from basics to advanced features, became both the product demo and the distribution; most of its growth came from the platform's own recommendations rather than from pushing existing audiences over.

Let free material do the selling. A free course and a free template attached to every build video were how he earned an email address first and made the pitch the next day.

Try one honest, exhaustive product walkthrough. The single most effective pitch was long and educational, ending in an offer rather than opening with one.

Protect whoever produces content. When the only person generating content spent three to four months building free automation workflows instead of publishing, sales slowed and the business posted its first unprofitable months; hiring an ops director and later writers was how he moved toward not being the sole creator in the company. Consider this a description of one founder's reported results at one date, not an income promise.

Sources

Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure