Make With Notion 2024: How to launch a Notion template business (Thomas Frank)

Paid Notion templates can become a real, scalable business without coding expertise, subscriptions, or upsells—if the work is driven by tenacity, fast iteration, and relentless feedback from actual buyers. Thomas Frank and his team built two paid templates (only two) that have reached more than 30,000 customers and generated over $2.5 million in revenue through one-time purchases. The key lesson: launch early, accept imperfection, and treat user responses—bug reports, support questions, and sales-page signals—as the roadmap for improvement.

Frank anchors the business advice in a personal story about confidence and “intellectual scar tissue.” As a student, he avoided engineering because he believed he was “too stupid” for it, despite doing fine in earlier math. In calculus, he never had to struggle in the way that forces real understanding: extra credit and a teacher’s answer book let him skip the hard work. Later, when he learned to code, the same pattern repeated in a healthier form—getting stuck, then breaking through (like learning recursion) until the belief “yes, I can do it” replaced fear. That shift matters for template businesses because the hardest part isn’t building a polished product on the first try; it’s persisting through the scary, uncertain middle.

When Frank launched his first paid template, the fear wasn’t about whether he could build it—it was about needing perfection before charging money. He worried that an unoptimized sales page or weak funnel would waste a rare chance. Instead, he launched imperfectly, then used real-world data to iterate. Early on, he sold via Gumroad to avoid overcomplicating the process with analytics, upsells, and bundles. The result was both financial and informational: the first month brought roughly $113,000, followed by about $133,000 by the end of 2021, and a second template (“Ultimate Brain”) produced around $90,000 in its first month. More importantly, users immediately surfaced issues—typos, incorrect filters, and feature requests—turning support into product development.

The iteration loop became clear: tweak the sales page based on what buyers respond to, add elements that reduce friction (like Ultimate Brain’s “light mode,” which users reportedly preferred), and actively answer support questions. Frank argues that answering questions “doesn’t scale” in the usual sense, but it scales expertise: it deepens and broadens understanding of needs beyond the creator’s own. His team even maintains a near full-time support role, with one person handling thousands of tickets, shaping product direction.

Choosing what to build starts with reframing. The “right question” isn’t which template to create; it’s which problem to solve for a specific audience. Frank borrows a public-speaking lesson: people remember at most one takeaway, so focus on who you’re helping and what single improvement you can deliver. He describes how his own product idea emerged from his personal workflow—then evolved when he realized the solution was valuable to other creators juggling multiple content channels. For distribution, he recommends “lighthouses”: content pillars that attract the right audience through YouTube, podcasts, tweets, and LinkedIn posts, plus community engagement (“search party”) to learn problems directly from users. Testimonials, he adds, can strengthen conversion because buyers trust other customers’ words more than marketing claims.