In early 2023 Thomas Frank published a plain sentence with a large number in it: "My team and I made $1 million selling Notion templates in a single year (Jan-Dec 2022)." The product behind most of it is a file. Ultimate Brain is a Notion workspace, a set of linked databases for tasks, notes and projects, that a buyer duplicates into their own account in one click. He lists it at $129 on his site today, frequently discounted to $79.
The part worth studying is not the total. It is that he did not run a single launch to get there, and he deliberately kept the product away from the YouTube channel where 2.9 million people were already watching him.
The product line, as he published it
In his own breakdown of the year, Frank lists the individual products behind that million:
- Ultimate Brain: $760k
- Creator's Companion and Ultimate Brain sold as a bundle: $298k
- Creator's Companion, Ultimate Tasks edition: $86k
- Creator's Companion, base edition: $17k
Creator's Companion, a planning system aimed at content creators, came first in August 2021. Ultimate Brain, the general productivity system, followed in April 2022 and immediately became the bigger seller. The bundle line is the one to look at twice: Frank reports that the bundle outsells the individual editions by roughly three to one and lifts average order value. Two files sold together beat either file sold alone, which costs nothing to test and is the single easiest thing in this story to copy.
The channel he did not use
Frank's main YouTube channel has 2.9 million subscribers, according to his site. He did not sell templates there.
Instead the entire funnel ran through a second, much smaller channel called Thomas Frank Explains, dedicated to Notion tutorials. His 2022 figures for it: subscribers up from 43,000 to 110,000, 3.43 million views gained, and 15 pieces published, 13 long-form videos and 2 Shorts.
Fifteen videos. Two of them under a minute.
The logic is a matter of intent, not size. Someone subscribed to a general productivity channel is looking for entertainment and ideas. Someone who searched "Notion formulas" and found a two-hour tutorial is holding a specific problem, inside the exact software the product is built for, at the moment they are trying to solve it. Frank's own summary of what he wanted from the channel, quoted in a profile of the business by Easy.tools: "I wanted people to click over and instantly feel: I want to learn Notion and this is the place for it."
That is the distribution argument in its most practical form. Reach is not the asset. Matched intent is.
Giving away the reference manual
The centrepiece of the free content is a Notion formula guide that Frank describes as "a complete, 42,000-word technical reference." That is book length. It is free, it is indexed by search engines, and it is the single most useful page on the internet for a person stuck on a Notion formula.
It sells nothing directly. It establishes that the person who wrote it knows the software better than you ever intend to, which is the only qualification that matters when you are deciding whether to hand someone $129 for their pre-built system.
This is the pattern under most successful template businesses: teach the tool exhaustively for free, sell the finished result to the people who would rather not build it themselves. The free guide serves the DIY crowd, who were never going to buy. The paid file serves the people who value their weekend more than $79. Neither group is cannibalised by the other.
It also answers the first-customer question in a way that scales without ad spend, and it is why the business survives the shift in search behaviour Builtplain covered in measuring click loss to AI summaries: video tutorials and a named expert are harder for a summary box to replace than a listicle.
No launches, no urgency, no countdown
Frank describes the sales approach as evergreen: a funnel that runs continuously rather than a series of launch events with discounts and deadlines. Videos published in 2022 kept earning in 2023 and 2024. There is no reason a tutorial about a formula function should stop attracting viewers, and no reason those viewers should not keep clicking through to a product page.
This matters for anyone weighing a template business against a course business. Courses are usually built around cohorts and launches, which means periodic spikes and long troughs of promotional work. A template with an evergreen funnel behaves more like a shop on a busy street. Frank's site currently states more than 35,000 customers, alongside a 30-day refund guarantee.
The costs the headline hides
The million-dollar year was not a solo effort. Frank lists a team of eight at the time: two developers, an operations manager, a video editor, a customer support lead, and a content and research specialist. A Notion template at scale needs version updates, documentation, a support community and someone answering questions from tens of thousands of buyers who have all customised their copy differently.
The timeline behind it is longer still. In the same thread he notes that he has been creating content since 2010, went full-time in 2012, made his first hire in 2016, and had hit $5,000 a month in affiliate income as far back as 2012. The template business was built on top of a decade of audience work, and by his own account it reached $100,000 a month in template revenue before the team was assembled.
What a much smaller creator can take from this
- Pick a tool, not a topic. The audience for "productivity" browses. The audience for "Notion formulas" buys.
- Publish the exhaustive free reference. One genuinely complete guide beats twenty shallow posts, and it keeps working for years.
- Sell the finished artefact. The people who read your tutorial and think "I do not want to build this" are the customers.
- Bundle two products. Frank's bundle outsold single editions three to one. This is a pricing-page change, not a product.
- Choose evergreen over launches if your content is searchable, so that the work you publish this month is still selling next year.
- Own the follow-up. Frank runs a newsletter of 50,000-plus alongside the channels, which is the one audience asset a platform cannot take back.
The honest caveat
A 2.9 million subscriber channel is not the reason the templates sold, but it is the reason the tutorial channel found its first 43,000 subscribers so quickly, and the reason his name carried weight in a new niche. Someone starting a Notion tutorial channel from zero today faces a more crowded field and no such transfer.
The mechanism, though, does not depend on scale: teach one tool in unreasonable depth for free, sell the finished system to the people who would rather buy it than build it, and bundle. That works at 110,000 subscribers. It plausibly works at 1,100, at proportionally smaller numbers, which is exactly how Frank's own niche channel started.
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