Introduction
Discover how Thomas Frank built a $2.5 million business selling digital products. In this exclusive interview, Thomas shares his journey from creating a YouTube channel to launching a successful business selling digital products in the form of Notion templates. Learn how he generates over $100,000 per month with a simple yet effective business model focused on selling digital products that solve real problems.
Founder Success Story QnA
Tell me about this amazing business you built.
So for the most part I make videos teaching people how to be more organized get more done. The main Channel which is just called Thomas Frank is coming close to 3 million subscribers I think it’s around 180 million views Lifetime and then I have a side Channel called Thomas Frank Explains that does nothing but teach notion. I think we’re up to 230,000 subscribers about 60 or 70,000 on our core notion email list and 200,000 on our full email list. We’ve sold about $2.5 Million worth of templates at this point for about 30,000 customers.
Break down your business a little bit more for me.
Okay so we have two premium notion templates that we sell. One is called Ultimate Brain which is a personal productivity template so it combines task management note taking uh project management it’s got useful dashboards for daily planning GTD stuff like that and then we have Creators Companion which is just our exact social media and YouTube and blog management template. Basically productized creators obviously use creators companion we have creators who have actual teams using it all the way down to solo creators just getting started on YouTube and then all kinds of people ultimate brain professional students just people from all walks of life use that template. Now with Thomas Frank Explains we do a few hundred thousand views a month those funnel into a lot of times free templates to our email list in many cases just direct purchases of our our premium templates as well.
In our previous interview our written interview on starter story you talked about the power of studying successful Founders and studying how they built their business can you tell me more about that?
Yeah this is something that I’ve been doing ever since I started the blog all the way back in 2010. I’ve never been a course learner when I want to learn something I just go and deeply observe somebody who I admire and usually that’s not like a strategic decision on my part it’s what seems like the most fun decision on my part and when you do that over time you just kind of observe what people are actually doing at a world class level instead of going through course material I think in many cases you can learn the exact same things.
So tell me about your backstory how do you get to this place where you built this business?
Going into college my thought was I have to be as competitive as possible just to get a job what this led me to do was start reading blogs like Life Hacker and crucially there was another one called hack College which was life hacker for college students. I thought it might be fun to write for them when they put out a call for new writers so I spent a whole night writing a guest blog post I thought would knock their socks off and they rejected me. I’m glad they did though because I took that blog post I wrote for them and I started up my own website College Info Geek.com I just started writing throughout a lot of my college Years it was purely for fun just I was like building up stuff I wanted to share all the little life hacks I was kind of implementing myself and then um we started YouTube in 2014 again a lot of just like I’m imitating the people I admire. I was posting videos every single week the channel eventually grew up to a million subscribers every video was sponsored I felt pressure to get 100,000 200,000 views on every single video it became the job and it sort of had sucked a little bit of the creative freedom out of it for that reason. In 2020 I had made a couple of notion videos for the main channel that did well and I was getting so into the software that I wanted to make more Niche videos but I’m like it just doesn’t fit on the main Channel super Niche tutorials it just isn’t a good branding play so I decided to start a brand new channel and I started having fun again.
You got this bigger Channel but now you’re getting excited about notion and something else tell me about that transition for you.
Yeah so we launched Creator companion within the first couple of months I think it was about $3,000 per month eventually scaled up to $155,000 a month within the first 6 months of launch. Then when we launched ultimate brain I think that was 90 grand from a weight list of 3200 people and then we made a video on Thomas Frank Explains just going going through the template it was a 45-minute video like the whole video is an ad but I’m showing so much of it that I feel like it’s still educational because people will be able to replicate parts of it if they want to without buying it. The video did so well that it goes up to 100 Grand a month. Another thing that I had set up from the very beginning with creators companion was active support if anyone comes in number one if it’s just not for them they can get a refund but if they’re stuck or they want to customize or whatever it is they should be able to get support so I was doing that support for 8 hours a day for at least a full month. I actually think this is something that Founders should do because you just get really in tune with how people perceive your product and how easy it is for them what their pain points and sticking points are but at that point it’s like now we’re making between 100 and 120 Grand a month and now there are all these new opportunities that just sort of put the main channel on the back burner every month for almost two years.
Let’s talk about how notion templates work what’s your process for creating A Great Notion template that you can sell online?
Uh yeah notion template is a page of notion that you make public and and you tick the little box that says able to be duplicated and that’s it. So to create an ocean template you just make something useful either for yourself or for a client or for an audience put the link out there sell access to the link. Creator companion was just an evolution from 2018 all the way to 2021 of everything we needed to make our YouTube videos and then we just went to the process of polishing it up adding a few more features like a Content repurposing dashboard and stuff like that packaging it up and selling it for ultimate brain it was a similar thing where I had made a task management template for myself and I’m just like let’s build on top of that so note-taking getting things done workflows project management goal tracking all kinds of stuff like that packaging it up.
Can you break down what the customer Journey or the funnel looks like for a million dollar notion templates business?
Uh yeah so Thomas Frank explains is the main way that people find us right now especially for notion templates because we just have all these videos teaching people how to use notion for free so we have build guides this is literally I’m going to teach you how to build a habit tracker or task manager those build guides always include a free template as as well. We also have notion new feature releases because people are searching for Content about new features fundamentals content so we have like a whole sort of free beginners course on how to learn notion from scratch and then we have listicle kind of like fun popcorn content like 10 ways that you’re using notion wrong things like that. Our videos will do one of three things they will pitch a paid template they’ll pitch a free template that’s for the build guides or they’ll just say like hey we’ve got a resource page here with all of our notion fundamentals content cheat sheets we have all kinds of like cool resources you’re going to want so get on our email list and then from there first thing I do is send them an autoresponder saying like hey enjoy your free templates here’s a link to all my other free templates but if you want to upgrade to full productivity and notion you can get ultimate brain here’s a discount code for being a subscriber.
How about pricing did you decide on the pricing for your products?
My thought was if you could run your entire Creator business from idea capture to publishing have like a full Archive of all your scripts everything in one tool people would probably pay tens hundreds of dollars a month for that so let’s at least charge over $100. Initially price creators companion at 99 and $49 for the higher addition at launch right now we’re at I think it’s $19 for ultimate brain alone $229 for the full bundle Edition and that’s what most people buy if they are getting creators companion sales do pretty well we did a price increase last year and we saw volume dip a little bit but overall Revenue went up.
So let’s talk about tools what kind of software and tools do you use to run this business?
Well notion for one we definitely dog food our own software and we use our own temp templates notion templates can be easily pired since they’re just a link so what I am concerned about is maintaining paid access to our support so we use circle. Soo and we have actual customer logins for that for uh point of sale we use lemon squeezy I like them because they actually act as merchant of record so they completely handle taxes for you we use convertkit for email marketing we’ve got a lot of actual funnels and automations and autoresponders as well as our newsletter we use a lot of pipe dream actually so pipe dream is automation software kind of like zappier but sort of built for developers that’s all JavaScript and no JS.
What does it cost to run a business like this?
So if you were building this it would really just come down to some camera gear some video gear and then you could build a framer website for 15 to 30 bucks a month depending on how content heavy needs to be distribute for free on YouTube distribute for free on Twitter LinkedIn whatever you want and that would be kind of it for the actual SAS cost to run a business like this you could get it under a few hundred bucks a month.
You’re an experienced YouTuber you’ve used YouTube to grow this business what kind of advice would you have for other people looking to start on YouTube?
Essentially when you’re starting out you need to get reps you need to go through a feedback cycle where you learn you try stuff out and then you publish so you get feedback what you basically gain when you do this when you go through this process of publishing on a schedule and trying to improve something small every time is you get a body of work that just slowly compounds your skills over time and you wake up 3 years later and you’re like wow I know color grading I Know audio I know how to build a set I know animation I can speak to the camera a lot better and I got to learn all that while I published content that got to grow my business and build an audience and all that kind of stuff so do whatever you have to do to make sure you publish on the schedule and try to get just a little bit better at something interesting every single time you publish.
Let’s talk about the power of a niche Channel this new channel that you created is a lot smaller than your bigger Channel but it makes more money can you tell me more about that?
So the power of a niche channel is you’re not necessarily trying to interest people in you You’re Building content about something that they’re probably already interested in notion already has a ton of people who are trying to do things they’re looking for answers so I’m fulfilling demand that’s already there. Zapier’s marketing strategy around Niche is what I sort of model my own my own after and what I look towards as the gold standard for it so zapier is automation software that’s a very small Niche really small but there’s a wider group of people who are interested in the top calendar apps the top productivity software so when you look at zapier’s marketing they cast this a little bit wider net that’s still very focused on workflow and productivity software and there’s going to be a smaller proportion of people in that group who are like oh I wanted to connect up these two apps and oh your tool can do that for me you need to figure out what are people looking for so you bring them in and then you show them we can do this thing that some of you want.
Let’s talk about how this business can be replicated across potentially other software or other channels what would be your advice for someone trying to start something similar?
So don’t assume that uh Niche software plus templates is the only way you can kind of monetize this it could be any kind of Niche where there is ground swell and if it’s a smaller Niche is that Niche businesses is it Enterprise would onet of the views bring in the same amount of Revenue and then the business model could be Consulting could be courses could be templates could be any kind of thing could be SAS you build on top of all kinds of stuff that helps people who are already using that software.
What is a day in the life for a notion entrepreneur?
Typically up at 6:30 make coffee do a bit of deep work in the morning kind of like you yeah go to the gym usually at the gym for an hour or two come back here and then from there my days are very variable because some days I’m doing CEO kind of stuff some days I’m filming videos some days I’m working on templates just depends on what my schedule demands.
In your journey is there anything that you’ve personally struggled with or has anything that’s been a challenge in your journey building a business?
I would say the the biggest challenge that comes to mind right now is self-doubt and how that combines with wanting things to be perfect before I put them out of the world when I got started with videos I had this feeling that I could make the perfect video and put it out so I spent like weeks working on it and then never ended up publishing it I have like this perfectionist tendency and it’s just at odds with the truth that you have to actually publish and get feedback and go through that cycle make it as tight as possible so I guess my biggest piece of advice for people who feel the same is it doesn’t matter if you get harsh feedback because it’s you’re going to learn from it and it’s going to make the thing you publish next better.
What advice would you have if you could sit on young Thomas’s shoulder or advice for someone who’s just getting started out and who wants to build a business that changes their life?
The main thing I would say is start building friendships with other people who are ambitious and who also want to build businesses I have this uh this term that I used a long time ago called fan first where just like become a fan of people that you’re interested in share their stuff be commenting because eventually you paying attention to them often leads to conversations me leads to meetings at conferences leads to friendships and then you have this network of people who inspire you you can help each other out that’s how you succeed in business I think even if you are building your own business solo it’s not done alone because anyone who’s successful I think is surrounded by other people in their Network in their their friend group who are constantly giving them advice giving them feedback giving them everything they need to succeed.
Thomas Frank Business Stats
Thomas Frank has built an impressive business selling digital products, specifically Notion templates. His business has grown to generate substantial revenue with minimal overhead costs. Below are some key statistics that highlight the success of his digital product business.
- Generated $2.5 million in total revenue from digital product sales
- Serves approximately 30,000 customers worldwide
- Monthly revenue ranges between $100,000 to $120,000
- Main YouTube channel has nearly 3 million subscribers
- Niche Notion-focused channel has 230,000 subscribers
- Email list consists of 200,000 subscribers across all segments
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Total Revenue | $2,500,000 |
| Monthly Revenue | $100,000 – $120,000 |
| Customers | 30,000 |
| Main Channel Subscribers | 3,000,000 |
| Niche Channel Subscribers | 230,000 |
| Email Subscribers | 200,000 |
Thomas Frank Method
Thomas Frank achieved success selling digital products through a systematic approach that leverages content marketing, product development, and customer engagement. His method focuses on creating value first, building trust, and then converting that trust into sales.
- Create specialized content for a niche audience (Notion tutorials)
- Develop products based on personal use and refinement
- Offer free templates to build email lists and trust
- Provide exceptional customer support to understand pain points
- Use YouTube as the primary discovery channel for products
Thomas Frank Tools
Thomas Frank utilizes a strategic stack of tools to run his business efficiently. He not only sells digital products built on Notion but also uses his own templates as part of his workflow, demonstrating the value of his products through his own operations.
- Notion – Core platform for creating and managing digital products
- Circle.so – Customer support and community management
- Lemon Squeezy – Payment processing that handles taxes automatically
- ConvertKit – Email marketing with advanced automation and funnels
- Pipedream – Developer-focused automation software similar to Zapier
Key Notes
The success of Thomas Frank’s business selling digital products offers several important insights for aspiring entrepreneurs. His journey demonstrates how focusing on a specific niche and creating genuine value can lead to substantial financial returns.
- Niche content channels can be more profitable than larger general audiences
- Digital products have extremely low overhead and high profit margins
- Building products based on your own needs ensures they solve real problems
- Providing exceptional customer support creates loyal customers and valuable feedback
- Consistent content creation compounds over time into significant business assets
Get Started in Just 5 Steps
If you’re inspired by Thomas Frank’s success with selling digital products, you can follow this simplified 5-step approach to launch your own digital product business. These steps capture the essence of his strategy in a format anyone can implement.
- Identify a growing software platform with an active user base (like Notion)
- Create content that teaches people how to use this platform effectively
- Develop your own templates or tools based on your personal usage and needs
- Build an email list by offering free valuable resources to your audience
- Launch and promote premium products to your engaged audience with exceptional support
Conclusion
Thomas Frank’s journey from YouTuber to successful entrepreneur selling digital products demonstrates the incredible potential of creating value in niche markets. By focusing on solving real problems with Notion templates, he built a business generating over $100,000 monthly with minimal overhead. His success story shows that with the right strategy, consistent execution, and customer focus, anyone can build a profitable business selling digital products. Whether you’re a content creator, entrepreneur, or someone looking for passive income opportunities, the model of creating and selling digital products offers a scalable path to financial success.