Digital ProductsThomas Frank made $1,000,508 selling two Notion templates in 2022, a number he published himself, line by line, and later confirmed in an interview with Starter Story. Easlo, a college student who started organizing his own notes, has publicly cited revenue north of $500,000 doing the same thing with a much smaller audience. Those are the headline numbers everyone quotes, and they’re real. What almost nobody explains is the mechanism underneath them, the one you can actually copy without three million YouTube subscribers. 🧠
That’s what this is. Not the highlight reel, the model itself: what you build, where you sell it, what it actually costs in platform fees, and the honest range of outcomes for someone starting from zero.
What the model actually is, stripped to the studs
Here’s the whole thing in one sentence: you build a workspace inside Notion once, then sell people a link that duplicates it into their own account. That’s the entire delivery mechanism. No printing, no shipping, no file hosting headaches, no customer support beyond answering the occasional “how do I duplicate this” email.
Notion crossed 100 million users in September 2024 and hasn’t slowed down since, which means the audience already exists inside a tool people are already using. Most of them have never built a project tracker or a content calendar from scratch, and most of them don’t want to. That gap between “I want this organized” and “I don’t want to build it myself” is the entire business.
The funnel that actually works, across nearly every successful template seller, follows the same shape:
Give away one genuinely useful free template to build an audience or an email list
Use that free template to demonstrate you understand a specific workflow, not productivity in general
Sell a paid version with more depth, automation, or a second connected template
Bundle two or three related templates once you have more than one, since bundles consistently outsell single products
Frank’s own numbers back up that last point directly. His Creator’s Companion and Ultimate Brain bundle outsold either individual edition by a 3:1 ratio, and it pulled a noticeably higher average order value than selling either template alone. 📈
The real numbers, not the highlight reel
Now the part BizWhat won’t skip: Thomas Frank and Easlo are outliers, not the median. Most people who start selling Notion templates never see six figures, and pretending otherwise would be exactly the kind of guru math this publication exists to push back on.
For someone starting today with a single, well-designed template and no existing audience, the realistic range in the first three months is $300 to $1,200, based on data from budget-tracker and finance-niche sellers specifically. Build consistently for six to twelve months, add a second or third template, and most sellers land somewhere between $0 and $3,000 a month. A smaller group of mid-tier creators, usually with two or three templates in a proven niche, cluster in the $2,000 to $5,000 monthly range. The five-figure-a-month tier exists, but it’s built on years of consistent output, not a lucky launch.
Pricing itself follows a fairly predictable pattern across the market:
$5-12 for simple, single-purpose templates like habit trackers or basic planners
$12-25 for templates with multiple linked databases and real polish
$25-50+ for premium systems, CRMs, or multi-template bundles
One honest complication worth naming: Notion now ships its own AI agents and meeting notes inside the product, which quietly raised the bar for what a paid template needs to offer. A page of empty databases isn’t really a product anymore, since a buyer can ask Notion’s built-in AI to sketch something similar for free. ⚡
Pick a niche narrow enough to be findable
The single biggest mistake new sellers make is building a giant “life operating system” instead of solving one specific, annoying problem. Easlo’s own numbers make the case better than any framework could: his $20 bullet journal and $40 finance tracker together accounted for close to half his revenue, not his $130 flagship “Second Brain” system everyone actually talks about.
Across the market, four categories carry roughly two-thirds of all paid template sales: productivity systems, personal finance trackers, content calendars, and lightweight CRMs. That’s not a coincidence, it’s buyer psychology. Nobody wakes up wanting to “restructure their life in Notion.” They wake up unable to find last month’s invoice, or juggling a content calendar spread across three different apps. A template that fixes exactly that gets bought in under two minutes, not after a week of consideration.
Quick check before you build anything: could you describe your template’s buyer in one sentence that isn’t “people who want to be organized”? If not, the niche isn’t narrow enough yet. If you want a longer list of where digital products like this fit into a broader income strategy, BizWhat’s rundown of digital products worth building this month covers the Notion angle alongside several adjacent formats worth stacking together.
Where to sell it and what the fees actually cost you
Where you list a template changes your margin more than most sellers realize, and the differences compound once you’re selling more than a handful of copies a month.
Notion’s own Marketplace: a flat 10% fee plus $0.40 per transaction, funds held for 14 days, payouts biweekly, with a $20 minimum payout balance, according to Notion’s own seller documentation. The upside is built-in discovery inside an app 100 million people already have open.
Gumroad: roughly 10% plus $0.50 per sale, instant payouts, easy to set up alongside a personal audience.
Etsy: a $0.20 listing fee stacked on a 6.5% transaction fee, worth it mainly for the built-in shopper traffic Etsy already has for digital planners.
Payhip: as low as 5% on its free plan, the cheapest option if you’re driving your own traffic through content or email.
Most sellers who reach real volume eventually list on two or three of these at once, since the marginal effort of a second listing is low once the template itself is built. For the full breakdown, tools, timelines, what actually works, the BizWhat Membership has an ebook on this that’s worth the read if you want the build process mapped step by step rather than pieced together across five different sources. On that note, if you’re building the actual template with AI assistance rather than by hand, BizWhat’s guide to building and selling AI-generated Notion templates walks through the exact prompting workflow.
The listing is where sales are actually won or lost
Buyers can’t test a Notion template before they pay for it. There’s no free trial, no clicking around first. Every purchase decision comes down entirely to how the product page presents the thing, which means the listing itself deserves as much effort as the template.
A strong listing consistently includes a cover image that reads as polished, not an empty gray database, plus a short screen recording (90 seconds is plenty) showing the template working with realistic sample data, not blank fields. Documentation matters more than people expect too. The templates still converting well are the ones with opinionated structure and prefilled examples that teach the buyer a workflow, not just hand them a layout and a “figure it out” energy. This mirrors a point BizWhat made about ebook economics specifically: a mediocre product on a great, specific topic will consistently outsell a beautiful product on a vague one.
So here’s the actual next step: pick one annoying, specific problem you’ve personally solved inside Notion, the kind of thing you’ve rebuilt for yourself more than once, and sketch the database structure for it this week. That’s the whole first move, and it’s the same one Thomas Frank and Easlo both started with before either of them had a real audience.