Well hello there! My name is Thomas Frank and I run a business teaching people how to use Notion and selling Notion templates. I also run a productivity-focused YouTube channel with 2.9 million subscribers, and I’m building a SaaS product called Flylighter.
Our flagship template is called Ultimate Brain, which turns Notion into a complete personal productivity system with tasks, notes, projects, and goal-tracking. We also sell a template for content creators called Creator’s Companion, which helps creators plan and produce content across all of their social media channels directly in Notion.
In about two years, we’ve done $2.1 million in sales for these two templates. Currently, template sales are around $120k/mo on average, and we also pull around $15k/mo through additional income sources – affiliate deals and YouTube AdSense making up the bulk of that.
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We’re now working on tools to complement our templates, starting with Flylighter – a powerful web clipper and idea-capture tool for browsers and iOS that will help Notion users instantly capture web clips, highlights, annotations, voice notes, and more.
I launched my first premium Notion template in late 2021 and launched Ultimate Brain in 2022. However, I started my business back in 2010, when I was still in college.
Everything I’m doing today is a direct evolution from that starting point – including our templates. I’m less a serial entrepreneur and more a creator who has branched into e-commerce and SaaS, leveraging the platform I’ve built up through blogging and YouTube for marketing.
I started college in 2009, during the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis. My dad had lost his job, along with a lot of other people our family knew. So I went into college thinking I would have to work insanely hard just to compete and get a job.
That led me to read every college prep book in my city’s library, and to reading tons of productivity blogs as a freshman. One of those blogs, HackCollege, put out a call for new writers near the end of my freshman year. I applied to write for their team, but I was rejected – so I decided to take the article I’d written as part of my application and build my blog, College Info Geek.
College Info Geek’s Original Design
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In 2012, the blog hit “full-time” income (read: enough to pay my bills living in an apartment in Iowa with three other dudes) and I decided to go all-in on it instead of looking for a full-time job. I paid off all my student loans, started a podcast, and then started creating YouTube videos in late 2014.
I hit 100,000 subscribers in 2015, then hit 1 million subscribers in early 2018. In short, my channel-building strategy was to create high-quality, fun-to-watch videos on studying and productivity.
In the beginning, I focused on students – and at the time, there was almost no one else making content like this regularly. I was also able to gain initial traction by posting summaries of my videos to a small subreddit (r/getstudying) where I built up a helpful reputation that caused the community to be ok with me essentially doing self-promo.
From 2017 to 2022, I published regular videos on the channel and nearly every one of them was sponsored, thanks to my agency Nebula (which I now co-own). We eventually got to around $50k/mo in revenue, mostly from brand deals on videos. My team also started growing, and we started to feel the need for more robust organizational systems.
That’s what led me to Notion. At first, we used it simply as a company wiki, but then I discovered that it’s also fantastic for managing video production. I built a robust content planning system for my team, which gave us a single place to capture ideas, write scripts, organize shot lists, and manage our editorial calendar.
In 2021, I started hitting major burnout making videos. The money was good, but I felt like I wasn’t pushing myself to learn new things. My publishing schedule wouldn’t allow it, and I felt that I had to keep it up to pay my team.
So I started looking for a way I could diversify away from solely relying on brand deals, and originally I thought I’d make a course for creators looking to use Notion.