Thomas Frank: $1M a Year From Notion Templates Alone — Going Dark on a 2.9M-Subscriber Channel to Bet on a 110K Niche Channel

All dollar figures carry an approximate yen conversion at ¥150/$1.

What this article confirms

Selling Notion templates. That’s it — and that alone grew into a business clearing over $1M (about ¥150 million) in a single year. The seller is YouTube creator Thomas Frank and his team, and he himself has published the 2022 results, January through December, broken down by product.

What makes this case interesting isn’t the dollar figure itself. In that same year, he barely posted a single video to his main channel of 2.9 million subscribers. Instead, he concentrated his output on a separate channel that at the time had only 43,000 subscribers, and, he writes, “revenue actually doubled.” Both the source of the numbers and the reasoning behind that decision are on record in his own words.

The disclosed numbers

The source is a single thread written by Frank himself. Below is the breakdown exactly as he presented it.

One thing worth flagging: adding up the line items gives $1,161,000, which exceeds the “$1M” figure Frank cites. The thread doesn’t make clear whether this gap is the difference between gross (before refunds/processing fees) and net revenue, or whether some bundle revenue is double-counted. This article treats “over $1M” as fact per his own framing, and reads the breakdown as showing each product’s relative size rather than an exact sum.

What was actually being sold

Two products. Creator’s Companion (released August 2021) is a Notion template aimed at YouTubers and writers, managing the content pipeline from ideation to publishing. Ultimate Brain (released April 2022) is a “second brain”-style template unifying tasks, notes, projects, and goals in one place.

Look at the breakdown, and most of the revenue is coming from the newer product, Ultimate Brain. $760,000 is nearly two-thirds of the annual total. This year’s result came not from an existing product quietly compounding sales but from a new product launched in April 2022 becoming the primary driver almost immediately.

One more thing: within Creator’s Companion itself, the single best-selling version was the bundle. Frank states explicitly that “the bundle outsells the other editions 3:1,” and says it lifts average order value. The $298,000-versus-$86,000-plus-$17,000 split is, in fact, close to that exact 3:1 ratio.

The decision that changed everything

The turning point is clear: launching Ultimate Brain in April 2022, and shifting his main platform for engagement from the flagship channel to the niche channel. Both happened in the same year.

Here’s what the before-and-after looks like. The main channel (2.9 million subscribers) went a full year without a single upload. Meanwhile, Thomas Frank Explains, with a modest 13 long-form videos plus 2 Shorts, went from 43K to 110K subscribers. Total views: 3.43 million. That’s a number a 2.9-million-subscriber channel could plausibly generate from a single video. And yet he writes that revenue doubled, and compresses the reason into a single line: More Views =/= More Money.

Why the smaller channel won

Views going down while revenue goes up runs against intuition. But look at the structure, and the logic holds together.

First, the video’s subject matter itself acts as a purchase-intent filter. The 2.9 million people who show up for “productivity tips” are only interested in productivity, full stop. Someone who searches for “how to auto-sort tasks with Notion formulas” and lands on the niche channel is already a Notion user, and already stuck trying to build something complex themselves. For that person, Ultimate Brain isn’t a “should I buy this” decision; it’s a choice between “build it myself or buy it.” The purchase probability per viewer differs by an order of magnitude between these two populations, and video topic alone is what’s doing the selecting.

Second, a massive free asset is building trust and search traffic at the same time. Frank says he reinvests profit into free content, citing a 42,000-word Notion formula guide and a two-hour Notion API tutorial as examples. This isn’t a “free sample.” It’s the reference document that anyone stuck on a Notion formula eventually finds from anywhere in the world, and it’s not something a competitor can casually replicate given its sheer length. It establishes “this person understands Notion better than anyone” first, and only then presents the paid template that person built. Reverse the order, and the same price tag doesn’t stick.

Third, the templates aren’t left as “just templates.” The 8-person team includes two dedicated developers. Combined with the fact that he publishes a two-hour tutorial built around deep use of the Notion API, what’s being sold reads less like a duplicated page and more like a continuously maintained, extended product. That’s why price can hold in a category flooded with free copies.

Fourth, the bundle works not as a discount but as a shortcut around a decision. A second brain and a content-creation pipeline are adjacent problems the same person runs into inside the same Notion workspace. Someone who buys one is nearly certain to eventually get stuck on the other. Handing over both instead of forcing a choice raises order value at zero additional development cost. That 3:1 ratio is also evidence that customers found the choice itself annoying.

Twelve years behind the numbers

Cutting the story down to just this one year drops an important premise, though. Frank includes his own history in the same thread: he started making content in 2010, went full-time in 2012, and made his first hire in 2016. The year the $1M happened, 2022, is year twelve.

The “43,000-subscriber channel” also isn’t a from-zero 43,000. It’s a second channel launched by someone who already had a 2.9-million-subscriber main channel. Its early subscribers came from that main channel. The niche-focus strategy genuinely worked, but there was already a population large enough to focus down from before the focusing began.

Revenue isn’t a single-product story either. Frank states plainly that the full 2022 business also included sponsorships, Skillshare course income, and affiliate revenue. The $1M figure is specifically “templates only.”

Where the weaknesses are

What’s disclosed is revenue, not profit. What’s left after paying eight salaries and processing fees isn’t public. Template sales carry low cost of goods, but running two dedicated developers is a meaningfully heavy fixed cost.

Platform dependence is also a structural risk. The product exists only inside a single app, Notion. If Notion ships equivalent features natively, or its pricing or API policy shifts, the product’s entire premise disappears. Second-brain-style templates like Ultimate Brain are, in fact, a category that saw a surge of similar products from 2022 onward.

And this isn’t recurring revenue (MRR). These are one-time purchases, selling the same amount again next month requires bringing in a fresh set of buyers next month too. Frank’s emphasis on reinvesting in free content reads, beyond good intent, as a necessary response to a structure where sales stop the moment the traffic stops.

How far can this be copied

Three things generalize well. Building a second channel that filters purchase intent by topic, bundling adjacent products to lift order value. And publishing one piece of free content large enough (like a 42,000-word guide) that competitors can’t easily copy it. None of these require capital. They require effort.

Two things don’t generalize. The 2.9-million-subscriber runway, and twelve years since 2010. A niche-focus strategy only works if “the population left after narrowing” is still large enough to sustain a business. If a following of 1,000 narrows down to 100, that isn’t $1M.

And the hardest thing to judge is timing. 2021–2022 was a period when Notion’s user base was expanding rapidly, while its official template gallery and the paid-template market were both still thin. Launching the same product from zero today, in a market flooded with free alternatives, requires lining up an additional reason to justify the price first, something like two developers’ worth of ongoing maintenance.

Put differently, the takeaway here isn’t “sell Notion templates.” It’s: identify which slice of your own audience is standing at the fork between building it themselves and buying it, and narrow your output to speak only to that slice. The decision to give up 2.9 million and keep 110,000 was only possible because that identification had already been made.

Related reading

• 24 Kindle books and the royalties they compounded — structurally close, in that it’s also multiple one-time digital products stacked side by side.
• Photo AI (Pieter Levels) — a useful comparison for what happens when someone with an existing audience launches a new product.