Easlo: $20K/Month and 356K Followers From Notion Templates, Weekends Only in Military Service

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

Someone who started with nothing to sell

$20,000/month (about ¥3 million) from Notion templates. 356,000 followers on X. That’s where Jason Chin, who operates under the name Easlo, stands today.

But the starting point is more striking than the destination. When he started, he had no product, and no time to build one. He told Indie Hackers directly: “when I started I was in military service, and could only work on weekends. Time constraints were huge.”

He couldn’t move on weekdays. He couldn’t carry a dev environment around. Under that constraint, the fact that his first move was “writing,” not “building,” decided everything that followed.

The numbers, laid out

The source is a single Indie Hackers interview. The figures and timeframes disclosed are coarse-grained, and limited to the following.

What’s not disclosed is also worth stating plainly. Individual template prices, the number of free vs. paid templates, email list size, buyer count, how many years it took to reach $20,000/month, and the starting year, none of these appear in the article. So this piece treats “how much is selling” and “in what order it was built” as fact, and does not attempt to reconstruct a growth curve.

The order got reversed

The turning point in this case isn’t a dramatic event. It’s the shift from “someone who reviews other people’s tools” to “someone who builds their own templates.”

What he was doing on X at first was posting about SaaS and no-code tools. He had nothing to sell, people followed him purely because he was posting useful information. From there he rediscovered Notion and, in his words, felt that “no-code, Notion described what I liked cleanly. It took things from the first spark of an idea to a working minimal version fast.” That’s where making Notion templates began.

Note: the numbers around this transition don’t appear in the source. When the shift happened, what his follower count was at the time, what revenue looked like right after, the article says none of this. What’s available is only the sequence. Namely: he built the audience first, and decided what to sell second. He states this as advice in his own words: “build an audience in public before you have something to sell.”

The constraint chose the strategy

Why this order? The reason is a physical constraint, not some clean piece of wisdom.

During military service, the only asset he could build up using just a phone was posts. He explains why he chose X this way: “I could jot down ideas and publish new content anytime, anywhere, from my phone.” Product development wasn’t possible on weekdays. But building an audience compounds through slivers of spare time. The constraint effectively chose, on its own, what he was able to build first.

And this sequence produced a side benefit: he ended up knowing what to build before he built it. The usual startup path is “build, then find buyers.” He went the other way, “watch the reaction, then build.” What his audience, people following his posts about no-code tools, was struggling with was already visible directly in how they reacted to his posts. Structurally, far less development time went to waste.

How a free template becomes a storefront

Another core piece is how the free product is used. Easlo puts out both free and paid Notion products. Here, the free version isn’t functioning as “advertising.”

His own explanation: “I welcome the user first, and run an email workflow sharing additional tips related to the template they downloaded. After that, I introduce a related paid template someone can move to, once they’ve decided Notion is a tool they’ll use long-term.”

This funnel works for three layered reasons.

The bottom layer is switching cost: the moment someone installs a free template, they start putting their own data into it. Unlike a written lead magnet, a template creates switching cost the instant it’s used. Once someone’s tasks are already sitting inside its structure, few people abandon that structure to move to something else. If the paid tier shares the same design philosophy, the natural next stop is effectively singular.

On top of that sits the email, which stops being “generic content” and becomes “the continuation of what you’re already using.” What arrives is not an announcement about a new product but usage tips for the template already in the recipient’s hands. The motivation to open it comes from the recipient’s own side.

At the top layer, the timing of presenting the paid version is left to the user’s own judgment. The condition, “once they’ve decided Notion is a tool they’ll use long-term”, is a design that waits for purchase intent to form, rather than treating everyone who enters through the free tier as an immediate sales target. Given that paid products carry a high cost in refunds and dissatisfaction, this patience is also simply rational.

Assigning each platform exactly one job

On acquisition channels, he draws a clear line around what each platform is for.

• YouTube: “my YouTube videos convert an audience into customers most effectively”
• TikTok / Instagram Reels / YouTube Shorts: “all likely to capture attention quickly”
• X and Instagram: building his profile and authority
• Instagram Stories: staying connected with his existing audience

In short: short-form video for discovery, X/Instagram for building trust, YouTube for the sale. What matters is that X, where he has 356K followers, isn’t designed as a direct-sell surface. The platform with the biggest number serves entirely as an awareness tool rather than a conversion tool. His own framing captures the division of labor well: “through social content, people got to know me as a person, and then learned about the solutions I’d built in Notion.”

What didn’t work

There’s one notable admission of failure. On shortcut tactics on X, he says: “for a while I used what some people call ‘hacks’ on X. I don’t do that anymore. And it doesn’t work if you don’t already have an audience.”

The second half is the real point. Tactics that accelerate growth are not the same as tactics that create growth. By his own account, applying them with zero existing audience simply doesn’t work.

He also repeatedly returns to the pain of the early period: “stay consistent. Across every platform (TikTok, YouTube, whichever) the hardest part is probably the beginning, before you have any followers.” 356K is the outcome. The stretch leading up to it included a long period with almost no response at all.

Where this structure is weak

Being one-time-purchase-only at $20,000/month is itself the biggest vulnerability. With no recurring-revenue foundation, hitting the same revenue next month requires bringing in a fresh set of buyers next month too. Revenue is a flow, not a stock, and that flow is tied directly to how much he’s personally putting out. Stop posting, and revenue decays. As a solo business, this is a “runs only as long as you keep working” structure, a risk worth weighing separately from the size of the monthly number.

On top of that, the product exists only inside someone else’s app, Notion. A spec change, a native feature rollout, or a pricing shift on Notion’s part can all move product value unilaterally, and none of it is his to control. Templates are also easy to copy and imitate. The barrier to entry rests heavily on “personal identity and trust.”

Finally, it’s worth flagging that the revenue breakdown isn’t disclosed. The $20,000 is stated to come from one-time template sales, but whether sponsorships or affiliate income are mixed in, and what profit remains after payment processing fees and ad spend, are not disclosed.

What generalizes, and what doesn’t

The sequence and the funnel generalize. Build the audience before you have a product. Use the free version to earn a place inside someone’s workspace, follow up by email with the continuation of that experience, and only present the paid upgrade to people who’ve come to need it. Assign each platform a role (awareness, trust, or conversion) and don’t force a sale on whichever platform happens to have the biggest number. None of this requires capital or an existing name.

What doesn’t generalize is, first, time. The sheer duration of posting consistently is itself the asset, and his advice (“commit to the long game, let consistency do the talking, and don’t let results interrupt that consistency”) is, read the other way, also an admission that the period without results was long. Second is timing. Having built up a following during the window when Notion’s user base was expanding fast and the paid-template market was still open isn’t something a late entrant gets under the same conditions.

And then there’s the “people follow people” part, where reproducibility depends heavily on the individual. “People follow people. Don’t just demo the product, show more of yourself as the person building it,” he says. An anonymous, product-only presence and one that shows a face and a process don’t reach the same revenue with the same product, but that’s a card only some people are able to play.

Related reading

• Hitode’s blog — a Japanese case with the same underlying structure: pushing through an early period with no response through sheer posting consistency.
• PDF.ai (Damon Chen) — an overseas case that turned an audience built in public directly into initial demand.