One of the most popular applications of recent years is Notion. This isn’t a notes organizer or a task manager or a calendar or project management tool. All of these at once and so much more.and at the same time its community has an important role, which not only exchanges guides and ideas to benefit from it, but also offers templates, a neural component.

These templates allow you to quickly import a pre-designed page type. To plan a trip, organize a move, prepare for the academic year, follow a routine in the gym… Just adapt the content to our needs. And it’s this exchange (not having to create pages from scratch, but importing what we want) that explains some of Notion’s success: a parallel economy: the economy of the sellers of these templates.

Long tail

One of the largest, if not the largest, examples of this economy worldwide is Easlo. This nickname was chosen by Jason Ruiyi Chin, a Singaporean teenager who used Notion to organize his lecture notes during his final years in high school. He realized he could use the basics of his templates to make them available to other students, and the success of that idea led him to share many more templates, from one template for tracking habits to another for managing personal finances.

In these startups, he noticed that his templates generated a lot of interest. So much for not smelling the money trail: If so many people use their insoles, This may mean that at least a certain percentage of them will be willing to pay for them.

And that was the boy.

Easlo started 2021 by sharing free templates and ended by taking up to $100 in voluntary tips as a thank you. In the autumn of that year, he decided that his activity would become a business and that his new templates would be mostly a paid product.

Here are some of the templates that make up the Easlo ‘Starter pack’. Image: Easlo.

Jason isn’t the only one who had this idea and implemented it, but there are a few factors that explain its success:

• He first built his audience by offering free content and then started making money, not the other way around.
• He was able to integrate his personal brand into Notion’s aesthetic with minimalist black and white illustrations.
• There is tremendous coherence and consistency in the online content strategy through social networks and YouTube channel.

Many people have tried to recreate their steps, but often ruin the first step: They start making money only when they can develop a certain community.

It’s even fun to see this Profile images of the accounts that appear when we search for “Notion templates” on Twitter, a literal swarm of one-shot black and white illustrations. Some have some additional details, but they are basically the same:

Profile images from various Notion template vendors. Image: Twitter, Xataka.

This is a quick pick, but there are tons more and it fits some version. long tail business modelWhere a few people make huge incomes and a very long list of followers try to repeat the success but reach much lower levels.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, this isn’t like an AI recreating creators’ photos into Notion-style illustrations. Or at least the vast majority have not achieved their goal this way: in others market places, like Basrr, There are illustrators who offer this service for a few dollars.

Illustrators who offer the creation of such avatars on Fiverr. Image: Fiverr, Mockuuups Studio, Xataka.

But this is another matter; It’s a symptom of how far Notion’s parallel economy has come.

In this table, some of the most popular, perhaps inherently due to their number of followers on X, the social network where such creators proliferate the most:

While Ali Abdaal surpasses Easlo in follower count on X, he doesn’t have such a prominent presence specifically in Notion templates, instead creating more diverse content around productivity.

Where do you sell these templates? in various places, including direct sales on relevant personal websites, but If one place stands out, it’s gumroadpopular Market place Digital content where Notion templates also triumph. A search for ““Concept template” Returns 10,423 results. Meanwhile, four of the top 10 are from Easlo.

Image: Gumroad.

There are also more specialized places. All kinds of digital content are sold on Gumroad, but on Notion Everything, for example, they distribute only such templates, both free and paid.

Templates for sale or free at Notion Everything. Like the WordPress app or theme stores, Notion templates drive their own economics and distribution. Image: Notion Everything.

Some templates are sold as standalone pages. For example, “financial planner” or “content calendar.” Others are sold as a slightly larger group, with several sections for managing personal projects, corporate projects or life goals. AND others are directly what many people call an “operating system”whether it is aimed at digital content, personal productivity, the operation of a business freelance or to all life. They often cover much more than a simple template.

Also popular are those who use the term.“Second Brain” (“second brain”) is a concept introduced by Tiago Forte, author and speaker on productivity and personal management, in his book ‘Create your second brain: A proven method to organize your digital life’. Some of the providers of these templates adapt their methods to Notion, some reference Forte more than others.

Entry to Easlo’s ‘Second Brain’ template is standard priced at $99. Image: Easlo, Xataka, Mockuuups Studio.

Home page of the ‘My Second Brain’ template sold by Notion Everything for $79. Image: Notion Everything.

As the complexity of the template or the number of problems it promises to solve increases, so does its price. Although this figure can also vary depending on the popularity of the creator: great creators with larger audiences such as Easlo, Pascio, Thomas Frank, The Notion Bar or Ali Abdaal can afford the prices prize; Those who start developing their communities often sell them for a few dollars. This is the market, my friend.

Notion’s free plan is generous enough that it gets by with users who decide to pay, mostly avid users or enterprise customers. They have also been marketing Notion AI for a year now, which integrates the GPT API not only for authoring, translation or synthesis, but also for manipulating and creating pages using natural language instructions.

However, they do not take action from these templates because they are not obstacles. Even on the app they advertise free trades and promote some of the most prominent creators, but the money goes elsewhere. They could have followed the app store model and centralized sales, or at least taken advantage of their privileged position and taken commissions for transactions, but they decided not to do that.

Certainly, There are also people selling courses on how to make a lot of money selling Notion templatesWe made a tremendous amount of zero money selling Notion templates, but if pickaxe vendors benefited the most during the gold rush two hundred years ago, why shouldn’t the same happen for Notion?

More than templates

Although until now everything revolved around templates, there are those who go one step further. templates only as part of the product they offer.not total, but a more global vision of organization and productivity, mentoring for companies, etc. focused.

In this case, we have a great national example: Elena Madrigal, who came to this world after several years of working career related to the world of communications and, in particular, design and user experience… although he never uses the word “template” for his products.. And what creates Learn the Concept during the epidemic

“I never use the term ‘templates’ for what I do because what I do often goes beyond that; I develop tools in Notion; I transfer a process, a way of working to the same platform. I never created a basic template for habit recording, for example, because it just wasn’t that interesting to me. What made me fall in love with Notion was its power Stream complex processes to run without needing to program anything, so that’s what I’ve always done; I transfer my working methods to a blank canvas and develop small tools to help me.

These tools include slightly more basic products such as Income and Expense Control or Continuous Improvement System, which sell for 15 euros each; or the Brain Design Kit, which includes the system plus a course on understanding how it works and how to configure it for each need.

Brain Design Kit page Image: Elena Madrigal.

As such, Notion doesn’t think it’s in the market for templates, instead its offering goes the other way, although it overlaps at some points. “The aim is not to convey a template or tool, but to convey a process that stems from my experiences.”

At this point we ask you about the dependency of a particular application like Notion and what happens if tomorrow you decide to stop allowing the import of templates or close the application completely. “It’s Notion now, but maybe in a few years it’ll be something else, or maybe I’ll be tool agnostic; I’m less interested in building a business based on templates than I am in ’empowering’ people to design their own systems.”

Avoiding dependence on a single foreign tool was one of the reasons he created his own software. newsletter here he is talking about principles rather than a specific tool.

The Brain Design Kit mentioned is actually sees it more as a SaaS (Software as a service,’software as a service’) more than anything else– Streamlines the tool in Notion, but the concepts are not tied to a single environment. “It allows the capture and processing of resources, it allows setting goals, associating those goals with projects, managing those projects and tasks like in a Todoist-type app… but it’s also designed to be able to combine those resources and notes in the creation of the content”.

And of course its activity is not limited to the sale of these resources, but also includes: Referral to Notion’s services regarding the design and implementation of work environmentsWhether for companies or individuals. “I don’t think a template should ever be the end all be all, especially if it’s templates whose purpose is to give you some pre-built stuff but there’s no principles passed down or anything that supports that architecture, especially if that’s just it.”

The truth is there are plenty of them on the internet.

in Xataka | For seven years I have been organizing my whole life with a task manager (and I recommend it to everyone).

Featured image | Notion, Mockuuups Studio.