An overview from Ben
Notion templates have played an outsized role in my life. I joined the Notion team many years ago thanks to Notion templates. My wife and I were featured on the front page of the New York Times thanks to my Notion template. I’ve worked and met with hundreds of Notion creators who’ve had their lives changed thanks to Notion templates. The best part, I originally discovered Notion on Product Hunt. Truly full circle.
A brief history of Notion templates
Notion launched the first official template gallery 5 years ago. In the early days at Notion, it quickly became clear that templates were an effective way for new users to get inspired and easily onboard to Notion. We spent a few weeks building out templates we thought would be useful to share in the gallery, but we had a feeling that the community would show up and share many more interesting templates. I remember reviewing the submissions for community-made templates and being blown away by the diversity in use cases.
Over time people realized that they could sell access to their templates. Creators mostly started using Gumroad to process payments and would promote their templates in the gallery, on YouTube, social, and even on Product Hunt. At some point, I remember seeing so many Notion templates on Product Hunt that people started calling it Notion Hunt for a while. In 2022, Notion was the #1 most searched keyword on Product Hunt. Creators started making significant money through their templates.
This continued to grow over time until the Gallery 2.0 launch a year ago. Led by Matt Picollela, this new gallery includes free and premium notion templates alongside creator profiles, better navigation, sorting, and easier publishing. As of today, you can find 7,000 creators who’ve shared thousands of free notion templates in this gallery, ranging from every use case you can imagine.
Building a business around Notion templates
Ultimately, distribution is most important when it comes to building a Notion templates business. Posting in the Gallery is definitely helpful, but you still will need to push hard on social, email, and any other channel if you want to reach larger distribution numbers and monetize.
Having a niche can be very helpful. As an example with myself, my couple’s home caters to a pretty specific audience. I was able to get a good amount of interest on Twitter and in the press, ultimately driving a good amount of sales of my template.
Going even more specific, I heard about this story below a while back. Very niche use case that this person was able to monetize incredibly well.
Best practices directly from Notion
Good templates are useful. Templates are tools; tools solve a clear problem or need for someone. There’s both a clear audience for your template and a clear problem to be solved, and your template solves that problem.
Good templates are differentiated. Notion is more flexible than typical word document. Differentiated templates combine one or more of Notion’s core product types (docs, projects, and wikis), or are very clearly visually different than a basic word document.
Good templates are scalable. If your template is intended for team use, it should be able to work with more than just one person. There are a few key points to check to ensure scalability: If it’s intended for collaboration, what might this look like if you added 10 people? 50? 100? If you added content from the last two months, what would it look like? If you already have lots of stuff in your Notion, does it easily fit in?
Good templates have the basics. They’re inoffensive, use correct spelling, and are thoughtfully structured.
A few of my favorite Notion templates
People often ask me what the coolest Notion template is. I’ve seen so many great premium and free Notion templates over the years. People use Notion templates for productivity, project management, content creation calendars, habit tracking, meal planning, mood tracking, and so many more, but some examples that have blown me away have been a poultry farm management template and a bible study template. Here are a few of my favorite Notion templates that I use all of the time:
- Ultimate tasks from Thomas Frank - I grew up watching Thomas Frank on YouTube. He’s always pushing the limits on Notion (and this one is free).
- Notion habit tracker
- a pretty simple habit tracker template made by the Notion team; I like that it’s minimal and easy to use. It's another great free Notion template.
- Startup pitch deck
- I love seeing startups use Notion as a deck or memo. So clean and easy to read.
- All in one travel planner
- a simple travel planning database. I plan all of my trips in Notion, one of my favorite use cases.
- Monthly budget
- I’ve used this a few times to plan my budget and as an overall Notion finance tracker.
- Couple’s home base
- my own template for managing my home with my partner, I use this daily as my second brain.
- Wiki
- I loved using Notion’s internal wiki. It’s a must for every startup. I also recommend checking out How Notion uses Notion.
Featured Notion template creator
I was lucky enough to meet Easlo in Singapore, one of the most legendary Notion template creators. He started at age 19 and now reaches tens of thousands of customers (paying $10-$100 for his templates) and 1.1M+ followers across platforms. All of this in just the past three years (!) starting from scratch.
Jason Chin got started when he was serving in Singapore’s military. He came across Notion while scouring the web and spent weekends watching YouTube videos, learning Notion in-depth. After seeing someone launch a Notion template pack on Product Hunt, he was inspired to create his own. He used a name generator and came up with Easlo as his nickname, which sounded like “easy.” Jason found an avatar generator to get a Notion look-alike portrait. He started releasing templates, publishing content (mostly Twitter to start), and growing his audience while riding the Notion wave.
After finishing his army service, he decided to double down and go full-time as a creator instead of attending university. He figured out what worked on Twitter, scaled his audience, and repeated the same on TikTok and Instagram. His business has grown so much that he hired his sister full-time and is planning to bring on more employees. Easlo inspired a whole generation of creators (search Notion creator on Twitter) — all of this by the age of 22. Incredible journey.
