For many people, Notion is just another note-taking app. But for Jason Ruiyi Chin, it's become a lucrative business opportunity. The 20-year-old student from Singapore, known online as Easlo, has made over $239 000 in just one year by selling Notion templates.
It all started when Jason began using Notion to take lecture notes at school. He quickly realized the app's potential for organization and productivity and began toying with it. Soon, he started tweeting out free Notion-template downloads, which helped him grow a significant following on social media.
As his audience grew, Jason decided to start monetizing his new content. He began creating templates for budget tracking, organization, and other productivity requirements. These templates proved to be incredibly popular, and before he knew it, he had created a six-figure business selling Notion templates.
In this article, we will delve into the strategies and tactics that Jason used to achieve such impressive success with Notion templates. From building a social media following to creating high-quality templates that customers are willing to pay for, we will explore the steps you can take to create a profitable online business selling digital products. Whether you're a student looking to make some extra cash or an entrepreneur seeking new opportunities, there's a lot to learn from Jason Chin's story.
Background Story
Jason Ruiyi Chin graduated from high school in 2021. While in school, he often used Notion, a note-taking software platform to organize his lecture notes. After graduating, he realized that people could customize Notion for different uses and decided to fiddle around with the program's functionality.
Jason started producing basic templates, like a budget tracker and a habit tracker, under his internet persona, Easlo. These templates became very popular among his followers, and he quickly gained a large following on social media.
Jason learned how to set up various functions in Notion by watching YouTube videos. He released these first templates for free, advertising them to his growing Twitter followers and posting on Product Hunt to get the word out.
While developing his templates, he was growing his Twitter audience. Jason followed popular productivity Twitter accounts and studied what formats and content they used. He modeled his Twitter behavior after theirs. This research has paid off because he now gets significant support on Twitter for his products.
For about two months in the summer of 2021, he regularly released new, free Notion templates and made them available to anyone who wanted them. They could be downloaded from Gumroad for free, with the option of leaving a tip.
Monetizing the Templates
Jason realized that being with the Easlo online presence might be a lucrative endeavor. In November 2021, he decided to start charging for his new templates and turn "Easlo" into a business. He stumbled into this entrepreneurship opportunity; it was his first job ever.
To get the word out about his new, paid products, he sent an email to all the people who had downloaded his free templates. To his surprise, people started paying for his new product.
Gumroad made it easy for him to switch from free products to paid ones. He just changed the price from $0 to whatever he was setting it as. The paid template was profitable immediately, as it brought over $3 000 in the first month.
His audience came largely from Twitter, where he has over 211 000 followers, and Product Hunt. His Notion templates performed well drawing tons of new customers to his website.
Working as a Solo Entrepreneur
Jason says that he works as a one-man machine, which can be stressful sometimes, but he takes pride in that every template, tweet, and Product Hunt post is designed and implemented by him alone.
He has never paid for an ad campaign. He focuses on growing his online audience organically. He invests a lot of time in growth on Twitter, which has brought him the greatest return on the investment of his time.
His tweets these days focus on helping others grow their audiences and ventures, which is a popular topic that gets a lot of attention. He tweets two to three times a day, replies to at least 10 tweets, and makes an informative Twitter thread weekly. His working hours vary from week to week — it's definitely a full-time commitment.
Revenue
Jason says that he made $239 000 in template sales in 2022 alone. His less-expensive templates such as the Bullet Journal, which costs $20, and Finance Tracker, which costs $40 make up nearly half of his business.
But the sales of his $130 flagship product, the Second Brain template, make up over $100 000 of the profit I've made this year. The template allows you to track personal finance, health and fitness, personal growth, and relationship goals. It also displays your inbox and schedule.
Insights on the Notion-Template Marketplace Now According to Jason:
In the past year, the landscape for Notion templates has changed a lot. There's more competition in the template market, so I've had to adjust my business, Easlo, accordingly. In addition to developing new templates, I've started creating educational content for the Notion community.
When I first started working with Notion templates, I had recently graduated from school. I never expected to find success in this field.
For anyone thinking of starting their own template business, my advice is to focus on building an audience first by offering them free, valuable content. By doing this, you can create a loyal following that will grow over time, and your sales will reflect this growth if you do it right.
