Transcription
That made like 80 grand as a launch. Oh wow. And then we made a video about it and I started doing 100 grand a month.
To what extent are you worried that Notion's market will not continue to just keep growing at this point? It's like a lot of just the anxiety you have as a CEO. To what extent do you worry about money?
It's a good question. You know, so Thomas, you have had an interesting story in that you were kind of the OG productivity YouTuber. And then, inexplicably, you kind of decided when you were at the at the height of your career as a productivity YouTuber to give it all up and start a completely new YouTube channel completely from scratch. And now you're making more money than you ever were before on that brand new YouTube channel. What was, what was the thought process behind that decision?
I, so I did not decide to quit my YouTube channel. Like, that's, that's the first thing I want to say. It wasn't like, "Okay, I'm done." Uh, it was more like I wanted a side project. And I had done videos about Notion for my main channel. They did pretty well. And I'm like, "I want to make more Notion videos." But the ones I, I want to make are hyper-technical. And if I put them up on the main channel, people are going to be like, "This is what is this? This is so technical." So I made a second channel while I was still running the main channel and I just did it as a side project.
And then, uh, we created Creator's Companion, which is our Notion template for creators. That started doing pretty well as a side project. I'm like, "Cool. I'm going to take a month off to build the Notion template I've always wanted." That's called Ultimate Brain. It's like task management, project management, notes, all in one. And the, the idea was, "Take a month off, build it, get right back to the main channel."
What actually happened was I took a month off, built it, sold it to a 3,000-person waitlist. That made like 80 grand as a launch. Oh wow. And then we sold it to the rest of our list. That made like 90 grand. And then we made a video about it and I started doing 100 grand a month. And I had to learn customer support, and I had to learn to scale a team. And, um, then I didn't have to, but chose to learn JavaScript. Yeah. And so, you know, a year and a half later of spending a lot of my time coding and building a business, um, we're finally back in the main channel.
So, so this side project that was initially just meant to be a side project started to do so well that it became the main thing for a very long time. Yep. That's really cool.
One of the, one of the really interesting things about your success with the second channel is that you didn't really try and cross-post from like the main channel to the second channel or trying to drive those 2 million subscribers you had on the main channel onto the second. You basically came onto YouTube completely from scratch with a brand new channel and managed to build a business making 100K a month within a fairly short amount of time.
Sort of, yeah, I guess so. So if you were to kind of connect the dots looking backwards, what, what do you think were some of the, some of the factors that aligned to make this like, what was the secret sauce that made this suddenly work? 'Cause a lot of people would be like, "I can have a 100K a month business in in a few months by starting a brand new YouTube channel." Whoa, that's, that's intense.
Well, I should say it's not a few months because I started TF Explains in 2020, like late 2020. And then we released Ultimate Brain in 2022, like April. So going on two years, at least a year and a half. Um, I think the biggest thing, like I can't even attribute this to myself. If we wanted to give it like a cool, you know, name, we could write a book on it. I'd call it the coattail effect. There was already a big audience around Notion, right? Like there's a ton of growing excitement about it. There's people asking questions about it. And I just got to this point where I'm like, "I'm feeling super compelled to build stuff on Notion all day long." Um, there's like this triangle I always try to put myself in. It's like, what's the point between there's a growing audience, there's my passion, and my skills? I want to be in the middle of those three points. And that was doing stuff for Notion. So it was already a growing niche. What I brought to it was a lot of experience in teaching and producing good videos. And then I knew how to build free templates. I knew, like, the whole thing where you can build an email list by giving away lead magnets like that. Uh, and we just kind of got off the raises. Uh, and then, you know, it's just like that same process of just seeing what works and doubling down. That in our case, we realized like build guides work. Um, covering new features work. So that's the majority of what we do. And yeah.
Are you, to what extent are you worried that Notion's market will not continue to just keep growing and therefore you might be, I don't know, making a channel about a product that is no longer, that no longer has all the hype and the buzz around it?
It's a non-zero amount of concern, I would say. So the way I like to think about this is you get to space with a rocket. And I guess unless you're SpaceX, now this this metaphor falls apart. But you get to space with the rocket and you eventually have to jettison parts of the rocket. Um, whereas if you're like, "I want one bicycle and I will never replace any parts of the bicycle," like you can't get to space, you know? You might have a vehicle that you can keep traveling in forever, but you can't do like that huge burst. So sometimes, like in business, I think you see it, an opportunity. You're like, "This is an amazing opportunity for now, maybe not forever." But I don't think it's a dead end. Like anybody who's using Notion, whether they're an individual or a team, needs to be organized. They need a place to externalize information. If that's Notion forever, awesome. If it's not Notion forever, I've built up this reputation of somebody who can teach that kind of software and those kinds of workflows. So if there's something else that like eventually comes and takes over or whatever it is, like if I want to teach that, I'm going to be able to teach that. Solid.
You know, so you've been on YouTube, I guess, in in total for almost 10 years now. Yep. That's a pretty long time. Or 2006 if you're, uh, technical about it. It's going to be my channel. Nice. Yeah, it's my thing. You account created in 2007 or something. So it looks like on YouTube for like 14 years. Um, what would be your top pieces of advice for people who are, let's say, just started out as creators? Like maybe they've been doing it for a few months, maybe up to a year. Or maybe it's people who are actually just thinking of like, you know what, this creator thing seems interesting. You've been doing it for longer than almost anyone I've ever spoken to. Um, what, what tips would you have to newcomers in the space?
I feel like people watching this video have maybe taken your course or watched your videos. They probably haven't. Like, the answer is going to be that same unsatisfying, like, "If you're starting out, you have to start out and you have to literally publish on a schedule and you have to build consistency." That's what it is. And ideally, you're making content about something you care about, not something that just seems that's like going to do well externally, because it's a long game.
Um, actually, I'll give a good example for this. I have heard that people who run other productivity tools have reached out to creators and offered to pay them to build channels like Thomas Frank Explains. Oh, okay. And I reached, I talked with one creator recently who was like, "I don't want to do that." Yeah. Because the money's not the only motivator. Yeah. It seems like a no-brainer for the brand. Like, I would do that if I was running productivity software. Yeah. Like, it's a no-brainer. But the difference and the thing that they're missing is, I wake up on a Saturday morning and I will go build Notion templates. They're not paying me for that, you know? I make money through selling Notion templates, but when I started TF Explains, I was selling nothing. I just wanted to do it that badly. Yeah. So whatever people are creating on, like, it needs to be something that they have personal interest in because it's a grind sometimes. It's a long game. And even once you're successful, it still can be kind of a grind, like doing it. I think that's one of the things where back in the day, the only people who did YouTube were the ones who were intrinsically interested in making YouTube videos. Right. But now with the proliferation of like, you know, I guess some of some of the videos I do of like, "This is how much money you can make on YouTube." Y suddenly people are like doing YouTube as a means to making money rather than as a means to making videos that they, that they enjoy. Yeah. And I think, uh, you know, if you're working with a team, like if there's already an engine, there's already a product, like maybe you get hired to make content. That's a different ball game entirely. But if you're just an individual and you're like, "I want to create content," and you know, I'm looking at the lives of these YouTubers and I see the the revenue numbers, if you're just an individual, I truly think you have to pick something you care about.
So what does a day in your life look like?
Like, I wake up at 7:00 because my dog gets me up at 7:00 and she will not stop annoying me until I get up. So I get up and I take her out. And, you know, go to the coffee shop for a bit and get some work done. Go to the gym. Come here and make videos with Tony. Uh, I don't have a crazy routine anymore. Uh, I will, a few times a week, instead of working here, take a 45-minute walk to a different coffee shop and then get 45 minutes on the way back. So that's maybe 15,000 steps. Yeah. I don't know. Uh, build stuff, exercise, hang out with my wife. And then when you're working, so when you're in the coffee shop or when you're here, what, what does that working look like? Like, what's, what's happening on your computer screen?
If it's a day where I get to do whatever I want, these days it's programming. Programming. Yep. Okay. So like, one of the things I've been working on recently is this really cool automation where you can, uh, record a voice note on your phone and you can get a full transcription, you can AI summary it. All goes to Notion automatically. I spent like four months building that. There's a whole video about it on TF Explains. There's more stuff I want to do to that. So if I get a day where I can do whatever I want, it would be that. Um, it seems like I don't get a ton of those days right now because we have 11 people. So I would say half my time right now is CEO stuff, just setting strategy, um, talking with team members, making sure everyone's aligned. And then a lot of it right now is we've been doing full redesigns of our templates. So the past week or two have been the actual design process. This week is literally recreating the design process while filming it so people can see how to do it themselves. Um, we'll be re-shooting our tutorial videos and courses. Yeah. So there's a lot of course and product work right now.
Yeah. Would you recommend this career/job to people who might be looking at it from the outside and thinking, "Oh, being a YouTuber seems kind of cool"?
Uh, yeah, it's rad. Uh, you know, there's downsides to every job. But I'll put it this way. I had a corporate insurance once. H. It was the first, the only like full-time job I've ever had. I've had a zillion part-time jobs. I've worked on campus. I've worked in grocery stores, all that kind of stuff. The only full-time job I ever had was working at a Fortune 500. My job was literally like running the corporate firewall. And I have journal entries where I literally wrote, "This feels like prison." H. And I know that there are better companies out there. There's probably some company where I'd feel happier. But I feel so fired up getting to build my own stuff every day. I feel so fired up working with a team that is aligned with the stuff that, you know, we want to actually work on. Uh, I feel amaz, I just feel like it's amazing that I get to create stuff every day. So yeah, it rocks. There's parts of it that suck. There's parts to every job that suck. In general, I think it's cool.
What are the parts that suck?
Um, so the parts that suck for me at this point, it's like a lot of just the anxiety you have as a CEO. You have like 11 people on the team. It's 11 people plus their families. Um, one person on my team is now having their third baby, which is amazing. You know, but it's like, there's anxiety around that. It's like, "Oh man, I have to make sure everyone is taken care of." And, um, that's just, it's a very different feeling to when I was completely solo and it's just like, "Yep, I'm just in my dorm room making stuff." All the other stuff I pretty, pretty much delegated. Like I don't like to edit anymore. I kind of got over it. So I hired somebody who loves to edit.
You know, what were the bits that sucked, other than editing, when you, when you didn't have a team and you weren't like responsible for 11 people's livelihoods?
It's a good question. Before I hired the team, I actually liked editing. So I think in hindsight, my brain would tell me that I delegated stuff way earlier than I actually did. Um, if you were to ask my wife, she would say like, "Yeah, he had many, many years of just stubbornly editing himself, staying up till 2 AM, waiting until the very last sponsor deadline second to get things done." You know, when it comes, when I really comes down to it, I feel like the editing and the pressure I put on myself, and especially the perfectionism in the edit, was the part that sucked the most. Researching, creating content, even filming to a degree isn't that bad. Um, for me, it was just the edit. H.
To what extent do you worry about money?
Question. I once read that when you get more money, you spend more time worrying about that money. And I would agree with that sentiment now. Um, and I think there's a lot of psychology bundled up into that. There's a lot of ego. There's a lot of like wanting to sort of stay at the same level as your peers. Um, so there's like, you know, there's, there's games of pecking order, stuff like that. But I think the big anxiety that I deal with is just like, I know what the burn rate is for our team and payroll. And I want to make sure like we never have an issue with that. So I worry about money from that perspective. Uh, right now, because we're building a startup called Fly Lighter, that's like, we've, we've hired developers for that full-time. That's a big addition to our burn rate. And that project's making no money right now because it's not released yet. So that's definitely anxiety. But, you know, personally, I don't worry about it too much. Yeah.
This is something I'm trying to figure out for myself because, you know, even though like, like for us, the margins of our business is like 60% gross margins. Um, you know, becomes 30, 40% once you take, uh, net, once you take tax into account. MH. That's pretty reasonable as far as businesses go. But because this is the only business that I've really ever ever run, yeah, there's always this sort of scarcity anxiety about money in the background. It's like, well, you know, I don't really vibe with doing so many sponsored videos, but the sponsored videos bring in so much revenue. And like, oh, you know, that means if we cut them out completely, then we would lose this amount of money. And, you know, that's some, that might be a million a year that we're losing out on by not having sponsors, even though I don't really want to do sponsors. And so I, I, I often have this sort of battle with myself of how much, like, when is enough enough? And at what, at what point is it prudent to make decisions that increase our bottom line versus that don't, but for the sake of my own energy levels or what I feel like doing? I don't, if any of that makes sense.
So do you feel like part of your anxiety comes from the, the feeling of leaving money on the table, like knowing you could be making more?
I think so. I think it's the knowing that I could be making more and therefore equating that to, therefore I should be making more. And the worry that in the future, you know, right now I don't have that many outgoings, it's all fine. But in the future, let's say I want to have kids, um, and stuff, will I regret not making hay when the sun was shining? 'Cause the sun is currently shining and may not be shining forever, 'cause YouTube careers feel like somewhat ephemeral kind of thing.
Which, I mean, that's a super common thing. Um, like with Nebula, that that comes up so often. And we get creators coming in who are killing it, but then there's this pervasive feeling like, "Oh, tomorrow could all go away." And I don't know how true that is. Like, I think a specific source of income could go away pretty quickly. But if you're navigating your career intelligently, like you're building connections, you're building skills, you're always learning new things, I think there's always going to be opportunity for you. Like, I don't know. And then, and then that creates a weird dichotomy in my head because part of me is like, "You shouldn't believe that. You should, you should believe in back against the wall, so you fight like a caged animal." And then the other side of me is like, "Yeah, but really, if your channel, you know, burnt down tomorrow night, is it not true that you could go do consulting and make a killing doing it?" Like, "Yeah, I could." So I think, uh, part of my motivation is like, "But I don't want to do that." Yeah. I want to build things and and show them off to the internet all day long. So that's what I want to keep working. It's interesting though, I don't get the, uh, I don't get the anxiety of like, "Oh, I should be making more money." H. It just isn't there. It's my anxiety is all like, "Are we making enough to comfortably make sure the team is taken care of and there's no threat for that?" Yeah.
So what, what gives you that, like, why, I guess, why don't you have that anxiety of "I could be making more money"?
Because my motivation is purely discovery. Discovery. My, my driving motivation. Yeah. Like the other motivation is like, take care of my team, especially take care of my mom. Uh, I moved out to Denver, like I want to make sure I can take care of my mom forever. But beyond on that, I'm not that motivated by money as a scorecard. I'm more motivated by like the feeling I get when, like say I'm programming something and I'm like hitting an error for an hour and I finally figure it out. That's what I'm after. I'm after like, "Okay, I just learned a superpower." So I'm just kind of always chasing that. Nice. Um, and it just so happens, like I feel lucky that my particular interests lead to discoveries that help to build good businesses. Um, you know, it'd be harder if like I want to just paint all day or something, you know? Or maybe I can monetize that. There's a lot of people who have done that. Um, but I often think about this fact, like for whatever reason, I'm interested in programming, business building, weird productivity tools. My only non-monetizable interest is music. So even then, you've got some tracks on Spotify.
So yeah, I did, I did like a, "Okay, let's make $1,000 from music" challenge. Did that. And then I'm like, "That's all I ever want to do." Nice.
How did you make $1,000 from music?
Same way. Well, actually, I don't know if you took it far enough to do this, but you totally could. So I made a study playlist and got a whole bunch of followers on it. And then, uh, just dropped my music into it when I released it. Oh, nice. And so you get those free streams as a result of. Yep. And you've made more than $1,000 from people streaming your like, two songs. MH. Oh, that's pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, I think to break it down, on Spotify, they have like maybe 300,000 streams put together. And then on YouTube, maybe 400,000 views. Oh, wow. So that's about it. And then I don't know if people have bought it on iTunes or whatever. Nice. Play. But yeah. And and you make music, so you could do the same thing. Yeah. Drop a, drop the study track into your, uh, into your playlist. Did to, to what extent do you run the risk of, uh, hobbies becoming not fun when you monetize them?
Not so bad anymore. I used to run that risk a lot, especially like when when my focus was all on the Thomas Frank channel. There was like this feeling like, "Okay, well, I got into weightlifting, I should make weightlifting content. I got into music, I should make music content. I should just like become this Superman who makes content about all of his interests." And that I was running risk for out. Okay, 'cause everything I would look at was like, "Okay, that's content." Yeah. I would like read a fiction novel, I'm like, "Can I build a parable out of this and make a video on it?" Now I'm like, there's so much more clarity. I teach Notion and I'm building a startup. So I'm going to make content on building businesses and maybe a bit of like productivity to that end. But I no longer feel that. I think honestly, ego-driven desire to make content, showing off the fact that I know how to lift weights or that I know how to play guitar. So that stuff, it's just like, that's my life. I lift weights, play guitar, play video games with my friends. And when I'm at work, I do technical stuff.
Okay, so you have this very clear separation between work, the thing that you do for work, yep, which is I make Notion tutorials and I, or I make Notion stuff, and I'm making the startup. And the rest of your life, which is all the other things. At this point, yeah. Yeah. 'Cause I guess with a lot of YouTubers, and I think I, I've definitely fallen into this myself, it's like your whole life becomes the content, right? And, yeah, like how did you get out of that, way of thinking about things?
Burnout. Yeah. Uh, several, several instances of burnout. And then, you know, I'll count it as luck a little bit, like getting into the Notion niche when I did. And then starting to build products, like just going down that rabbit hole of curiosity. Uh, and and actually having it pay off. That was very helpful. Um, and I don't think that there's nothing from that that can be learned by another person, even if they're going into a different niche. Because the real thing I learned was just because I have a cash cow over here with the sponsors, doesn't mean that's the only thing I could ever do. And I spend a lot of time as a creator thinking, "This is all I could ever do. I'm making four videos a month, they each make $10,000 video or $10,000 each. That's our cap. I do not see a way that we could ever increase revenue or even match this revenue in a different way." So I felt stuck. And then when I finally kind of stepped back a little bit and started exploring the Notion thing, I realized like, this is way, way bigger than the sponsor stuff ever was. And it doesn't require four videos a week. It doesn't require $1,000 or 100,000 views per video. There's just like this whole perspective shift that happened learning this thing. Yeah.
How's, how has your relationship with metrics changed over time?
I have embraced the fact that metrics give me anxiety a lot of the times, so I just don't look at them. That's, um, you know, every business guru in the world would be like, "That's the worst advice ever. You have to to look at your metrics. You know, what gets measured, that gets managed." But one thing they say, like this is very common in in startup circles, is like the founder's number one job is to manage their own psychology. So if I know what I need to get done, and I know that looking at metrics on a past thing is not going to help me get that thing done, I'm not going to look. I will look when it's time to look. Uh, there, there's a line from "Good to Great" that business book that like, good managers are the ones that can like peel open the rock, like peel up the rocks and look at all the bugs and squiggly stuff underneath. Like the stuff you want to leave alone. So there does come a time where you do have to look at the metrics and dig in. But I used to be the kind of person who would just constantly check.
Yeah, same. I, I used to constantly refresh YouTube Studio multiple times a day. I, I would just habitually go to it on my phone. And now I can't even remember the last time I opened it. I think every now and then I'll open it just to click on the comments tab and I won't even look at the homepage that shows my subscriber count change, revenue, what, how well the latest video was doing. I'll just look at the comments tab to be like, "Are there any comments I can hard to reply to?" Very occasionally. But I think, and I think a lot of creators I've spoken to, they sort of eventually get to this point of realizing, actually, the metrics are meaningless broadly. Um, the, and there's almost this sort of separation of church and state, separation of like the creative from the commercial. And the metrics are too focused on the commercial because it's a lot harder to creatively make a video when you're being like, "Oh, but I've got to hit 100,000 views for this video." Yep. And I mean, I don't know if you feel this, one of my big problems is I will get obsessed with the metrics and then I'll be like, "Okay, well, the next video I do needs to be perfect. I need to hit all these beats. I need to optimize for retention. I need to make sure I have a perfect title and angle and everything." And then what happens is I don't make a video. Yeah. So part of what I'm realizing that I need to do, uh, is go back to my roots a little bit. The way that I came up as a YouTuber was I literally had an app that would charge me money if I didn't publish every Friday. Yeah. It would look at, I think YouTube had RSS feeds back then, they've gotten rid of them or at least they're buried. But yeah, would look at the, the RSS feed for the YouTube channel. If there was not a video, it would charge me five bucks. And, you know, five bucks is not that much money, but it was like the psychology of knowing you've lost. Yeah. Against yourself. And so are you going back to having an upload schedule now?
Yes, I am. Oh, yep.
Why, why not just decide, you know what, I've, I've been doing this for 10 years, I'm going to chill and just make videos whenever I feel like it?
'Cause I don't, I just, I want the schedule for a while. I want, I want to get out of that perfectionist mindset. I want to get out of that metric D mindset. So for a while, I think it's just like, let's just do the exercise of publishing again. Doesn't have to be forever, you know? But it's like the same thing with like, if you've been off the gym for a while, a great way to get back in is like, "Okay, three days a week, I'm just going to go." It's going to show up. That's my metric. And you have to worry about like, how many reps did you do? How many sets did you do? Like right now, I'm at a time in my life where the startup is almost all consuming. And then my wife wants time, my family want time. So I do not have time to go to the gym for two hours. But I do have enough time to do like 30 pull-ups a day on those rings right there. I have enough time to go to the gym, get a half an hour, just blitz session in. I don't care if I'm getting stronger, I'm just getting it done. So that's kind of where my mind is at now is like, with the main channel, I want to be publishing. I have a lot to say. I don't want to be hindered by these these feelings that I have to like have a perfect angle, perfect hook, all that kind of stuff, 'cause that's just going to cause me to not make anything. Yeah.
Managing your own psychology. And so for you, managing the psychology means the goal is, I'm just going to upload once a week or I'm going to publish once a week. And with that goal, everything else falls by the wayside, like all of the concern about the metrics and the imposter syndrome of the overthinking and all that crap.
Yep. Because you have to hit that upload. MH. H.
What I really want to try is streaming. Oh, yeah. We're doing our first one tomorrow. Nice. So we'll see how it goes. Yeah. Yeah. I always find streaming more more energizing than just filming a video. MH. Do you get the same feeling when you, uh, speak in public?
Yeah, I love speaking in public. Same. Right. If I do a public speech and it's like, "Yes, this feels so good." I want to talk to everyone afterwards and all this kind of stuff. But like filming to a camera, that's like, no one else is watching other than once it's been uploaded three weeks later. It doesn't have that same sort of emotional resonance. It's like, yeah, it's just like, I don't know. Like I was telling you at lunch, I wanted to be the guy in the basement doing the IT stuff. And, uh, becoming a YouTuber was not that different. I'm still in the basement, I'm just, I'm talking to a piece of technology. Nice.
Well, thank you very much, Thomas. I think this is a good place to end this. We have to head to Denver Airport 'cause we're flying to LA. Thank you very much for inviting us to your lovely studio.
Absolutely. D. All the best for the startup. Um, any final pieces of advice for people who have watched the 20-something minutes of this video so far?
I mean, if you got this far and you are trying to become a creator, this is the one I always say: 1% rule. Put yourself on that schedule. And then with each video, try to get 1% better in some area: animation, eye contact with the camera, cadence, whatever it is. Anything interesting. Just try to get a little bit better.
Amazing. Thank you so much. MH.