This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Today we have a caller with a question about selling Notion templates. This would be the software Notion, the app, the productivity app Notion. In fact, it describes itself as a project management and note-taking software platform. Perhaps you have used Notion or something like it. It's really taken off over the past few years, lots and lots of users.
And where there are lots of users, there's also sometimes at least opportunity. So we featured a number of stories about people who have created user guides for various software tools. People have created templates. And in fact, that's what we're gonna look at here today. Notion comes with over 100 professionally designed templates which allow you to add your own images, videos, and text using a visual editor.
And that's cool, but you also get to make your own templates. So going to our caller here, they don't wanna just use existing templates. They wanna make their own. And not only that, they want to sell the ones they make to this very large user base. So can they do that?
Well, yes, they can actually, but how can they do that? And what might make their templates more successful than others? How can they grow this business? Can I make and sell Notion templates? That's today's question.
Welcome to Sada Sol School. Detailed question coming up after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
Hi, this is Noah from Scottsdale, Arizona. I'm a longtime user of Notion which has really taken off in recent years. One of the cool things about it is the chance to make and share your own templates with other users.
These templates can be used in lots of ways like to modify a calendar style or organize any other type of information. I'd like to start selling my templates. There are a few existing marketplaces, but I'd also like to sell them on my own website to cut out the middleman and also just differentiate a bit. What would be the best path forward? [Music]
Hey Noah, thanks for calling in.
Hope all is well in Scottsdale. And I'll just say up front, I think this is a great idea. Or at least it can be a great idea, especially if you're an expert in this field and you've got some great templates, which it sounds like you do. As for third party platforms, I'll just cover that briefly since I know Noah wants to do something different. But I think it would be wise to check out creativemarket.com, creativemarket.com, see what is being sold there, be familiar with the process and so on.
But of course, Noah mentioned selling them on his own. So I found a few good blog posts detailing the process, including some from some people who are making a few hundred dollars here and there. In one case, somebody making a couple thousand dollars a month, which is great, of course. And there was at least one person who was doing very, very well, more than $10,000 a month in fact. So we should probably talk to that person and see if we could feature him on the podcast.
But since we're trying to help Noah first, Gumroad is a great tool for this. Technically, Gumroad is a selling platform like Creative Market or Etsy or similar in that people can go to gumroad.com and shop. But mostly it's an e-commerce tool that allows creators to sell digital items. So I think something like Gumroad is great. I'm sure Shopify has an option to sell something like this since you can buy anything on Shopify these days.
So you can add that Gumroad or Shopify or whatever it is, check out button to your site, just like Noah wants to do. So far so good, but now how do people find them? This is probably a more important question because it's gonna determine what you do next. Does Noah want to become an authority on Notion, like building an audience over time and then selling templates to them, to those people? Or does he just want to make and sell templates?
So big difference here. If it's the latter, he's probably better off focusing on those third-party platforms and perhaps some SEO to that website he builds to target certain keywords that Notion users are searching for. Okay, and if it's the former, if he wants to actually build an authority, then that is, as I said, a different process. And we want to focus here on that question of how can I quickly make and sell them? And that's what you do.
So good luck, Noah. Good luck everybody out there. I am cheering you on, sidehustleschool.com/questions. You want to ask a question for the show. We'll continue to feature them each week along with case studies, features from previous case studies, tips, all kinds of stuff, new episode every single day.
Thanks for tuning in. I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
