He made $80k selling Notion templates

🚀 From zero to side hustle. No investors. No board meetings. Just you, your hustle, and a wifi connection. This is The Ramen Hustle, your weekly reminder that the best businesses start scrappy.

IN TODAY’S EPISODE

Want to feature your side hustle in an upcoming newsletter? Click here

——— Let’s go! ■□□□□ ———

FRESH IDEA

The Notion Template Niche Strategy

The best-selling Notion templates aren't generic productivity systems. They're hyper-specific solutions for hyper-specific people. Nick Lafferty made $80K+ in 12 months. No inventory. No shipping. Just solving problems people happily pay to have solved.

Wedding planners pay $30 for a template that tracks vendors, timelines, and budgets. Freelancers pay $40 for a CRM that manages clients and invoices. Students pay $20 for study systems built around their exact workflow. Content creators pay $50 for editorial calendars that sync with their posting schedule.

First, what is Notion? It's a free productivity app used by millions for notes, tasks, and databases. Think of it as a digital workspace where everything lives in one place. The magic is flexibility. Users can build almost anything, but most don't have the time or skills to design from scratch.

That's where you come in.

The money is in niches that convert: personal planning, business hubs, content creation systems, student life organizers, finance trackers. Pick one. Own it completely.

Differentiation means solving one problem extremely well instead of trying to do everything. A habit tracker that actually works beats a life dashboard that's overwhelming. Depth over breadth.

Pricing tiers follow complexity. Simple templates like single-page trackers go for $5-15. Comprehensive systems with multiple linked databases sell for $20-40. Full business operating systems command $50-100.

The bundling strategy unlocks scale. Create an ecosystem of related templates. A freelancer bundle might include client CRM, project tracker, invoice generator, and time logger. Sell individually or as a discounted package.

Customer research is free. Reddit communities like r/Notion have thousands of posts about what people wish existed. Twitter threads show pain points. YouTube comments reveal gaps in current solutions.

Visual appeal matters more than you think. Clean design, consistent icons, thoughtful color schemes. The template needs to look premium before anyone tests the functionality.

Platforms to sell: Gumroad, Etsy, Notion's own marketplace, or your own site. Most take a small percentage, so startup cost is effectively zero. The passive income reality: once listed, templates sell while you sleep.

——— ■■□□□ ———

RAMEN RIFF

Teach What You Know, Charge Later

The best marketing for your side hustle is teaching your craft for free.

Blog posts. YouTube videos. Twitter threads. Newsletter issues. Give away the knowledge. Sell the implementation.

This sounds backwards until you see it work. The Notion template creators crushing it right now aren't just selling templates. They're posting tutorials, sharing their build process, explaining how they structure databases. The free content builds trust. The paid products convert that trust into revenue.

The content strategy is simple: document your process publicly. Show your work. Explain why you made certain decisions. People learn from watching you think through problems. Platform choice depends on your strengths. YouTube works if you're comfortable on camera. Blogging works if you write well. Twitter threads work if you can break down ideas into bite-sized pieces. Newsletters work if you can show up consistently.

Here's the key insight: share everything except the execution. The knowledge is free. The done-for-you solution is paid. You can explain exactly how to build a content calendar in Notion. People will still pay $30 for yours because building takes time and yours is already built.

Notion template creators are the perfect case study. They share templates for free to build audiences, then sell premium versions or bundles. The free templates are marketing. The paid templates are the business.

——— ■■■□□ ———

HUSTLE RESOURCE

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.

Sign Up Free

——— Keep going ■■■■□———

CASE STUDY

The Accidental $27 Billion Company

Stewart Butterfield tried to build video games twice. Failed twice. Both failures accidentally created billion-dollar companies.

The first attempt was Game Neverending in the early 2000s. The game flopped, but a photo-sharing feature users loved became Flickr. Yahoo bought it in 2005.

The second attempt was Glitch, a multiplayer game his company Tiny Speck started building in 2009. By late 2012, Glitch was clearly dying. But the internal chat tool they'd built to coordinate their distributed team? That thing was useful.

Butterfield walked into a meeting with his investors and told them: we're not a gaming company anymore. We're an enterprise software company now.

That chat tool became Slack.

The preview release dropped in August 2013. By February 2014, they went public. Growth was absurd: 5-10% weekly user increases, 60,000 daily users within months, 120,000 by summer. Within the first year, they had 500,000 daily active users and raised $120 million.

The wildest part? 90-95% of that growth was organic. No ad budget. No growth hacks. Just a product people couldn't stop telling their friends about. Word-of-mouth from happy users built the entire thing.

Butterfield's approach was maniacally focused on customer feedback. He personally managed Slack's Twitter account in the early days. His team blurred the line between support and product development. Every complaint became a feature request.

Salesforce bought Slack for $27.7 billion in 2020.

The pattern is the lesson: pay attention to what users actually do, not what you built for them to do. Butterfield didn't pivot because he was smart. He pivoted because he watched. The side project his team couldn't stop using became the main business.

Your side project might be your real business. You just have to notice.

Google AdSense's Auto ads lets you designate ad-free zones, giving you full control over your site’s layout and ensuring a seamless experience for your visitors. You decide what matters to your users and maintain your site's aesthetic. Google AdSense helps you balance earning with user experience, making it the better way to earn.

Take control of your ads

READING MATERIAL