Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q to get our free database of 102 digital product ideas that are making millions right now, just like Thomas's. And if you're serious about building a million dollar online business, consider joining us at Starter Story. Much love, and I hope you guys enjoy the rest of the video with Thomas. Peace. So tell me about your backstory. How do you get to this place where you built this business?
A Going into college, my thought was I have to be as competitive as possible just to get a job. What this led me to do was start reading blogs like Lifehacker, and crucially, there was another one called Hack College, which was Lifehacker for college students. I thought it might be fun to write for them when they put out a call for new writers, so I spent a whole night writing a guest blog post I thought would knock their socks off, and they rejected me. I'm glad they did, though, because I took that blog post I wrote for them, and I started up my own website, collegeinfogeek.com. I just started writing throughout a lot of my college years. It was purely for fun, just, I was, like, building up stuff. I wanted to share all the little life hacks I was kind of implementing myself, and then, um, We started YouTube in 2014. Again, a lot of just like, I'm imitating the people I admire. I was posting videos every single week. The channel eventually grew up to a million subscribers. Every video was sponsored. I felt pressure to get a 100,200 thousand views on every single video. It became the job, and it sort of had sucked a little bit of the creative freedom out of it for that reason. In 2020, I had made a couple of Notion videos for the main channel that did well, and I was getting so into the software that I wanted to make more niche videos. But I'm like, it just doesn't Fit on the ma…
AI assessment note: “I started up my own website, collegeinfogeek.com. I just started writing”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q Let's talk about how notion templates work. What's your process for creating a great notion template that you can sell online?
A Uh, yeah. Notion template is a page in notion that you make public and you tick the little box that says able to be duplicated and that's it. So to create a notion template, you just make something useful either for yourself or for a client or for an audience, put the link out there, sell access to the link. Creators companion was just an evolution from 20 18 all the way to 20 21 of Everything we needed to make our YouTube videos, and then we just went to the process of polishing it up, adding a few more features, like a content repurposing dashboard and stuff like that, packaging it up and selling it. For Ultimate Brain, it was a similar thing where I had made a task management template for myself, and I'm just like, let's build on top of that. So note taking, getting things done, workflows, project management, goal tracking, all kinds of stuff like that, and packaging it up.
AI assessment note: “to create a notion template, you just make something useful either for yourself or for a client”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q So let's talk about tools. What kind of software and tools do you use to run this business?
A Well, notion for one, definitely dog food, our own software and we use our own templates. Notion templates can be easily pirated since they're just a link. So what I am concerned about is maintaining paid access to our support So we use circle.so and we have actual customer logins for that. For a point of sale, we use lemon squeezy. I like them because they actually act as merchant of record. So they completely handle taxes for you. We use convert kit for email marketing. We've got a lot of actual funnels and automations and autoresponders as well as our newsletter. We use a lot of pipe dream actually. So pipe dream is automation software, kind of like Zapier, but sort of built for developers. That's all JavaScript and no JS.
AI assessment note: “Well, notion for one, definitely dog food, our own software and we use our own templates.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q Can you break down what the customer journey or the funnel looks like for a million dollar Notion templates business?
A Uh, yeah. So Thomas Frank explains is the main way that people find us right now, especially for notion templates, because we just have all of these videos teaching people how to use notion for free. So we have build guides. This is literally, I'm going to teach you how to build a habit tracker or task manager. Those build guides always include a free template as well. We also have notion new feature releases because people are searching for content about new features fundamentals content. So we have like a whole sort of free beginners course on how to learn notion from scratch. And then we have listicle kind of Like, fun popcorn content. Like, 10 ways that you're using Notion wrong. Things like that. Our videos will do one of three things. They will pitch a paid template. They'll pitch a free template. That's for the build guides. Or they'll just say, like, hey, we've got a resource page here with all of our Notion fundamentals content. Cheat sheets. We have all kinds of, like, cool resources you're gonna want. So get on our email list. And then from there, first thing I do is send them an autoresponder saying, like, hey, enjoy your free templates. Here's a link to all my other free templates. But if you want to upgrade to full productivity in Notion, you can get Ultimate Brain. Here's a discount code for being a subscriber.
AI assessment note: “So Thomas Frank explains is the main way that people find us right now”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q Yeah. How about pricing? How did you decide on the pricing for your products?
A My thought was if you could run your entire creator business from idea capture to publishing, have like a full archive of all your scripts, everything in one tool, people will probably pay 1000 of dollars a month for that. So let's at least charge over a hundred dollars. Initially price creators companion at 99 and one 49 for the higher edition at launch. Right now we're at a, I think it's a 129 for ultimate brain alone. Two 29 for the full bundle edition. And that's what most people buy if they are getting creators companion sales do pretty well. We did a price increase last year and we saw volume dip a little bit, but overall revenue went up. All right.
AI assessment note: “My thought was if you could run your entire creator business... people will probably pay”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q Let's talk about YouTube. You're an experienced YouTuber. You've used YouTube to grow this business. What kind of What advice would you have for other people looking to start on YouTube?
A Essentially, when you're starting out, you need to get reps, you need to go through a feedback cycle where you learn, you try stuff out, and then you publish so you get feedback. What you basically gain when you do this, when you go through this process of publishing on a schedule and trying to improve something small every time, is you get a body of work that just slowly compounds your skills over time, and you wake up three years later and you're like, whoa, I know color grading, I know audio editing, I know how to build a set, I know animation, I can Speak to the camera a lot better. And I got to learn all that while I published content that got to grow my business and build an audience and all that kind of stuff. So do whatever you have to do to make sure you publish on the schedule and try to get just a little bit better at something interesting every single time you publish.
AI assessment note: “when you're starting out, you need to get reps”
