Latest / The Side Hustle Career Podcast with Fexingo: Second Income, Freelancing While Employed / How a Software Developer Built a 6000 Monthly Side Hustle Selling Notion Templates
Transcript
- Lucas: So, Notion templates. If you’re active on Twitter or YouTube, you’ve probably seen creators selling them — digital planners, project dashboards, CRM systems built inside a single Notion page. It’s a real market, and I’ve been tracking one specific case: a software developer named Marcus who turned a side project into a consistent $6,000 a month side hustle. Luna: That’s impressive, but isn’t the Notion template space super crowded by now? I feel like every week there’s a new 'ultimate life OS' template. Lucas: It is crowded, sure. But Marcus found a wedge. He didn’t go after the general productivity crowd. He built templates specifically for project managers at early-stage startups — think teams of five to twenty people who need a lightweight way to track sprints, bugs, and OKRs without paying for Asana or Jira. Luna: Right, so he targeted a niche with a specific pain point. Did he start from scratch, or was he using Notion himself? Lucas: He was already using Notion to manage his own side projects. He’d built this elaborate dashboard for tracking his freelance gigs, client invoicing, and learning goals. A few developer friends saw it and asked for a copy. He put it up on Gumroad for $19, and within a month he’d made about $400. Luna: That’s a good signal. So he validated demand with almost zero marketing cost. Lucas: Exactly. Instead of scaling broadly, he doubled down on that niche. He created three more templates: a sprint-planning board for engineering teams, a hiring pipeline tracker for startup founders, and a client onboarding system for freelancers. Each priced between $29 and $49. Luna: And he just put them on Gumroad and hoped for the best? Lucas: No, he was strategic about distribution. He started a Twitter account called something like 'Notion for Startups' and posted one tip per day — things like 'how to use Notion formulas to calculate sprint velocity' or 'a simple database for tracking customer feedback.' He wasn’t selling directly; he was providing value. Luna: That’s the classic content-marketing approach. Build trust first, then the sales come naturally. Lucas: Yes. Over six months, he grew to about 3,000 followers. But here’s the key metric: he built an email list of 800 people by offering a free 'startup project management dashboard' template. That list became his primary sales channel. Luna: So he’s trading a free template for an email address. Smart. What did his revenue look like at that point? Lucas: By month six, he was averaging $2,000 a month. But the real jump came when he introduced a premium bundle — all four templates plus a set of custom Notion icons and a 30-minute setup call — for $199. That bundle accounted for about half his revenue, even though only 10 percent of buyers chose it. Luna: That’s a classic tiered pricing strategy. The $199 option makes the $49 single template feel like a bargain, but the bundle captures people who want the full system. Lucas: Right. And the economics of digital products are wild. Once the template is created, the marginal cost per sale is essentially zero. Gumroad takes about 9 percent, but Marcus’s profit margin is over 90 percent. No inventory, no shipping, no customer support beyond the occasional email about how to duplicate a template. Luna: That’s the dream, but I’ve heard that template theft is a real problem. People share Notion templates without paying. Did he have any issues with that? Lucas: He did. Someone posted his $49 sprint-planning template on a Reddit forum for free. He said it stung, but he also noticed a weird pattern: that Reddit post actually drove more paid sales. People saw the free version, realized it was useful, and then bought the full bundle for the extra features and the setup call. Luna: So piracy became a marketing channel. That’s counterintuitive, but I’ve heard similar stories in the software world. Lucas: Yeah, for digital products with low marginal cost, the calculus is different. Marcus now earns about $6,000 a month, and he spends maybe 5 hours a week on it — mostly on Twitter engagement and updating templates when Notion changes its interface. The rest is passive. Luna: That’s a solid side hustle. But I’m curious — could anyone do this, or does it require a certain skill set? Like, you need to be pretty good at Notion to build templates. Lucas: You do need some proficiency. But Notion is not coding. It’s more like building with Lego blocks — databases, linked views, formulas. Someone with decent spreadsheet skills could learn the basics in a week. The harder part is identifying a niche and building an audience. Luna: What would you say is the biggest mistake people make when trying to start this? Lucas: Building a template for 'everyone.' The general productivity templates are a bloodbath. Marcus succeeded because he focused on a very specific user — startup PMs — and his marketing spoke directly to their pain points. If you try to sell a 'life planner' template, you’re competing with thousands of sellers. But if you build a template for, say, real estate agents tracking client leads, that’s a much smaller pond. Luna: So niche down hard. That’s a recurring theme in side hustles. Lucas: It really is. And once you have that niche, the barrier to entry is low. Marcus didn’t need a website or a developer. He used Gumroad, Twitter, and a free email tool. His total startup cost was zero — just time. Luna: I’ve been thinking about this as we talk. It’s interesting that this type of side hustle is essentially productized knowledge. Marcus packaged his expertise in project management workflows into a repeatable digital product. Lucas: That’s a great way to put it. And that’s why we keep coming back to these stories on the show. The best side hustles often come from something you already know how to do, but you turn it into a product rather than trading time for money. Luna: It’s a good reminder that your skills have value beyond your day job. And if you can package them well, you can build something that works for you over time. Lucas: We deliberately don’t run ads on these episodes, by the way. That’s a choice we made because we want the content to be useful without any commercial noise. If you find value in what we’re doing and want to support that approach, there’s a link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It’s a small way to keep this ad-free and focused on what matters. Luna: Yeah, I appreciate that. It keeps the conversation honest. Lucas: So back to Marcus — one thing I didn’t mention is that he started getting inbound requests from startups asking if he could build custom templates for them. That’s a whole other revenue stream. He now charges $500 to $1,000 for a custom build, which he does on weekends. Luna: So the templates became a lead generator for consulting. That’s a great flywheel. Lucas: Exactly. And that’s the ultimate goal of a side hustle — not just to make money, but to open up opportunities you didn’t have before. Marcus told me that the custom work is where he learns what features people actually need, and then he rolls those into the next version of his paid templates. Luna: So it’s a feedback loop. The more custom work he does, the better his templates get, and the more he can sell. Lucas: Right. And that’s a model anyone can replicate. Start with what you know, package it simply, share it generously, and iterate based on real feedback. That’s the blueprint. Luna: I think that’s a good note to end on. Thanks for digging into this one, Lucas. Lucas: Always. And if you’re thinking about starting something like this, the best time to start is this weekend. Open Notion, build something small, and put it out there. See what happens.