Well, hello there. It's been a while since I posted on this channel, nearly a year and a half in fact. And this video I wanna talk about why I stopped posting on this channel, how doing so actually doubled my income surprisingly, what I'm doing now and what the future is for this channel and for what I'm doing in general. But the gist of it is, hey, I'm back. I've got new videos in the works. We are gonna be regularly publishing on this channel again. And if you ran across this video in your YouTube feed and have no idea who I am, hi there, I'm Thomas Frank. I've been posting about productivity and personal development on this channel for a long time. And in the last couple of years, I've gone very deep into no code, notion, even programming. I'm building a new startup. There's a lot going on. And I'm gonna talk about kind of why I ended up leaving this channel because I think that's the question that a lot of people are gonna be having. In fact, I've got a lot of people over my Instagram who thought that I either died or forgot my Instagram password. And I'm sure a lot of you thought that I forgot my YouTube password. So let's just get into it. I've got a few different things I wanna talk about, but the big question a lot of you probably have is, hey Tom, why did you stop posting on this YouTube channel? Why would somebody abandon a 2.9 million subscriber YouTube channel? And a secondary question, how would doing that actually double my income? The short answer is that I took some time off from this channel, intending for it to only be a month, but it turned into a year and six months just about, to get the focus and to get the time I needed to go and build an actual product. I had something I wanted to build. It was a premium notion template called Ultimate Brain. I still sell it. And I never talked about it on this channel because what I thought was gonna be a month taken off to build it ended up becoming a year and a half of building an entirely new part of my business, building up my second channel, Thomas Frank Explains, going very deep into some hyper niche technical areas that I'd never explored before. And one thing led to another and I just didn't have time to publish on this channel. Our team has grown to 12 people. I've actually kind of had to become a CEO and I've also sort of gone the complete opposite direction with some of my time and I've learned how to code and I spend a lot of my time actually programming these days. So I've been doing a lot. And again, I just kind of wanna go through a lot of what's happened in this video. So to get into the story of why I ended up abandoning this channel, I wanna talk about a little bit of philosophy first, actually. I wanna talk about the philosophy of pivots and side quests. And I think the best way to frame this would be to not talk about the channel abandonment right away and instead talk about my podcast that I deliberately quit back in 2020, I believe. I had been running what I called the College Info Geek podcast later called the Inforium for eight years, started it back in 2013. And that was like a college advice podcast kind of morphed into a life advice podcast over the years. We talked about productivity, we talked about personal finance, but after eight years of running it, both myself and my co-host Martin kind of had this realization that we were kind of clocking in, clocking out every other week, doing an episode. And eventually we were getting to the point where we were trying to find topics to talk about because we had sort of made a job of creating content about how to improve your life, about how to be more productive. And I kind of had this realization, like at a certain point, I'm not giving myself enough time to go out and have additional life experiences to go out and really learn new things. And I was kind of presented with what I saw as a fork in the road. I saw one path as what I'll call the journalistic path where I could remain a creator who makes content about self-improvement and productivity. And the way that I could learn new things, I could kind of garner new lessons to share with my audience was by kind of taking on the role of a journalist, going out and interviewing people who were like doing their own cool things, doing lots of research, or I could take the other path in the road and I could go out and build stuff for myself, get new life experiences. For a long time, I thought I could do both of those and I was trying to deeply research videos while also trying to build stuff myself. And as my past self who has made many, many videos about focus could tell me and you, that's pretty tough to do. It's pretty tough to spin a lot of plates. It's much easier to focus on one thing. So we made the deliberate decision back in 2020 to shut down our podcast. It was really tough. There were a lot of people who were sad about it. We were sad about it, but when we did it and we finally let it go, it felt like this weight had been lifted off my shoulders because I now knew that I had time to focus on new things, to go out and learn and try new things and build new projects and one of those projects was building a second channel, which I called Thomas Frank Explains. And I called it that because I could not think of a better name. Seriously, my team and I sat around the table trying to think of names for like eight hours one day. We couldn't think of anything better, but I wanted to make a channel that was all about Notion. If you have watched this channel for a while, then a few years ago, you probably noticed me post a few videos about Notion. It was a productivity app that I got really into and I'm still very much into. And I had so much fun making those videos that I kind of had this idea of like, what if I made an entirely different channel, just all about Notion? And I had a couple of different reasons for doing that. First, I just wanted something different to do. I had this channel and at the time, every single video was sponsored. It was a great source of income. It was a great source of livelihood for both myself and my team at the time, but there was a lot of pressure. It was still fun, but I wanted something that was like an outlet. And because I'm a weird nerd, instead of making my outlet like video games or music or something, it was building an entire second channel about a software product, a single software product. But I also had some inspiration. I think back in like 2012 or 2013, there was this guy who made an entire website and then sold an entire course about Evernote. And I knew about him because I used Evernote back in the day. And I don't remember how much he made or how big his audience was, but I know that he was able to build a good living for himself, possibly even for a team, just making content on Evernote, because there was a big enough audience out there for this niche product. And they had goals that required learning this product, learning its ins and outs, tips and tricks. So they were willing to pay for the products he was shipping out and willing to pay attention to the content he was making. So I just had that little seed of inspiration and I just had this conviction. Like I see a lot of buzz and excitement about Notion Online. I'm personally excited about it. And I think that there's a lot of potential here for something that could become a business. I didn't know what it was, but I felt good about it. And ever since I was like a late teenager, early in college, I've kind of had this philosophy that the place you wanna be in life is the intersection of three different points. One is a thing that you're good at. The other is something that you actually enjoy doing. And then the third is something that has a growing and hungry audience. So if you can get yourself at the middle of those three things, you're in a good spot because you're good at it, you like it. And there's an audience who is looking for solutions, looking for products, looking for information at the thing that you're good at and that you're working on. So I went and started this channel and it was so funny to see how I reacted to the initial view counts because initial videos were getting 100 to 200 views. I wasn't promoting that channel very heavily on this channel. I thought, hey, this is super niche. I think my first video was about like recurring tasks in Notion, second video was even more niche. It was like a URL handler trick that I had found I was excited about. So I didn't talk much about that channel on this channel. I just thought, let's let the algorithm do its work. But it was so interesting just seeing how excited I got to see a hundred views on a video then to see like my first 500 view video on there. It was almost like starting over again from scratch and that excitement came back. Initially I thought, hey, I'm gonna build this channel and I'm gonna be very bored or disappointed with the view counts because I'm already sort of like set and calibrated to the view counts on my main channel. That's not at all what happened. I started the new project and it was just so exciting to see the ball get rolling once again. So I was making videos on that channel completely for fun. And then I had this idea, hey, people seem to be interested in these videos and there's this cool little feature in Notion where you can actually share a page that you've created as a template. So people can basically duplicate it and get an exact copy of that page in their Notion workspace. And the other thing that Notion had really kind of communicated in their marketing back in 2018 when I started using it was, hey, it's this all in one app. It should be able to do task management. It should be able to do note-taking. It replaces all these different singular apps you've been using for a long time. It's like the whole Alton Brown thing, right? Don't use unitaskers, get yourself a good chef's knife. It can do everything. So Notion is like the chef's knife or the utility knife of productivity tools. So I kind of took that as a challenge and I was like, hey, can I build a really good task manager in Notion? Can I build a note-taking system in Notion? I did the note-taking system tutorial on this channel actually. And then I built a task manager one for Thomas Frank Explains. And with that, I kind of created a free template people could use just to see was there interest in this whole template idea? And could I use these templates to start building up a secondary email list around Thomas Frank Explains and around my Notion work? Because I didn't wanna be constantly spamming my huge email list that signed up for college tips and productivity tips with really, really technical Notion tips. So I made this whole template. I made a whole video about it. That did pretty well. And then something quite interesting happened. I think there was a Saturday morning where I was bored. So I came down to my basement and I'm like, I'm gonna basically build the template from scratch all over again. I'm gonna film myself doing it. And I don't even know if I'm gonna post this. I was so not confident about this video idea that I used a tool called Loom to record my screen. Usually I use like a very high quality screen recorder. I'll break out my really nice camera to do the face cam. With this, I just use Loom. I use my webcam. It turned out to be like an hour long. I'm like, no one's gonna watch this video. It's so long. It's so technical, but let's just put it up in the channel anyway. That's kind of the beauty of having a brand new channel as you feel like there's this freedom to try different things and experiment again. So I put that video up there alongside the shorter video to sort of going through what the template could do and how to get it. And if you go on the Thomas Frank Explains now, you can sort by popular and you can see that the hour long task manager tutorial is one of the most popular videos on the channel. And it did way better than the shorter video that I thought was gonna be the more viral or whatever. The way better than that in terms of views and retention. And that started telling me, oh, there's a lot of potential here. There's a lot of interest around just making these build guides. So I started making build guides. I started creating this whole content strategy on Thomas Frank Explains and it started to become a bigger part of my life and a bigger part of my business. I was still making content over here. I think this was around late 2020, early 2021, but I was really getting interested in how I could build up this second channel as a niche side business. At the time, my ambitions were not super huge with it. I was thinking, hey, maybe we could build this up to replace one video's sponsor spot worth of income each month. So we could kind of go more in depth on the videos we're making on the main channel. But as time went on, I just kind of got more and more ambitious. And this leads into what I think is the real start of the pivot that I made. In mid 2021, there was this huge boom in what are called cohort-based courses. Basically these are like Zoom courses where there's like a live cohort. Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain is a great example of this. Ali Abdaal had a cohort for Part-Time YouTuber Academy as well. And obviously everyone was locked inside at the time at mid 2021. So I was thinking, hey, I wonder if a cohort-based course would be something that would be a good monetization opportunity for this side channel here. So I ended up taking, this is very meta, I ended up taking a course for course builders offered by, I think it was OnDeck. And for four weeks I showed up to those live courses thinking, hey, I'm gonna learn how to become a great teacher and a great facilitator for cohort-based courses. And then I'm gonna go build one. And as I was going through that cohort-based course, I started to have this realization. I didn't want to make a course, I wanted to make a product. My original idea for the course was gonna be like Notion for Creators because ever since 2018, I've started moving more and more of my creator business into Notion and we eventually got to a point where we were managing all of what we did on a content basis inside of Notion from idea generation to scripting, to managing the edits between myself and my editor, everything was done in Notion. So I'm thinking, hey, let's make a course on this. And maybe this could be the way we monetize Thomas Frank Explains. But as I was going through this cohort-based course, I started realizing like, what if I just took the system that I built for myself and my team, turned it into a product and sold that instead? So that's what I decided to do. I basically took the custom Notion template, Notion system that we had made for managing our channels, for scripting videos, for collecting research, for managing the edits, all that kind of good stuff. And I bundled up into a template that I call it Creators Companion. And this was actually the first real product that I've ever sold myself. And it feels kind of weird to say that because I've been doing online business since 2010. I hit full-time income on my blog in 2012. And ever since then, I've always had intentions of making and selling my own products, but whether due to my sponsor schedule or my inclination to try to make everything that I do free, I just always kind of kicked the can down the road. So finally, I was like, I think that this really makes sense as a paid tool. It's what my team and I are using for professional level, management of a profitable channel. I think this makes sense as a paid product. And I remember it was kind of funny at the time, there was this online discourse where there were kind of like two different ideas that were thrown around. The first one being, no one would ever pay for a Notion template. Why would they do that? It's so easy to build stuff in Notion yourself, which I disagreed with because the stuff I was building was very complicated, required a lot of knowledge of databases and things like that. And then the other prevailing message was, well, maybe a template is worth like $5 or something. And my thought there was, I'm not excited to sell something for $5. That's kind of always been one of my guiding principles actually, is if I'm not really excited about the amount of money I think I could make selling something, I would rather just make it free. So I did the math like $5 template, how many people are possibly gonna wanna buy this? This is kind of a complex niche tool. $5 doesn't make sense. Let's just challenge the assumptions for a second. What's the worst thing that's gonna happen if I decide to charge like 200 bucks for this? Again, it's a professional level tool. It's for professional creators who are making money. Let's try charging 200 bucks. If nothing happens, if nobody buys it, that's fine. I already built a system for myself. I didn't invest that much more time turning it into a product let's just try it. And we put it out there. I tried to go back and see just how much marketing I did around it, but I know that I really didn't do a whole lot. And the reason for that was, I was worried that with my big audience, I was gonna ship something out there. And if I publicized it too hard, people were going to find tons of bugs and I was gonna be overwhelmed with support and negative comments. So perhaps almost too timidly, I just started to very, very, very gradually market this template to bits and pieces of my email list at first, little mentions here and there on Thomas Frank Explains. I don't think I ever talked about it here on this main channel. And within a couple of months, it was making around three to $5,000 a month, which was already beyond my expectations because I wasn't doing a lot of marketing. And that was a really cool signal because I had gotten my first taste of what it's like to literally build and sell my own product, build the entire sales funnel, sales pipeline myself. And it was a lot of fun. Previously, I had been working with sponsors or my little tiny dabbling with selling things had been like having a create space book on Amazon where they totally take care of everything for you or having like courses on Skillshare. Again, they take care of everything for you. You just say, hey, go to Skillshare, that's it. With this, it's like, I gotta build the sales page. I have to handle fulfillment. I have to figure out what payment processor to use. Obviously, I went way too in depth with that and spent way too much time hemming and hawing over the options because that's just kind of how I am. But eventually I got my sales pipeline working and yeah, we were making three to $5,000 a month, which was really, really cool. And a couple of months after that, it eventually got up to around $15,000 a month. Again, not a whole lot of direct marketing. I wasn't really doing ad reads for it in my videos, just mentions here or there, but I also had my free templates, my email list, and that was a great way to pitch the template to people who signed up. So that was kind of an eye-opener. Like this is making 15K a month. It's a niche tool on a niche channel that is very small. What if we did something bigger? So that is where we get to why I ended up sort of accidentally abandoning this channel. I had an idea for another template that I wanted to sell. And this template idea really went back to what I wanted Notion to be all the way back in 2018 when I discovered it, all the way back when I found that homepage and they had that all-in-one productivity tool tagline there. That is what I wanted because I've spent my entire career both as a creator, but also as a student and as somebody who just has to get work done, juggling a whole lot of tools out there, my calendar app, my to-do list app, my note-taking app, all kinds of stuff. And as I started to hire people and started working with teams, things just got very, very complicated. So I wanted to build the all-in-one productivity template. I wanted to both apply the knowledge that I gained as a Notion template creator, and also a lot of the new feature releases that they had been coming out with since 2018 to really try to build that template for myself, a note-taking system, a project manager, a task manager, everything that I would need to manage my life inside of a single template. So the idea was I'm gonna take March of 2022 off, give myself 30 days to build this template. Then I'm gonna release it and get right back to making content for the main channel. That was the intention. What actually ended up happening was I did actually build the template within one month. I launched it to a small wait list on my email list on April 4th, I wanna say, and that was around 3000 people. And with just two emails to those 3000 people, I wanna say we made $80,000 in one month. And that was legitimately more than we had ever made in the entire life of my business. I think the most we had ever made before then was around 70K one month, a previous year when we had done a big new Skillshare course launch and did a spot about that course on one of my videos. So this was instantly more money than I'd ever made from all of my other income sources combined. And that was from an email to 3000 people. Now, granted that was 3000 people who had signed up to a very specific wait list for this template. So they had sort of like opted in and shown their interest already, but still 3000 people was all that was needed to do 80,000 in a single month. The next month I decided not to make a video about it yet. Again, I was worried about getting too many customers too fast, I didn't have a support team. I was worried about getting inundated with support requests and having people find bugs. So I kinda wanted to slow roll it. So the next month I just sent an email to my Notion Tips newsletter. At the time, I think it was around 50,000 people. So 50,000 people minus the 3000 who had already heard about it, that email push did $90,000 in revenue. And then in I think late May, I finally made a video about it on Thomas Frank Explains. And once that video went live, we started averaging between 100 and $130,000 a month in revenue from then on, which was absolutely insane. I did not expect that whatsoever, but the video did really well. And I actually had a very interesting inspiration, like point of inspiration for making that video. It was actually the channel, More Plates More Dates of All Things, which he makes videos about like fitness and supplements and things like that. But I remember he had made this video about like a pre-workout that he had developed. And it was almost an hour and a half of content where he just goes ingredient by ingredient, just going through every single thing that is in this pre-workout, talking about like why he chose the dosage, why he chose to have it in the product, what it does in the body. And I remember watching that and I was like, this is an advertisement. I know it's an advertisement, but holy crap, this is super interesting content. Like I'm learning about all these different things and compounds and how they affect performance with like athletics and weightlifting. This is like legitimately interesting content. And then of course I got influenced and I bought the product, used it for a while, but I was inspired by the format of that video. I was like, you can make a video that is an advertisement through and through, but it's also like valuable content on its own. And that is something that I've always wanted for any kind of content that I make is it needs to stand alone. It cannot just be an advertisement that is valueless unless somebody buys the product that it's pitching. And that was a big point of like ethical concern with my main channel, since I was talking about productivity and life advice and things like that, I wanted to make sure no sponsor, no product pitch, no nothing could ever be the main focus of a video. Every video had to be something useful, had to have something you could take away for free. So that video was a huge inspiration because I realized like the entire thing is kind of advertising this product, but holy crap, it's still super educational. So I thought, okay, let's make a video like that about Ultimate Brain. I'm gonna show every single part of the template. So if somebody wants to, they could replicate it entirely for themselves. I've got all these tutorials on Thomas Frank Explains that are completely free. I had striven to make that a completely end to end, like everything you could ever want to know about Notion should be there as a tutorial kind of channel. So my thought was, I think this will be a good advertisement for the templates, but I'm not gonna really pitch it hard until the end. And otherwise I just wanna show everything. I wanna show people like here's how you could structure an all-in-one productivity tool for yourself. Here's why it's so beneficial to say, have a project dashboard. And when you go into a project, you can see both your tasks and your notes for that project. It gives you a single point of reference for both all the information and context, but also everything you need to do. And that's more useful than having it kind of spread out between different apps. So I wanted to show people the architecture, the thought behind it, give them inspiration for building things themselves, but also sort of say like, hey, if you don't wanna build this for yourself, if you want the faster option, if you want us to do it for you, then you can go ahead and buy it. And that video, you can go over to Thomas Frank Explains if you want and check the popular sorting option. I think it is the most popular video on the channel. It's getting near a million views. So that just sort of made things explode. And like I said earlier, we were doing between 100 and 130K in revenue per month just off of that video. And then the sort of like email funnel we had built as well with our free templates. But getting to sort of the next part of the story, the reason that I didn't come back to this channel was I ended up doing customer support eight hours a day or more full-time for two months after that template launched. Because you get those kinds of good problems when you have a successful product launch. And in our case, it was tons and tons of support requests. I had done as much bug testing as I could. I had made over six hours actually of tutorial videos. And I made like a whole interactive version of the template that had dummy data, all kinds of stuff. But with a tool like Notion, there is a lot of customizability. There are a lot of people who get excited about a template like this, even if they're new to the product and don't really understand it very well. So support inquiries are going to be inevitable. And a big decision that I decided to make before I even launched Creators Companion was I wanna have active support. A lot of template creators out there just give out the template or they sell it. Maybe they have some documentation, but that's kind of it. And I didn't want that because I knew from listening to my commenters and interacting with them on the channel itself that Notion is complex, that it's easy to get stuck. And I really wanted to make sure that people were gonna have as good of an experience as possible. Another thing, maybe I'll come back to this a little bit later, we also offer refunds for our templates. And that sounds kind of weird to some people because it's impossible to return a digital product. There's no license keys. This isn't SaaS, you duplicate the template and you have a perfect copy of it forever. But I wanted to offer refunds and I wanted to offer active support because one of my core tenants, one of my values as a business person is everyone who purchases from us must have a good experience. So that means our product needs to be excellent. Our support needs to be excellent because if people get stuck and they want to continue, we need to have an avenue for that. But we also need to offer refunds because if somebody purchases, there's gonna be a certain percentage who realize this isn't the product for me. Maybe it's just not the right time in my life right now. I wanted to make sure those people had a way to get their money back. So there's no way anybody could ever be truly dissatisfied or feel like they were put out because it was the wrong product for them. So we offered refunds, we offered active support and in the beginning, active support was just me. I had a team, but everyone on my team at the time wasn't really a Notion expert. We all use Notion, but I was the only one who was sort of sitting in my basement on Saturday mornings, learning how to fiddle with databases and writing Notion formulas and all that kind of crazy stuff. So it was up to me to do the support requests. And I did that full time for about two months. I actually think that was a very, very useful thing to do because that sort of gave me a different perspective on the product. And if anybody watching this, if you were watching this and you want to build your own products, maybe like a SaaS product eventually or your own Notion templates, whatever it is, I would highly encourage you to do customer support for a couple of months after you launch, at least a couple of months. Because as the builder of the product or as the CEO, you're gonna have a very different perspective than your customers are going to have. You have the architect's eye and that sort of involves what's called the expert paradox where experts get so good at something that the things that are hard for a beginner are almost like breathing to the expert. It's so unconscious that they don't even think about it anymore. So by doing support, you really gain greater perspective on your product. You help your customers who are stuck, but you also get insights that you can use to go and improve that product that you just couldn't get yourself. So go ahead and do support for yourself. But I eventually got to a point where I'm like, there are other things I wanna do. Ideally, I wanna get back to this channel and start filming again, but there's some other things I wanna do. So I think it's time to hire my first like actual support person. And I kind of wanna talk about the way that I hired. And if anybody watching this needs to hire support for their own products, maybe even for YouTube channel, I think this is a good method. So basically what I did is I put together a test that I anticipated the right kind of candidate who had the right kind of Notion product experience would be able to finish in 10 minutes. So honestly, like not even as long as the average job application for the right candidate, but it had two main components. So there was a building challenge. I basically had like a test in there. I was like, hey, I need a two database setup. There's gonna be a meetings database and a CRM. I need you to show, I think it was like the last meeting date for each person in the CRM. So that required a little bit of Notion formula knowledge, a little bit of filters and roll ups, all kinds of like stuff that anybody who's gonna be doing Notion support needs to know. That was my product knowledge test. But then I had the other test, which secretly in the back of my head was the more important one. And that was two sample support questions from some fictional characters. And I asked candidates to answer those support questions as if they were talking to those characters. And what I was looking for there was not necessarily perfect product knowledge. That was a plus, but the real things I was looking for are number one, empathy, and number two, the ability to anticipate the next question. These are in my opinion, the two out of the three, I think, two out of the three most important qualities that anybody doing any kind of customer support needs to have. The other one is a solution finding ability. So not necessarily preset product knowledge, but the ability to Google well, the ability to use chat GBT these days, the ability to find references, that's very important. But empathy and anticipation are the other two that are mega, mega important. So number one, I learned this when I was working in the IT tech support department at my college, back when I was 18, 19 years old. You have to be empathetic with the person who is asking the question. You cannot make them feel stupid because they're gonna come out of it with a bad experience. So I was looking for like actual empathetic answers, like, hey, yeah, I've been there before. Yeah, this can be really easy to overlook. The product's kind of confusing. Let me help you out. The other thing I was looking for was anticipation. So this is another thing that I learned in tech support. Often the question that the person comes to you with is not the question that they're actually trying to get answered. It's just the first step in a process. So a good support person, it needs to be able to identify the actual goal that the person has. And ideally they can anticipate the next question that is going to come after they answer the question that has been asked. So what I was looking for there was, did you not only answer the question that was posed, but did you also anticipate the next follow-up question and include your answer there? Because that is the hallmark of efficient support. You are getting people to their goal much more quickly. Side note to the side note, this is also a very good quality to have just as an individual. For example, if you get an email or a message from your coworker, they're asking you a question. If you can anticipate what their next question is and include that information. So easy example, like, are you available to meet next week? The obvious follow-up question is, when are you available to meet next week? So instead of saying, yes, I'm available and waiting for the follow-up, it's like, yes, I'm available Tuesday, Thursday from the three to five hour windows. That is anticipation of the follow-up question. And that is anticipation of the actual goal. So I put that test out there and this guy, Alex, was my top candidate. And it turned out that he actually was one of the founders of the Notion subreddit. So I was very excited to hire him and he came on and he just started to kick an absolute ass. Like he is amazing. And it was so amazing to hire somebody who was so good at support and so interested in connecting and building community that I think within just a couple of weeks, support was almost no longer a concern that I had to think about actively. I didn't have to go in and like check all the threads, make sure that the answers were good. He was so good off the bat that it allowed me to go focus on other things. And this I think is the ultimate benefit, the ultimate thing you're looking for, like the holy grail of hiring is that you can hire somebody who is so good, so passionate, who takes such good ownership over their area in the company that you totally trust them to handle it. You know that they're gonna go above and beyond and that gives you the freedom to go focus on growing the business or focusing on the things that you are the absolute best at. And Alex has been amazing at that. Ben Smith also a huge influence in Ocean Community. He came on as our second support guy. And then Alex and Ben have also started taking on bigger projects. They are actually helping me do upgrades on the templates. They're doing documentation. They have both demonstrated that they have the ability to not only take on new projects, but suggest improvements that are really, really well thought out. And that has just been so awesome to experience as a business owner, especially one like me who really just kind of wants to be like the Tony Stark in the cave with a box of scraps. That's another big thing that I've learned about myself over these past couple of years is like managing people and making tons and tons of decisions all day long is not really what I wanna be doing. I wanna be off in my own little corner building things. And then I wanna come onto the camera every once in a while and kind of show it off. So it's been really, really cool to be able to hire people who can just take ownership of their area of the company and just be excellent at it, which has been super, super amazing to experience. So we built that. And then once again, I anticipated getting right back to the main channel. But part of my problem is even though I know it would probably be more profitable to make lots of videos about topics that are gonna go viral, to really lean into the whole influencer thing, part of my problem, which I will embrace and not even call a problem really, is I am just very fascinated by technical things. So after sort of like the chaos calmed down from the ultimate brain launch and building out our support department, I had this idea. And it started out as a video idea actually, but it ballooned into what ended up being a four month project. But I had this idea. I was like, I want to teach Notion formulas. If you don't know what these are, basically in Notion there's a database function, looks kind of like Excel tables. And like Excel, there's a formula function where you can like do math and you can do all kinds of stuff. It's almost like programming. At the time, Notion hadn't really done documentation for their formulas. So a lot of people weren't really sure how to use them. And I ended up spending a lot of my time on the Notion subreddit just answering formula questions because I found it fun. So I had this idea, let's make this video about Notion formulas. And I wanted to do it in that like five levels of complexity style. And I think I'm still going to do it, but spoiler alert, I have not made that video yet because I got this idea that, hey, wouldn't it be interesting if there was like a bonus resource to go along with that video? Like maybe it's like a formula cheat sheet, something that would show a simple example of what every function in the formula language actually does. I let that idea snowball into me writing like Mozilla level technical documentation for the entire formulas language. It ended up taking me four months of work. I wrote 45,000 words of documentation, made like a hundred different example databases, deeply learned that formula language and ended up publishing it on my website. It's still there. It has been now updated for the new formulas language. Ben on my team did the full update. So that is now more his project than mine, but yeah, 45,000 words of documentation, four months of effort. And that just sort of kept happening. I think that is what I could encapsulate as the theme here. The reason that I sort of kept kicking the can down the road for coming back to this channel is I kept finding these interesting technical problems that I knew would be useful for my audience if I solved, they were fun for me. And they also helped our business. Like if I make additional Notion content, not only is that another way that we can market our templates, the one thing that we sell that actually makes us money, but it also helps to build up our library of content. That I think I kind of forgot to mention this, but I do wanna bring it up. That was my guiding principle with Thomas Frank Explains. The idea there was to go and build the go-to channel for the Notion niche. I sort of had this idea, like if you think Notion, or if you think I want to answer a question that I have about Notion, you should immediately think of Thomas Frank Explains. So that was the idea there. And to really accomplish that goal, the channel needed to have high quality content covering anything that a Notion user might want to do, from the absolute basics of building pages and linking to things to the higher end stuff, like formulas and like the Notion API and everything else. So I went ahead and I built that Notion formula documentation, and then went right into the next way too big project that I did not anticipate being so big when I started it. And that was the Notion API. The Notion API is basically like this set of tools that programmers can use to connect Notion up to different things. If you're curious about what it can do, I think the coolest application of it right now that I've come up with is I have a little automation where I can record a voice note on my phone and using the Notion API, and also some AI tools from like ChatGPT and Whisper, I get a full summary, I get a full transcript, I get lists of main points and action items and things just for my voice notes. So at this point, I can just like go for a half an hour walk, I can record an idea in my head, or I can just talk to my phone and I get the whole thing as a note in Notion. That video is live, so I'll go ahead and link to that in the description. If you are curious about it. But yeah, that's an example of what the Notion API could do. And again, going back to the mission of Thomas Frank Explains, if I was going to accomplish that mission of building the go-to resource for the Notion niche, it needed to teach the API as well. The only problem is I didn't know how to code. I'd made a couple of videos about how you could do like no-code things with the API using like Zapier and make.com, no-code tools like that. But again, that wasn't good enough. I needed to have a video on the channel that would teach the Notion API. So I started teaching myself JavaScript. I started completely from scratch and that was about a year, a year and two months ago. And at this point, I think I've actually become a pretty confident backend JavaScript developer. I've got a whole video in the works about my coding journey that'll probably be within the next two videos I released on this channel. So I'm not gonna go too much into how I did that with this video, but I've kind of become a programmer at this point. It's really fun. I keep getting ideas for things I wanna build. So that's part of the reason I haven't been on this channel in a while. But yeah, back in, I think it was like July, 2022, I started with free code camps, free JavaScript course at the absolute basics, learning how to set variables and build loops and all that kind of stuff. Very quickly abandoned that course after the first couple of modules because I learned enough to start actually going out and building. I think that is a very important principle in learning any skill, but especially how to code. You gotta get a project you care about as quick as possible. And the project I cared about at the time was I wanted to teach the Notion API. So I took another about three full months to build a single video on Thomas Frank Explains, ended up being two hours long, where I teach people how to build a full Pokedex from scratch with no manual data entry whatsoever, pulling all of the Pokemon data from a Poke API and use that to teach the Notion API. I ended up also writing, I think it was like a 30,000 word blog post that is almost like a beginner coding tutorial on its own as well. So that took up about three months. And now on the channel, we have what I'm gonna call one of like the infinity gems in the gauntlet for that channel, the Notion API tutorial is there. Little did I know that I was going to catch the programming bug. And now I spend a lot of my time programming that voice notes automation that I talked about a while ago, that's around 2,500 lines of code and is actively developed. It's got a GitHub repo. Like I've kind of gotten the whole nine yards with programming and it's been a lot of fun. I spend a lot of my time doing it now. I've built a lot of automations. I use primarily a platform called Pipe Dream to do it. It's kind of like Zapier, but you can actually write JavaScript code. And another cool thing that I like about it is I can actually share my workflows with other people. So it's almost like being able to ship many apps to people and I can even update them, which is pretty sweet, but I don't have to like build my own servers or deploy to Amazon or all that stuff that I have not learned how to do yet. So that's pretty cool. And that I think explains a lot of 2023. It's been pretty quiet on the content front, not because I haven't been doing anything, but because the videos that I've been working on are sort of like mini software projects in disguise. And they always take a lot longer than I think they're going to take. Case in point, another automation that I made was adding voice tasks to Notion. So I now have an automation on my phone where I can click a little shortcut. I can record as many tasks as I want actually. And they're all gonna go on the Notion with their names, their due dates, their assignees, their projects. I thought that was gonna be a two week project, ended up taking me four months. I don't really regret it because I learned a lot about coding. I learned a ton of advanced concepts like concurrency and error handling and all sorts of stuff that I really didn't think I'd be getting into this early into my journey. But that took about four months. So that about brings us up to today. And I wanna talk now about what I've got planned for the future, both for this channel, but also for the entire business that I'm running. I just wanna talk about the one that I'm most excited about right now. And that is the new startup that we are building. It is called Flylighter, and it is going to be the best information and idea capture tool you have ever seen. We are starting out with a Notion web clipper that is far more powerful than Notion's official web clipper or any other web clipper out there. So if you are on a webpage and you wanna save it, you wanna highlight text on that page, you wanna capture an image you want to do, basically any sort of information capture on the web, Flylighter gives you a bunch of tools to not only build these very, very highly customized capture abilities, you can even like take YouTube notes with timestamps to the notes, but also it is built for speed. You can set up these flows and then the moment you click a flow, it'll be just instantly capture it with your settings. We've been building this tool for almost a year, actually more than a year at this point. I think I hired my first developer in August of last year actually. And this started out as like a very, very small idea that ballooned into something much, much bigger. Originally, I had just wanted a Notion web clipper that number one, had better abilities to capture like certain like folders in my Notion basically. But number two, that use the official API because there are other tools out there that are pretty good, but they use like non-official APIs that are not super comfortable with because they kind of like hijack your user session. So I wanted to build a tool that used the correct API that was security focused, privacy focused. And then I hired my developer Eli and we just sort of bouncing ideas off of each other. He had all these great ideas for like advanced table capture and web element capture and all this kind of cool stuff. And then I had ideas, a really big one that I had is I wanted to be able to highlight text on a webpage for like blog posts research or video research, capture those highlights to Notion like you would with a Readwise or a similar tool. But then if you go back to that webpage, you see the highlights still. So we're building it. There are gonna be a heck of a lot of other features in the product. We are building a full iPhone app. What I wanna do is solve capture. If you have an idea, wherever you are, there should be a tool for instantly capturing that idea using voice, using text. But also if you come across something on the web, you should also be able to instantly capture that, add it to your second brain so you can close that tab and be sure that you can find it later. This is a big problem I have. If you ask anyone I know who has ever seen my computer screen, they'll tell you, I often have like a hundred tabs open. And a lot of those tabs are just like tabs I didn't want to lose. And I haven't found a good enough tool yet to capture them to my tool of choice, which is Notion. So we're building it. And I'm telling you now very early in what I will call our like release process, we've been working on this tool for a year, but we are now I think nearing the end of our private beta. So if you go over to flylighter.com, there is a waitlist signup. And as soon as we can, we are gonna be releasing a browser extension that you can use on Chrome and Edge and any Chromium based browser. And then ideally quickly after that, we're gonna have a basic iPhone app that is going to be from day one, the best web clipper for Notion, but eventually a heck of a lot more than that. I've got tons of ideas. And if you've seen some of the tutorials and projects I've been doing on Thomas Frank Explains, you might be able to extrapolate what we are planning on adding to Flylighter as time goes on. I'm also planning on building this kind of in public as much as I can. I'm not an indie hacker building this on my own. So I do have to think about the fact that there is a bigger audience here. And I don't wanna like bring too many people into the product before it's ready. So there's definitely gonna be some navigation there that I have to do, but I wanna share this experience with you. I want to actually document the experience of trying to build a profitable privacy focused startup that doesn't take VC money, that is really focused on giving you the ability to send your data where you want to send it. We don't wanna be another one of those startups that is like the place that actually holds your data. I'm not comfortable with that in the first place, but also I think that there are already so many great tools out there with Notion being my focus for having your data where you want it, for building it the way you want, for organizing it the way you want. And a lot of my business is around teaching people how to use Notion. So what we wanna do is solve the first part of the funnel, the capture part of the funnel. Once again, you can go over to flylighter.com and sign up for our waiting list if you are interested in testing it out and using it once we have a full launch. Beyond that, what I've got planned for this channel is a bit of a mix of content. I have a lot more I wanna say and a lot more I wanna teach when it comes to productivity. So you're gonna see a good mix of productivity videos in the future, but I've also spent a lot of my time over the past couple of years learning how to code, becoming an expert in no code tools and building my business. So this channel is gonna kinda delve into some of those topics as well. One of the videos that I'm working on right now is on how I learned how to code. I've got a couple of business related videos as well. So this channel is gonna be kind of like an entrepreneur-y, Cody productivity focused channel going forward. If that's your kind of thing, I think you're gonna like the content that we are building. My only real call to action for this video, other than going and signing up for the FlyLighter wait list if you are interested, is if you wanna learn Notion, I've got lots of content that is coming out regularly over on Thomas Frank Explains. So check that out if you do want to become an expert at that tool. If you do want an all-in-one productivity system for Notion, you can check out Ultimate Brain over at thomasjfrank.com slash brain. And beyond that, if you have questions, and at some point I might do like an AMA on Twitter or I might do some like more talking content like this in the future. So let me know in the comments what kind of stuff you would like to see in the future, what questions you have that'll help me shape additional content ideas. And I'll see you in the next video. Oh, and if you wanna chat, Tom Frankly on Twitter.
