A little over a year ago, life was going well. My YouTube channel was growing, I was getting invited by Notion to speak at official events and being a Notion Consultant was proving to be lucrative enough to pay the bills.
But then, I came across one of these quotes that stop you in your tracks and shift your perspective forever.
Being a freelancer means you get all the downsides of running a business without the upside of scalability, and all the downsides of having a job without the security. You’re essentially taking on the worst of both worlds.
That hit hard.
Sure, I was kind of aware of these trade-offs.
I could have been at a big law firm, with a regular pay check and sure, long work hours, but at least guaranteed vacation.
Instead, I was sitting in Mumbai with no income for a month, because I was getting married and had decided to not take on any client work.
Don’t get me wrong, I am very happy with my choice to quit being a lawyer. I love the work I do and highly value the incredible agency that “being your own boss” brings.
But listening to Daniel on Ali’s Podcast spelling it out so clearly made me realise that I had to think about the next step.
How Do You Scale A Notion Business?
So… how do you scale a freelance practice into a proper business?
When I sat down to answer that question, I could think of three possible ways in my specific situation:
First: Build a Media Business around YouTube
This is the go-to business model for most youtube creators and it looks like this:
- Primary Metric: Views
- Monetisation: Sponsorships, later into product
- Example: Ali Abdaal
As so often, it’s a simple business model that is hard to execute.
- You need to be able to make consistent youtube videos that appeal to a wide group of people.
- You need to stick with it for a long time
Since filming Youtube videos is probably my favourite activity of all the things I do, I was really drawn to this approach.
But it had one big drawback.
My channel was (and is) nowhere near the size to make this business model work.
So while this might be a business model I could pivot to in the future, it’s not something that can generate enough cashflow to sustain itself now.
Which meant that this approach was already out.
Second: Build a Service Business around Consulting
At the time, I was running the freelance version of this business which boils down to this:
- Primary Metric: High-Ticket Clients
- Monetisation: Money-for-time
- Example: Tem from Optemization
If you have an in-demand skill set, starting a service based business is probably the easiest because it requires the least initial ramp-up time.
If you can sell your service at $1,000 per month, you only need three clients to make it to $3,000 for a first entry level salary.
Which isn’t too hard to achieve from your immediate surrounding and inner circle, even if you don’t know a lot about Marketing.
But – and that’s what made me hesitant – service-based businesses are notoriously hard to scale.
You’re trading time for money, so in order to increase your revenue, you quickly need to hire your first person to deliver the service.
Hiring talent is very expensive and a big drag on your cashflow.
Having to pay someone else $3,000 every month as a base salary means you now need at least 7 clients to even make a little bit more money in our simplified calculation.
3 to pay for your hire, 3 to pay your own base salary and Nr. 7 is the one upside.
All in all, I was reading a ton about the agency model that was reason for caution which made me turn my eyes on business model Nr. 3.
Third: Build a Product Business around Notion Templates
If you were on then-Twitter two years ago, you probably remember the engagement farming tweets along the lines of:
14 year olds are making millions from their bedroom selling Notion Templates
(which was then creatively repurposed last year by swapping out Notion Templates with AI – apparently, 14 year olds are very good at identifying the latest trends on X & co.)
That is definitely overstated, but if you’re able to build a product based business, it has a few interesting upsides.
- Primary Metric: Downloads
- Monetisation: Paid Templates
- Example: Thomas Frank Explains
Most importantly, a product allows you to decouple time from earning potential.
As your cost of fulfilment is near zero or at least relatively small (assuming your product is digital), you can scale much further without having to hire more people.
It’s by no means an easy business model though.
I wouldn’t recommend a Notion Template business to anyone starting out (and Sara Loretta, another Notion Creator, agrees with me).
The math is just incredible hard if you don’t already have an audience.
Here’s how our $3,000 minimum monthly earnings calculation looks like for a template business.
Let’s assume you have a template for personal use and sell it for $10.
You need to sell 300 per month to make it to $3k.
Assuming a very, very good conversion rate on your sales page of 5%, that’s 6000 visitors to make 300 sales.
Those visitors have to come from somewhere – either from bought traffic (aka ads) or owned traffic (aka an audience you have on social media).
Ignoring ads for now and hoping that 5% of people who see your post will click through to the sales page, that’s now 120,000 impressions that you need to drive for $3,000.
120,000 impressions.
Every month.
And if we adjust our conversion rates to a more typical 2%, you would need 750,000!
So TL/DR: unless you happen to have a big audience (or want to build one), this is probably not the best entry level business model for you.
Earning $10k With Notion Templates?
And yet, despite knowing these numbers, I was tempted.
After all, I had an audience.
And to tip the math in my favour, I decided to go upstream and build a B2B product that’s more than just a template.
I basically wanted to create a software-like product for companies that just happened to be delivered via Notion.
A good idea – or so I thought.
With that in mind, I set out to create NKS, the “Notion Knowledge System”. It was a turnkey knowledge base to help companies create and maintain a single source of truth in Notion.
And since this wasn’t supposed to be “just another template“, it also included two video courses with a total of 15 modules, a 14 day email onboarding and a dedicated community.
It was – and is – a great product and it managed to create a respectable $9,634.34 in revenue, until I decided to shut it down.
Because even with a youtube channel that generated 50k – 100k views a month and a newsletter with then 20k subscribers (now up to 30k at the time of writing), the math just didn’t work out.
At least not with only one product and without giving it A LOT more time and attention.
Not saying that this business model can’t work.
I could have stuck with it, added more products, pivoted my content around it and should have been able to grow it sufficiently.
But in the process of building NKS, I realised one thing.
At least for the moment, I don’t enjoy the whole process of building a business around templates.
And at the end of the day, if I wanted to just earn money, I could have stayed in law.
So why bother building a more complicated, more risky and probably even less lucrative prison?
It was time to say goodbye (for now) and focus on a different approach.
Did I waste time? Maybe. But I’ve come to realise that it’s really hard to imagine how an activity will feel – until you actually do it. Doing, iterating and pivoting seems like the only option.
It’s Time To Scale Services
Which leads us back to the actual topic of this essay – building Europe’s Nr.1 Notion Consultancy.
While trying my best with the product business model, my revenue from consulting kept increasing.
I had the chance to work with amazing clients.
Hetzner Cloud, a German AWS competitor, hired me to revamp their project management for more than 100 engineers.
With Russmedia, I dove deep into the inner workings of Private Equity and streamlined their deal sourcing.
And for Lukso, a Berlin-based web3 startup, we developed a complete operating system in just three months.
In retrospect, the decision is obvious – as so often.
Connecting with these clients, working hand-in-hand with ambitious and driven teams and solving hard challenges for asset managers and startups was incredibly fun.
A lot more fun than trying to fine tune a funnel for my templates.
So around March 2024, roughly 6 months after starting the experiment, I sunset NKS to fully focus on building a consultancy.
Since then, I’ve been trying to sharpen my focus and dedicate more time to work on the business, rather than just in the business.
Now, every business needs vision, a mission and a moonshot goal to steer the course.
Here’s mine:
- Become Europe’s Nr. 1 Notion Consultancy
- Enable ambitious teams do their best work
- Reach $500k annualised return by end of 2025
Europe’s Nr. 1 Notion Consultancy – what does that mean?
Being “the best” is of course a hard term to define when it comes to something as broad as consulting.
What’s right for one client isn’t necessarily the best choice for another.
And there are a ton of awesome Notion Consultants in this community that specialise in a wide variety of use cases.
So when I talk about building Europe’s Nr. 1 Notion Consultancy, I don’t mean building a giant company that’s trying serve the whole market.
And rather than focusing on a specific arbitrary metric, I’d argue that you can look at a combination of market signals to see whether the Consultancy is on track to “earning that title”.
To me, this is the goal:
- We serve the most ambitious teams (and focus exclusively on team setups)
- We are deep subject matter experts for operations in startups, scale-ups and asset managers.
- We are the “obvious default alternative” for our target customers, i.e. you might look at others, but you’d have to always justify not going with us.
- We are the price leader. We aim to deliver the highest possible service in a clear tier 1 segment. We are transparent about this and are happy to recommend budget options if you want to optimise for price.
- We create the thought leadership content that helps onboard and train the next generation of consultants.
- We are the obvious first choice that VC and PE recommend to their portfolio companies.
- We take on few, selected projects to ensure the best possible service.
- And most importantly: we create utterly delighted customers and help the most ambitious teams in Europe do their best work.
These are the guidelines by which I’ll measure whether the Consultancy is on the right track.
But why Europe?
Well, the economy in Europe and particularly the startup world is at a pivotal moment.
The gap to the US is widening, but that doesn’t mean we can’t start creating better conditions today.
We’re here to do our part by removing all the roadblocks of busy work, outdated legacy tools and inefficient systems, so that the next generation of startups can thrive and take their best shot.
That’s what building the Nr. 1 Notion Consultancy in Europe means to me.
On the mission – how do we help ambitious teams?
How much of your day do you spend doing the things you were actually hired for?
And how often are you…
- Searching for a document in the cryptic depths of a complex SharePoint structure
- Pinging a colleague on Slack because only they have the information you need
- Disrupted in your flow because a colleague is pinging you for information only you have
- Manually moving data from one tool to another
- Reinventing the wheel on a process someone else (or you) actually did before
- Trying to figure out what actually all is on your plate
- Wondering what the status on that project is that you delegated to John
The list goes on and on.
We spend far too much time on busywork rather than our actual jobs.
But that’s not your fault.
Your tools and systems are actively working against you:
- Creating silos instead of bridges
- Fueling complexity instead of rewarding simplicity
- And costing you far more time than they save you
Just the other day, a now-client showed me their current Project Management tool where they had to manually write their own name into every task they created – just to be able to later see only their tasks!
You and your team deserve better.
And me and my team will be here to help.
Here’s what you can do next:
- Learn more about our process
- Get in touch
- Or if you’d rather do it yourself, check out my massive library of free resources
