Who is Easlo?
Template creator and indie maker. Known for Second Brain, and a catalogue of templates that taught a generation of creators the business was real.
This page recognises Easlo for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“I have a tool I understand better than most people, and I want to know whether that can be a business rather than a hobby.”
Easlo is the clearest worked example of that path. He gave the work away first, built an audience out of the people who took it, and only then charged. This page lays out the sequence he actually followed, including the part most retellings skip: he had a list before he had a product.
Easlo was a student taking notes in Notion. That is the whole of the beginning. No agency, no audience, no plan to sell anything.
What separated him from everyone else doing the same thing was that he kept the systems he built for himself, tidied them, and handed them out. Through the summer of 2021 he put template after template on Gumroad, free or pay what you like. People took thousands of them.
In November 2021 he changed the model. He emailed the people who had downloaded the free work and offered them something paid. They bought. The templates went on to earn him over half a million dollars, and by late 2022 he was making around twenty thousand a month from them.
The free years were the business plan
It is tempting to read the free templates as generosity that happened to pay off later. It works better as the first half of a deliberate sequence. Every free download was a person who had used his work, seen that it was good, and given him an email address. When he launched paid products he was not looking for customers. He already had them, and they already trusted the work. The lesson creators keep relearning is that the audience has to exist before the product does.
Second Brain, and building on someone else's idea
His best known template is Second Brain, a single workspace for notes, tasks, projects and goals. The concept was not his: it comes out of Tiago Forte's work on personal knowledge management. What Easlo added was the thing Forte could not ship, an actual system you could duplicate in one click. That template alone passed a hundred thousand dollars. There is a lesson in that too. You do not need a new idea. You need to be the person who makes an existing good idea usable in fifteen seconds.
One channel, done properly
He grew on Twitter, and only Twitter, posting about productivity and the tool every day for years. No ads, no growth hacks anyone could name afterwards. The interesting part is what that consistency bought him: when he shipped something, a large group of people who already read him daily saw it on the first day. Distribution he had built slowly, then spent quickly.
Where the work went next
The catalogue kept growing past thirty templates, and then it stopped being only templates. easlo.co now lists small apps built around the same idea he started with: SyncTasks for to-dos, Journal for writing, Experiments for running your life as a series of tests, Menu. The through line has not changed since the student notes. Take something people manage badly, remove everything from it, hand it back.
Why Easlo is on this list
Easlo made the path visible. A lot of people building small products around this tool, us included, are working in a space he helped prove was real. Handing your best work out for free before you ask for anything is a harder discipline than it sounds, and he did it for a year.
We wrote this from public sources and we would rather get it right than get it first. If you are Easlo and something here is wrong, missing, or you would prefer this page did not exist, tell us and we will fix or remove it.
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