Who is Thomas Frank?
Notion educator, template maker and software builder. Known for Ultimate Brain, the free Notion formula reference, and publishing the full revenue breakdown of a million-dollar template business.
This page recognises Thomas Frank 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 am deciding whether to learn Notion from Thomas Frank, buy one of his paid templates, or copy the way he built the business behind them.”
This page collects what he has actually shipped and what it costs: the free courses and formula reference, the paid templates and their launch dates, the open-source automations, and the revenue numbers he published about his own business. It does not review Ultimate Brain or judge whether its structure suits your work. His free Ultimate Tasks template is the cheap way to answer that for yourself.
In 2010, Thomas Frank started a blog in his dorm room called College Info Geek, writing up, in his words, "my experiments in studying more effectively and getting the most out of college." It grew into his full-time job before he graduated. By his own accounting he went full time in 2012 and made his first hire in 2016. Along the way came a book, 10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades, published in January 2015 and later recorded as an audiobook by Brilliance Audio, a podcast that ran 325 episodes as the College Info Geek Podcast before becoming The Inforium, and a YouTube channel about habits, health and finance that has since passed three million subscribers.
The turn came from a tool he adopted for himself. Frank does not describe Notion the way most reviewers do: "While many people view it as a note-taking app, I see Notion as a graphical programming language that lets you build your own productivity tools." He moved his video business into it, scripts, sponsorship rules, music licences and a searchable record of every shot he had ever filmed. In Notion's own customer story about him, he puts the payoff plainly: "Before, I had to rely on memory. I'd spend 20 minutes looking for a particular shot. With Notion, I know exactly what I've done in the past and where to find it." Then he packaged the system. Creator's Companion shipped in August 2021, Ultimate Brain in April 2022.
In January 2023 he posted the receipts. His team sold $1 million of Notion templates between January and December 2022, and he published the split: $760,000 from Ultimate Brain, $298,000 from the Creator's Companion bundle, $86,000 and $17,000 from the two smaller Creator's Companion editions. The detail that made the thread travel was where the money did not come from. He sold none of it on his three-million-subscriber channel. "In fact, I haven't published a video on that channel in nearly a year," he wrote. The sales came off Thomas Frank Explains, a Notion tutorial channel that went from 43,000 to 110,000 subscribers that year on thirteen long-form videos.
He was already a productivity writer when Notion arrived
Frank spent a decade on study skills before he touched a template. College Info Geek began as advice on note-taking, exam prep and getting through college without wasting the money, and his about page says the site still reaches over 400,000 students a month. The self-published edition of 10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades has sold more than 20,000 copies while the digital version stays free. That background shows up in how he teaches Notion: the tutorials assume you have a workflow problem and are looking for a method, so the videos spend as much time on why a database is shaped a certain way as on which button to click. He also writes a text version of most tutorials, on the reasoning that some people would rather read than watch.
He documented the feature Notion had not documented
The clearest thing Frank built for other Notion users costs nothing. His Notion Formula Reference covers every operator, function and data type in the formula language, each with example code and a working example database you can duplicate, plus guides to operator precedence, type conversion, debugging and regular expressions. His stated reason for building it was a gap: "Since Notion launched, it has lacked an extensive reference for the formulas feature. This is that reference." It sits alongside Notion Fundamentals, a free beginner course on pages, blocks and links, a free databases course, and free templates for tasks, notes, PARA, habits and expenses. Ultimate Tasks, the task manager that grew out of a tutorial he published in 2020, is still free: "Like nearly all of my Notion templates, the Ultimate Tasks template is 100% free."
The smaller channel was where the money was
Frank's 2022 numbers argued against the thing most creators optimise for. Revenue roughly doubled by going all in on a niche channel while the large one went quiet, which he summarised as "More Views =/= More Money." The thread went further than a headline figure, listing expenses, profit, six years of gross and net income, traffic, and the stack he ran the business on, including Lemon Squeezy for checkout, Circle for the support community and Pipedream for automations. He also flagged the boring part: "I've been creating content since 2010. I went full-time in 2012, made my first hire in 2016, and currently have a team of 8 people." Ultimate Brain kept moving after that. Version 3.0 landed in November 2024 with recurring tasks handled natively, "no Pipedream or Make.com scripts needed," along with a people dashboard, book and recipe systems, and My Day and My Week views. It lists at $129 and his site credits more than 35,000 users.
These days the work is shipping code
Frank's current work has moved down a layer. He is building Flylighter, a Notion web clipper made with Eli Wimmer of Notion Style Tweaks, with the tagline "Capture anything to Notion. Fast." It captures articles, highlights, images and tables into Notion databases and auto-fills properties, runs on Chrome and Firefox, and has a free tier with paid Pro and Insiders plans at $4 and $8 a month. Obsidian and custom HTTP destinations are on the roadmap. He described the ambition on Creator Science in March 2024 as "the best web clipper for Notion, but eventually will be just the best idea capture and knowledge capture tool." Around it sits a set of open-source releases on GitHub: a Pipedream workflow that transcribes and summarises voice memos into Notion, a companion one for voice tasks, an email-to-Notion action, and notion-helper, a JavaScript library for working with the Notion API that he first published in September 2024 and has shipped past a hundred releases. His GitHub bio now reads "Notion educator, JS dev, guitarist, rhythm game nerd."
Why Thomas Frank is on this list
Two things he handed the Notion community. First, he wrote the reference documentation for Notion formulas that Notion itself did not have, and gave it away, along with a beginner course and a shelf of free templates that thousands of people learned the app on before they ever considered paying him. Second, he published his own books. The full 2022 breakdown, per-product revenue, expenses, tooling and the admission that his biggest channel contributed nothing to sales, told every other Notion template maker what the market actually looked like instead of leaving them to guess from screenshots of Gumroad dashboards.
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