249: How to Make $1M Per Year from a Small Channel w/ Thomas Frank

and we were making so much more money on this small channel than we've ever made on the big two million subscriber channel. So what it really comes down to is becoming the go-to person in a niche that has growing demand and that has good product market fit. Instead of looking at people who are doing the same kind of content you're doing and trying to pull a lot of inspiration from them, look at somebody who's in another niche that you're interested in and ask yourself like how can I pull a little bit of what they're doing and bring it over here because that's where you get like the whole steel like an artist ethos right. Is it possible to earn over a million dollars a year from a small channel? Well today on the Think Media podcast I'm talking with Thomas Frank who actually left his over two million subscriber channel to start a new channel that generated over $1.4 million in just a year and in this episode he's going to be breaking down what he did some tips from that lesson and in general he's a genius when it comes to productivity mindset personal development so this should be a powerful episode that you're definitely going to want to stick around until the end for but Thomas how's it going? It is going very well. Super pumped to be hanging out with you and as we get into some tactics heavy information for those that are maybe just meeting you give a little bit of context to your history. Yeah so I'll wait for this camera but I'm going to talk to you for the most part. I started making YouTube content 2014 mostly for college students before that I was a blogger making blog posts and podcasts for college students basically how to study better how to be productive how to get your first job at a college that kind of thing moved on to general productivity for professionals as I got older and then started dinking around with notion 2018 and for those of you who don't know notion is productivity software that is very very customizable you can kind of do whatever you want with it which means that it has a very high learning curve and in 2020 I realized there's enough of a learning curve in this and there's enough of an audience building up around it that I think there's an appetite for a channel around it so 2020 is sort of making a notion tutorials I made a whole separate channel called Thomas Frank explains as a side project partly because I was burned out from the main channel and partly because I was just having so much fun and then 2021 rolled around I made some products and that is basically what I spend all my time doing now is making notion tutorials products in the ecosystem templates automation is that kind of thing that's amazing was it hard to let go of a channel that grew to two million subscribers I mean it's still there it probably still bringing in some revenue from videos that are still being watched but you haven't uploaded it in a year was that hard decision to make about a year and six months since I uploaded in the funny thing is I didn't make the decision to abandon the channel it just sort of happened so I launched a product last year and my intention was okay I'm gonna take a month off of the main channel to build the product I'm gonna release it and then I'm gonna get right back to making main channel videos well I built the product in a month released it and it instantly started making about 90 grand a month and I had no support staff and one of the things I really wanted to offer was a dedicated active support for my customers so I spent about six to eight weeks doing full-time support in our support forum myself and that was yet another month or two not publishing and then I hired a team to do support and I spent another month onboarding them and then I just went through all these different little projects and we were making so much more money on this small channel than we'd ever made on the big two million subscriber channel meanwhile I'm having more fun than ever because this is perfectly aligned with my nerdy tech brain so it's just like a okay we'll get to the main channel next month we'll get to the main channel next month and we're finally to a point where next month we actually will get to the main channel I've hired people to help me with scripts and I've hired people to help me with editing so we're getting back to that machine so I'm gonna call it a side quest not an abandoning of the main thing and a switching over permanently so your main channel will actually become your side quest I think so yes and then the side quest becomes the main quest and vice versa that's amazing and it's that speaks to just how exciting the creator economy can be and how much longevity that's inspiring that you've been in the creator economy for a long time and so to be clear on the products you launched like what's the website for the product Thomas jfrank.com and then you can just go to notion templates at the top and you'll find the products and is it so it's multiple different templates yes and an aggregate together their digital products that plug into notion uh yeah they're basically notion pages I share so notion starts as a blank canvas um there are some templates that they have which are very basic but if you want something a bit more advanced like say you're a creator with a team and you want a full pipeline from ideation of your content to having an archive where you can analyze performance go back in see your scripts all that kind of stuff we turn that into a product similarly we turned uh my my want for an all-in-one productivity system into a product as well and what are the price ranges of these uh ultimate brain right now is 129 and then creators companion the highest end is 199 and then we have a bundle which is 229 to get everything yep so that is the highest ticket product we sell what is the general revenue range monthly now right now between like 110 and 145 per month and how do you market it just YouTube organic just YouTube organic and I guess SEO if you want to say that as well um so for yes for most notion tutorial videos I will also try to create a written resource and then beyond the videos we've also created some bigger resources so one thing notion really never did was made like a full-on documentation site for their formulas feature which is very similar to excel formulas so kind of complicated to learn I spent four months writing full-on developer style documentation for that as well so we get a lot of site traffic and uh and then mostly YouTube traffic as well and do how big is your team for the notion side of things become that's a good question uh I wouldn't say that we have like a clear separation between the notion side and the other side like my editor Tony I especially has the biggest overlap between the two because he'll work on all the videos uh but the team is 10 people now do you write your own blogs or do you have a writer for like the blogs I write my own blogs at this point okay so you write your own blogs that have done the SEO oh yes you come up with the video content uh yep on the notion side what are the roles of the team so we have two full-time support people we have an ops director and she is amazing her name is Marissa um at Tony is our editor and then he also is in the studio with me so he'll also help with camera operation he even helps with some ideation for video topics and when you get to 10 people it's hard to think of everyone in the team sure one of the person uh Eli is our full-time developer on a software product that we are launching hopefully next month so don't have a ton of details on that I can share quite yet but yeah quite a few different things going on and what have you learned about building a team was that hard did that come natural uh no it was hard yeah uh the the main thing that I can say I've learned and which I think will be helpful for certain viewers is uh I am not built to be a manager and it is possible to build a team without having to become a manager so I am I'm an explorer um I'm a builder I want to learn and build things all day long and teach people I do not want to spend any time giving feedback uh doing performance reports any of that kind of thing management is just nodding my DNA so what I've learned is to get to the point where you have a team you kind of do have to go on yet another little side quest learn how to manage uh a small team but once you get to a certain size you can hire an ops director you can hire a COO you can even hire a CEO if you need to and they can handle the business aspects for you while you still stick in the creative lanes if you want to that's uh really great advice so on this topic of how do I make a million dollars a year from a small channel for someone listening to this what are some of the steps or tips that you would try to apply in a more general sense to creators what it really comes down to is become in the go to person in a niche that has growing demand and that has good product market fit so what we've done and I'll use what we've done as an example because I don't want to try to generalize my advice too much but what we've done is we we realized that I had an interest in notion I had skill and a lot of product knowledge there and there was a large and growing contingent of people who are very interested in it and there was uh there was products that we could build that people actually wanted to buy so what that created was a very strong funnel and I think that's what a lot of creators don't quite understand they think if I get a lot of views that's going to somehow lead to money but that's like pouring water at the edge of a funnel that's just been cut off right at the top slice right it's going to go nowhere it's not going to go into the bottle you want it to go into so you have to figure out how do you get people from the top part of your funnel to the bottom part of your funnel and if there are strong transitional points to each each stage in the funnel that is how you build a sustainable business so in our case there's a lot of interest around notion right now which means that we can get quite a lot of traffic on videos in a niche sense it's not Mr. Beast's level it's not even uh not even like 100K per video most times but it's enough people who are interested enough in this product and are interested enough in our products who may pay $129 or uh $79 if we're running a sale that kind of thing that you don't have to have a huge audience you just have to have enough that come in and buy at that level so right now we operate on I believe like a $90 average order value uh you could do the math in your head right now it doesn't take a lot of sales to get to a hundred grand per month relatively uh when you're at $90 average per value uh versus with something like ad sense most people are getting between uh what is it like one and four dollars CPA is the the average that gets thrown on the industry that's a lot of people you have to bring in to make any kind of money at all yeah and it sounds like you know I think for the YouTube mindset is focused on I have to go viral to make this sustainable and what's also interesting was it at all this struggle for you to have that view differential I think for some if you don't have a big visible view count which could be arguably a vanity metric it could hurt your ego it could make you feel like you're not successful as a youtuber you're not getting Mr. Beast numbers even the lid or like the height of your content won't compare to your other channels numbers it's not as much broad appeal right but it's such a it's a much more effective business but was that just easy for you because you saw behind the scenes or was there any kind of ego of like well I'm not pulling you're most viewed video as six plus million views or seven and you're you're not pulling those numbers but it's such a niche thing was it an easy transition for you or is there anything also there's a slight bit of ego yeah but I think that I kind of worked through those ego problems before I even went full-time on Thomas Frank explains yeah and the reason for that is I had been in the productivity niche for so long I was kind of the top of it for a while and then Matt Diavella came along better ideas came along all the Abdul came along and even before they all passed me up I could tell like they're going to pass me up they're either hungrier or they make better content in certain dimensions or they're publishing more often like I can see the directory and I can either chase that hamster wheel because I want to satisfy my ego and stay on top or I can really dig deep and say like what is it that I actually want to do what what's the average day that I want to experience what are the metrics that actually matter I don't necessarily want to be a famous person I don't want to be mobbed when I go to a place like this so chasing the fame is actually counterintuitive to what I want there's like that Bill Murray story where he's like I always tell people who want to be rich and famous try being rich first see if that covers all the bases and I've definitely realized that like as I've become a little bit less known generally I'm actually happier I can go more places not get recognized I can spend more time on the highly technical niche things that actually interest me and there's an audience there that is so hungry for that kind of content as well I can have a sustainable career without needing to chase the big numbers so at this point I'm just like I don't really care yeah as long as I can sustain myself and especially my team my family I'm good to go are you ready to start or grow your youtube channel do you feel stuck and need help connecting the dots join this free web class where you'll learn the step-by-step playbook for youtube success we've helped thousands of purpose driven entrepreneurs just like you grow their influence with video register today for this exclusive training at thinkmasterclass.com that's it's actually you're like I think media podcast dream guest because we actually our dream is to help creators reach financial independence and maybe be unknown in the process because everyone's chasing fame and I think fame could be overrated yes some will some will reach out and maybe that's the model that most aligns with even the style of content and perhaps it could be their desire it could be a toxic desire but it also could be a good desire if you want to reach an impact a lot of people but saying that it's so encouraging that it's possible to make man over a million dollars a year and beyond with this small channel are you focused completely on youtube or are you trying to diversify into vertical video cross-platforms right now youtube it's it's the thing where I would like to be diversifying on the tiktok onto youtube shorts all that kind of stuff but it comes down to what's my capacity for creating content right now if I could someday scale the team to where they can hand me you know I script or something and it's like here's five shorts you're gonna film I'm totally down to do that right now my average day is like coming to the office and I spend the entire day programming because I've been working on the same video for two months and I think I think in lumpy analytic terms so like everyone wants to have that smooth hockey stick style curve and they think you need to have super super frequent content to do that I'm okay with like a little jump and then plateau for a while a little jump a little plateau for a while because during those plateaus you have some breathing room and some time to sort of go into the cave Tony Stark style and build something out of a box of scraps and then you get to go stand on the stage and present what you've built so that's the kind of style that really resonates with me if I could build the machine around me that would allow me to also create content that's in short form video form without really digging into that schedule I'm down for it and you think that now going back to the other channel how is that going to be sustainable because you have someone helping you with scripting two people helping with scripting got my editor so buying necessity the main channel is going to have to become I guess my role in the main channel is going to become more like say a Hank Green on Crash Course where he's not necessarily the one writing the chemistry scripts he's got a script supervisor he has writers he has fact checkers and he has a whole editing and post production team he can sit down maybe do a table read for the script to get familiar with the material make sure he's into it delivered to the camera and make a good show you become a host almost yeah and I think that's actually where the ego problem lies it's not in the views or the fame it's like this internal feeling like I should be part of every step of the process in every video I make otherwise it's somehow bad and I've realized watching other people's shows that I really enjoy no it's a team effort you don't have to so a really good friend of mine once said like get clear on what is your ego and what is your art so like what's the real core of what you contribute and what you're best at and what's just the stuff that your ego says you have to do and cut out that ego stuff that's really powerful I think Phil DeFranco has a similar show and he's also been sustainable his writers yes delivering the news he can weave in his personality maybe veer off script of course and it's always his personality but he's also created the machine but that's some very powerful insights for us to think of maybe a little bit different about the trajectory of where our content will go I want to do a little bit of a lightning round with you related to maybe books podcasts influential resources as someone that is into productivity and all of the above that have helped you in your journey maybe just personal development in general what is some of the top books or audio books that you think creator should read it could be related to being a better creator and it may be also just having better habits being more effective and actually getting things done do you think that the average person watching this is maybe in the beginning stages um we have the average person watching this could just be starting but we do have a lot of season creators that are pretty established and a ton of business owners that either want to build a personal brand or use YouTube to get more leads clients and sales so leverage kind of their personal brand but to grow their business so there's some diversity here but a lot of think media is a little bit more advanced as well gotcha I think a lot of the consumption I did of books and podcasts and things were much more at the beginning stages so I'll give a couple of recommendations there the main one for me is a little book like truly little called the motivation hacker and this was a book that this guy Nick went to wrote when he was I think like 22 or 23 years old and it was just like it's a book about how he forced himself to do a bunch of goals he had and I read that back in 2013 when I had hit a point in my blog where I actually got like that mythical passive income like it was literally getting like five to seven grand a month and I didn't have to do anything for it I had written a post that ranked number one on Google for a high value keyword and then the rest of my blog was about nothing like there wasn't about that at all so people just kept coming in and I'm like cool I'm living with my college roommates making seven grand a month I can basically do what I want so for a year I just played match with the gathering and like try to get myself to work I read this book he's like I wanted this exact same problem so what I did is I signed up for this tool that makes you bet money that you're gonna do what you said you're gonna do and if I didn't write my 500 words a day I was gonna lose like $7,000 and so I used that tool it was called B-Minder I didn't bet $7,000 I kind of just put more of my ego in like five bucks online but it transformed my work style it was like that that mindset shift from amateur to professional professionals show up they don't wait for inspiration they come in and they practice the craft every single day and they dig inspiration out of the ground so I would recommend reading that book if people have troubles with consistency I would also recommend another very tiny book called The Dip by Seth Godin this was a very inspiring book for my transition from a big youtuber doing productivity style content to the niche content that book is about how to quit strategically and how to know when to quit and it's like you can read it an hour so I don't really need to give a Houston office of it I recommend everyone read it to identify at what point in my journey am I am I now trying to exploit something that is no longer exploitable am I trying to drop blood from a stone and what point of my journey do I need to go explore and do something else of course we'll link those up in the show notes as far as a content creator in terms of storytelling or structure has there been any films or creators or documentaries that have maybe helped you create content better be a better artist I'm very inspired by Edgar Wright films so Scott Pilgrim hot fuzz those kinds of ones it's hard to say because I really try to pull my inspiration from a huge variety of services give you a great example I got into this game doing academic success content there was nobody on YouTube at the time doing it well so my original inspiration came from crash course and they were doing like crash course world history too in biology at the time I want to say and then there were people doing like video game retrospective videos so people like Catecharis and Satchel Drake's and John Tron back in the day that's where I pulled a lot of my style inspiration from in the beginning and I just was like how can I apply this to my specific niche so I would say instead of and I think this is actually quite important to say instead of looking at people who are doing the same kind of content you're doing and trying to pull a lot of inspiration from them I think that's how we get beast clones look at somebody who's in another niche that you're interested in and ask yourself like how can I pull a little bit of what they're doing and bring it over here because that's where you get like the whole steel like an artist ethos right you're pulling something from a totally unrelated niche you bring it to your own and you're making your own niche better without really copying yeah and for that reference still like an artist another great book Austin Cleon also show your work all his books are very cool and there's going to be a resource rich episode in the description are you a podcast consumer not anymore but you were previously yeah I was back in the day any helpful business launch manure podcast that helped you build your business so there's a new podcast so I used to I used to co-host a podcast called listen money matters which is a personal finance show it was my favorite podcast in college one of the co-hosts left I basically took his spot so it was your favorite podcast as a listener yes and then you eventually were a host on it yeah so basically the way this worked is I had my podcast the college and bogey podcast I really wanted to have an episode about personal finance so I went on to iTunes I found a great personal finance show emailed the guys we instantly hit it off we become friends and then every single morning I would listen to their show because they were daily back then yeah they had a bit of a falling out one of the co-hosts left I was like I don't want this show to die can I just come take the spot that's wild and so Andrew and I co-hosted that show for three years I eventually left and then the original coast came back and they also co-hosted a show called money lab which it is done it's still online I recommend going through the archives but Andrew recently started a new show called seeking profit so if you're interested in online business that is the current show that I listen to on occasion when I do listen to podcasts it's called seeking profit podcast so I'll link that one up as well and was that remote for you were you able to be a co-host on this podcast just remotely yep and it was audio only yeah it was audio only and they do there's video now but they're also remote I mean Riverside FM is just such a good tool you can build a whole remote show and you can have your angles you know with like a Riverside and a good black magic setup you can basically do anything yeah that yeah we stream yard does something similarly that's what we use kind of they call it perfect record oh yeah so it's really crispy on the back end captures natively on people's computers and then uploads to the cloud before they jump off similar and yeah video podcasts big opportunity because you could kind of live anywhere yes and still create great content as long as you got internet 100 percent well as we're landing the plane is it too late to start YouTube no why do you say that because the audience keeps growing and when the audience grows the micro niches grow too so my favorite example of this is my friend patch from tier zoo his channel does like fighting games style tier rankings of animals and so like that's a niche where you're like taking fighting games and video game culture and then zoology and mashing that together and he has a multi million subscriber channel now every single video gets over a million views that's a niche he invented right and now here I am making you know a million dollars a year it feels like a brag but like it's about productivity software yeah you go look at people who are doing content on obsidian which is even smaller like their building sustainable businesses so YouTube's audience is always expanding and I think that as a community we're now learning more and more and really dialing in on what it takes to build a great channel on how to optimize for attention all this kind of stuff there's more resources out there than ever the cost to entry is lower than ever and the audience is bigger than ever so while the competition is both more numerous and higher skilled your barriers are lower there's more people out there it's worth trying and I think it's easier than ever to succeed ironically final two questions because of your unique perspective as a guest two different types of listeners to this podcast the first is trying to break six figures the seconds trying to break seven figures what advice would you have for that person that is as a creator or entrepreneur so they may be creating content they also are trying to do a digital product maybe they're going patreon more entertainment brand deals but they're trying to scale up any tips for the barrier of six figures I feel like the answer is kind of the same for six and seven yeah so the the answer is to optimize for more of you and what I mean by that is most creators are looking at how do I increase my ad sense revenue through more views or how do I get sponsorships and brand deals those are both great ways to monetize I hit six figures quite easily with sponsorships and brand deals but when people click on a video of yours they're signaling that they want something they want to watch the video so the video has a job to be done which is deliver what it promises to the viewer if you slot in a sponsorship or if you do a mid roll ad that kind of harms the videos job right because the person didn't click on the video to see an ad for in a way suitcase or a skillshare or whatever it is and then those are great products but that's not what they came there for if someone clicks on one of my videos because they want to build a full stack creator management system and notion that's what they want and if I have a product that I can sell them like hey I can teach you how to build this you can do it for free or I can set it up for you save you tons of time we have a support that pipeline is just so obvious so if you can optimize for more of the thing your audience came in for and you can productize that that is the quickest way to six figures and I think seven figures as well specific to the question of second seven figures I know some people who have done this without scaling but it's easier if you scale and bring on extra people who can take off all the things that you are not the best at so if you can bring in an ops person if you can bring an editor I think editors the number one hire everyone should make first thing they should do is hire an editor if you can get a VA to handle support or handle like customer requests or your email or whatever it is you have more time to focus in your content and you have more time to focus on your product offerings and that is what is going to help you get to that six and seven figure benchmark I know Alex Ramesi had a great tweet about this he said you don't get rich by diversifying you get rich by focusing and then you stay rich by diversifying so if you can just batten down the hatches focus on whatever is the highest leverage activity you have access to that's the quickest way to get there you're a legend super grateful for all the wisdom you shared today this is a very rich strategic and powerful podcast so thank you Thomas people of course can check out everything that you're doing in the show notes lots of good resources shared but break it down if people want to follow you on social media and then you're made or both channels because by the time they see this too will be blessed to have content on both channels working people connect with you yeah so the audience here is creators the main thing that I'll share is on my website ThomasJFrank.com you can go to the little blog tab and there's a creator advice section that's just an area I've been brain dumping everything I know about being a creator from how to get a perfectionism to how to optimize your website speed whenever I think of something cool I just put it on there I've got pictures of all the sets I've ever built behind the scene stuff like basically just trying to build that out until like an online book of everything I've ever learned so that might be useful to people who are watching this Twitter I'm Tom frankly and then the main channel is Thomas Frank the notion channel is Thomas Frank explains if you want to learn notion and I think everyone should learn notion yeah kind of biased no and I'll explain explains I think I personally have not got into it but as we wanted to be more productive that creator bundle specifically as a workflow for creators in notion you've create that is available for purchase yes you can just plug and play that right into play use it with your team is a whole script area b-roll areas topic and thumbnail and title optimization areas all that kind of good stuff amazing well appreciate your Thomas thanks for coming on the podcast thank you so much for the opportunity Sean absolutely subscribe if you're not subscribed share this out this one's a good one somebody needs to hear this smash like depending on where you're listening to it and we will talk soon think media podcast