$557 ,000. Two -sec silence. That is a staggering
number. It really is. It's the kind of number
that just makes you stop. It forces you to recalibrate
your entire understanding of what's possible
online. Yeah. And here's the wildest part. That
half a million dollars did not come from a venture
-backed tech startup. It wasn't built by a massive
team of software engineers. It came from one
single person. One person. Selling a single digital
Notion template. A template hosted on Gumroad,
priced at just $79. Right. Downloaded over 7
,000 times. There's no shipping involved. There
are no warehouses to manage. Zero physical inventory.
Every single purchase simply duplicates a digital
file. Welcome to the Deep Dive Learner. Today
we are unpacking a truly fascinating guide. It
was published in March 2026 by Max Anna. The
mission for us today is very clear. We're going
to show you exactly how to mine Etsy for high
-revenue niches. And then you will learn how
to build best -selling Notion templates in a
single afternoon. The kicker is you can do this
with zero prior experience. Yeah. We're going
to explore the underlying economics. We'll look
at a highly specific research strategy. We'll
break down the two -step AI build workflow. And
finally, we'll discuss the visual packaging.
Let's start with those core economics. Why are
Notion templates still such a massive opportunity
today? It all comes down to a mix of user base
and extreme friction. Notion currently has over
100 million users globally. That is a massive
built -in audience. Huge. And people use it for
literally everything. They manage intense college
study schedules. They track daily health and
fitness routines. Some people run their entire
small businesses on it. But there is a significant
catch here. Notion is incredibly powerful, yes.
It's like a massive box of digital Lego bricks.
You can build anything you want. But building
a deeply functional aesthetic system from scratch
is hard. People stare at that blank page and
just get completely overwhelmed. Exactly. Setting
up proper databases is incredibly tricky. Figuring
out relations and complex formulas is deeply
frustrating for beginners. I have to admit something
to you here. Oh boy. A few months ago, I tried
building a simple daily habit tracker from scratch.
How did that go? It was a complete disaster.
I still wrestle with prompt drift myself. Yeah,
prompt drift is tough. You know, when the AI
just slowly forgets your original instructions
as the chat gets longer, it's so much harder
than it looks on YouTube. I actually saw that
first habit tracker of yours. You did? It looked
like a spreadsheet that got into a car crash.
It really did. It was bad. Right. And that is
exactly why this secondary market exists. People
will gladly pay $20 or $30 to completely bypass
that frustration. They just want to buy a ready
-made workspace. It solves their specific problem
instantly. It's an absolute win -win. The proof
is sitting right there in the live marketplace
data. Take Etsy, for example. Yeah. A brand new
Notion life planner is currently making over
$3 ,600 a month. And the wild thing is it was
posted just two months ago. There is also an
ultimate Notion planner generating over $1 ,000
monthly. The top performing Notion shop on the
platform is pulling in over $15 ,000. every single
month the average listing in the broad planner
niche makes about 495 dollars a month and then
there's gumroad aside from that half million
dollar second brain template there's a highly
popular student planner it sells for 24 .99 it
has over a hundred thousand units sold beats
the consumer demand is very real but the timing
right now is what makes this opportunity so special
why is that previously you need a deep technical
expertise to build these products You basically
had to be a notion wizard. Great. Now that barrier
to entry has completely collapsed. Cloud AI can
generate the entire structure. It handles the
complicated databases. It writes all the formulas
for you. Technical skill is no longer the bottleneck.
The real skill is simply deciding what to build.
Which is a huge shift. So let me play devil's
advocate for a second. Yeah. If Claude can build
this so easily. Why wouldn't a buyer just use
Clubb themselves instead of paying 20 bucks on
Etsy? They aren't buying files. They're buying
their weekend back from frustrating software.
That makes perfect sense. So if the AI makes
bidder effortless, the only real hurdle left
is figuring out what people actually want to
buy. You cannot just guess. You need to find
out what is already selling. The strategy here
is brilliantly simple. Do not invent things from
scratch. Find a proven product that already has
traction. Identify one specific angle to improve.
Then just build a better version. That's the
entire game. But how do you actually see what's
selling? It's not public information. Well, you
use a free Chrome extension called ListingView.
You can find it at listingview .io. It essentially
acts like x -ray glasses for the Etsy marketplace.
It is an amazing little tool. When you search
for Notion templates on Etsy, ListingView overlays
estimated monthly revenue. It shows historical
sales data right on the search results page.
You can instantly see which digital products
are actually making real money. But here's the
counterintuitive part. You are looking for the
obvious bestsellers. Chasing the biggest bestseller
in a crowded category is a trap. That's the hardest
possible place to compete. Beat. Instead, you
are hunting for outliers. Yeah, an outlier is
a listing. that dramatically outperforms everything
else around it. When one highly specific product
pulls far ahead of its peers, it means something
important. It means that product solved a very
painful problem better than the rest. When you
find an outlier, You study it intensely. You
look at their mockup images. Most importantly,
you read all of the customer reviews. Those reviews
are an absolute goldmine for a builder. Customers
will tell you exactly what they struggled with.
They will tell you what specific features they
loved. Those reviews literally become your new
product brief. You're letting the frustrated
customers write your feature list for you. But
before you start building anything, you must
validate the niche. You want to see low overall
competition combined with high monthly revenue.
Let's look at a very specific real world example.
Okay. If you search for something like snowball
debt calculator, you'll see very low competition.
Only a few thousand listings total. But the average
monthly revenue for those listings is around
$966. That is a massive buying signal. It shows
incredibly clear consumer demand. The competition
is totally manageable for a beginner. The target
audience is highly focused on solving one painful
problem. It's the perfect entry point. Start
small, solve one problem exceptionally well.
You can always bundle it later. Focus on the
quiet, profitable corners first. But I have to
ask. Why ignore the massive mega hits and spend
all this time hunting for these weird outliers?
That's always mean endless competition. Outliers
reveal actual underserved profitable needs. Now
we arrive at the most fascinating part of the
entire process. The AI build workflow. Beat,
this is where abstract ideas actually become
reality. And it relies on a very simple two -step
AI system. You essentially need three tools to
make this work. First, Claude AI on the free
tier. Second, a totally free Notion account.
Third, Notion AI. That specific feature requires
a business plan for $20 a month. But there is
a crucial setting you absolutely must change
before you start. Inside the Notion AI interface,
you must switch the underlying model. You need
to manually select Claude Opus 4 .6. Beat. Let's
clarify what that is. It's an advanced AI model
that perfectly follows complex multi -step instructions.
It consistently produces much better, fully functional
results than the default models. So phase one
of the build happens over in Cloud AI. You write
a detailed planning prompt. You must emphasize
functionality, not just... basic looks ask it
to include visual elements like progress bars
dynamic charts and specific layouts buyers absolutely
love those visual cues but there is a golden
instruction here you must add this specific line
to the very end of your planning prompt quote
before you start ask me clarifying questions
end quote beat this one sentence changes everything
it really does instead of just generating a bland
template claude actually stops It asks you thoughtful
questions. If you want a personal goal tracker,
it asks about your preferred time horizons. It
asks what specific calendar views you need. It
asks how the databases should interact. Your
answers shape a totally unique, highly custom
build plan. Two people using the exact same base
prompt will get completely different end results.
You're essentially creating a custom mold for
your digital product. Then comes phase two, actually
building it with Notion AI. You open a totally
blank Notion page. You click the Notion AI button.
You paste the entire customized plan that Claude
just gave you. You double check that it's set
to Opus 4 .6. Then you hit submit. Two sec silence.
Whoa, watching this happen in real time is incredible.
It's almost unsettling. Watching a machine build
a perfectly tailored organizational system from
a single text prompt. Notion AI generates a self
-checklist. It starts building right before your
eyes. It creates the databases. It sets up the
complex relations. It writes all the formulas
perfectly. And just to be clear on what that
means, a relational database is a system linking
different data sets together for automatic updates.
Imagine changing a due date on your master calendar
and it instantly updates your daily to -do list.
And your project tracker and your team's dashboard.
That's the power of what it is building. Imagine
seeing an AI spin up a fully relational command
center just from text. In seconds. It automatically
drops in realistic example data. It builds timeline
views. The whole process takes under an hour.
It feels like magic. But you cannot just stop
there and list it. Phase 3 is all about polishing
the final product. You run one final comprehensive
prompt in Notion AI. You ask it to fill in highly
realistic demo data. Buyers need to see the system
actually working to understand it. You also ask
the AI to clean up the visual layout. Fix any
weird visual bugs. And critically, you ask it
to generate step -by -step instructions. A clear
how -to section is absolutely vital for long
-term customer satisfaction and good reviews.
Phase four is scaling. Once you build one successful
template, the next one is exponentially faster.
You can actually upload screenshots of top -performing
Etsy listings directly into Clawed. As visual
references, you can ask it to replicate complex
features. Like dynamic journaling, for example.
That's a feature that embeds completed daily
tasks directly into a nightly journal entry.
You use the screenshot, tweak the prompt slightly,
and the AI matches the functionality. Once you
have a few small tools, you bundle them together.
You create an ultimate planner and charge a premium
price. It is a remarkably efficient workflow.
But I'm still curious about the handoff. Why
is handing off the planning to Claude before
touching Notion AI so critical? Claude designs
the perfect blueprint so Notion AI handles heavy
lifting seamlessly. Welcome back to the Deep
Dive. So we've built a highly functional, beautiful
Notion template. Now we actually have to sell
the thing. Beat. This brings us to the final
hurdle. Packaging and selling on Etsy. Here is
the harsh truth of digital products. A beautifully
working template isn't enough on its own. Buyers
cannot physically test a digital file before
they hand over their credit card. Therefore,
your mock -up image has to do all the heavy lifting.
The mockup essentially becomes the product. Creating
a highly professional mockup used to require
expensive, complicated software like Photoshop?
Not anymore. You start by finding a high -quality,
free mockup image. Search for a clean iPad or
MacBook mockup on a stock site like Freepik.
Next, you open a tool called Photopea. That's
a completely free, browser -based image editor
that mimics professional software. You open your
downloaded mockup file right there in the browser.
you look in the menu for something called the
smart object layer that is a crucial term a smart
object layer is simply a speckle image layer
that automatically formats anything you paste
into it it's essentially a magical placeholder
for the device screen you paste a screenshot
of your finished notion template into that exact
layer you scale it to fit perfectly Then you
just save it. When you go back to the main image
view, your template is seamlessly integrated
onto the device screen. It perfectly matches
the lighting and angle. It looks incredibly professional.
The entire process takes maybe 10 minutes. It
costs absolutely nothing. But it builds massive
immediate trust with the potential buyer. So
why do we list this specifically on Etsy? Why
wouldn't you just build your own website and
keep all the profits? beat. It ultimately comes
down to traffic and buyer intent. Etsy already
has millions of active buyers with their credit
cards on file. They are actively searching for
productivity tools. Exactly. You don't have to
spend a fortune on Facebook ads. You don't have
to slowly build an email audience from scratch.
etsy provides organic highly motivated traffic
they also provide crucial trust badges verified
reviews and bestseller tags make brand new sellers
look highly legitimate very quickly and your
actual listing strategy should be purely data
driven Remember that listing view tool we talked
about? You go back to those exact top performing
listings. You study their tags. You look closely
at their titles and keywords. You basically copy
their entire SEO strategy. Just to be crystal
clear, you do not copy their actual product.
You copy the specific search keywords that bring
them that massive traffic. You upload multiple
high quality mockups showing different views.
You write a product description that focuses
heavily on the painful problem your template
solves. Pricing is also highly strategic. here.
A single, narrowly focused tool should sit between
$7 and $27. Like that debt calculator we mentioned.
But when you bundle three or four tools into
a massive ultimate planner, you can comfortably
charge $47 to $97, sometimes even more. It is
all about perceived value. The larger bundle
feels incredibly comprehensive to the buyer.
It is fascinating, but does a fake stylized image
really matter more than the actual software code
underneath? Buyers purchase the feeling of organization.
High quality visuals prove that feeling instantly.
They are buying the feeling. That is a profound
way to look at it. Let's zoom out for a second
and look at the big idea here. If you're listening
to this and want to try it, what should you realistically
expect? Well, the revenue expectations are grounded
in actual observable market data. A single niche
tool like that snowball debt calculator averages
around $900 a month. A newly launched bundled
life planner can easily hit $3 ,000 to $5 ,000.
And if you dedicate the time to build a full
shop with multiple high -quality templates...
The top performers on the platform are seeing
$15 ,000 a month. That is truly life -changing
money for what is essentially a side business.
But the raw revenue is only half the story. The
underlying mechanics of this specific business
model are what truly stand out. Eat. Think about
why most physical side hustles fail. They fail
because of massive overhead. They require expensive
inventory. They demand complex shipping and return
logistics. Not this one. Every single sale is
an automatic, instant digital delivery. You're
asleep, the file delivers. You're on vacation,
the file delivers. Cloud AI has completely eliminated
the technical skill barrier that used to keep
people out. You don't need to spend six exhausting
months learning to code relational databases.
And most importantly, this specific type of effort
compounds. If you drive an Uber, you only earn
money when your hands are physically on the wheel.
If you build a Notion template, it stays on that
digital shelf forever. Every single new template
you build adds another permanent stream of passive
revenue. You are slowly building a highly valuable
asset library. Your very first niche template
might take a full weekend to research and build.
But your 10th template might only take two hours
from start to finish. The friction is basically
gone. Which really brings us to the ultimate
takeaway for you, Lerner. The vast distance between
having a good idea and having a polished, sellable
digital product has completely collapsed. It
used to be an impassable chasm for most people.
Now it's literally a single afternoon. All you
really need to do is the upfront research, find
out what the market actually wants to buy. Let
the AI handle the complex, tedious building phase.
Create a beautiful, trustworthy mock -up. Let
Etsy's algorithm handle the buyer traffic. It
fundamentally changes how we have to think about
creating value on the internet today. Two sec
silence. It does. But it also raises a rather
profound question about the near future. Yeah,
we're clearly standing on the edge of a massive
shift in personal computing. Think about this
for a second. If AI can now build a custom, perfectly
tailored organizational system in a matter of
minutes, what exactly happens to the multimillion
dollar template market in five years? What happens
when every single user has a personal AI assistant
customizing their entire digital workspace on
the fly just by listening to them speak? Two
sec silence. That is a wild thought. We will
let you chew on that one for a while. Thank you
for joining us on this deep dive. Keep questioning.
Keep learning. We'll see you next time. Out to
your own music.