Welcome

back to the Make Lemonade podcast, the show for creators, by creators where we hope to inspire creators to earn more money through their own lemonade stand. I'm one of co-host James and I'm back here with JFR, co-founder of Lemon squeezy. How are you doing JFR?

Good good. I'm excited to be here today.

Well today we've got a very special guest. We've got Thomas Frank, who is a YouTube creator who on his main channel has over 2.8 million subscribers and 138k subscribers on his Notion Focus channel, which is the one he's focusing most on now, which is called Thomas Frank Explains. He started out helping ambitious college students study better and pivoted to the self-help personal development niche. He's a creator in every sense of the word, going from YouTube videos to writing books, making courses and even launching his own streaming platform with some other creator friends. Now the good chunk of his income comes from these Notion templates, making over 100k per month consistently. Wow, that's a lot. Thomas, you do a lot. Welcome to the pod. How are

you doing? Thank you. I'm doing very well. Excited to be here.

Oh, that was a lot to get through. So you started making videos about studying full sheetants. What sort of videos are

they? I started as a blogger first and that was actually back in college. Basically, I applied to write for another site. I got rejected and I'm going to make my own site. I ran that all throughout college and then in 2013, very near my graduation, I added the podcast. So I was blogged podcast for several years before I got into video and I literally graduated, went a year running my business with no YouTube, just blog and podcast and then got into YouTube realized I spent my entire college career running this blog, running this podcast, almost no academic content. Because I just didn't care about that when I was in school. I got decent grades, but I wasn't trying to maximize my grades. I wasn't trying to study better. I was trying to go to clubs and run my business and do freelance and make friends and all kinds of stuff. So that's what I wrote about. And then I realized, well, if I'm going to build the ultimate resource for college students, it ought to have a great library of content on how to study and do well in your tests and all that. So I went hard on that for many years. And it kind of started with my YouTube channel getting started around the same time I was trying to build this email opt in because everyone back then said, if you want to build your email list, you got to have an email opt in, like you have a free ebook or something. So I'm like, cool, I'll make this, I don't know, 5000 word guide on how to get better grades. And that turned into an entire book, like 27,000 words whoopsie. I still didn't get free. But I was like, well, cool, I just wrote myself an entire book of content. And now I can just make videos out of this pretty much. So the whole loop for several years was once a week, make a video about a concept usually related to studying or academic performance. And the video I pitched my newsletter in the book. And that helped me build a YouTube channel with up to a million subscribers when I was focusing on students, along with a pretty big email

list as well.