Let users build on your product and publish what they made. Each template is a landing page, a search result and a reason to sign up.
In June 2023 Notion rebuilt its template gallery around creator profiles. It said the gallery had grown from 600 templates to more than 5,000 from more than 2,000 creators, and that in the previous year nearly 11 million people had duplicated templates 51 million times (Notion, 21 June 2023).
The gallery is now the Notion Marketplace, where creators sell paid templates and Notion takes 8% plus $0.40 a sale. One of its most successful creators, Thomas Frank, says he and his team made $1 million selling Notion templates in 2022.
SaaS and tools where users create something: documents, designs, workflows, sites, automations.
Templates answer long-tail searches such as "[use case] template", show the product working before anyone signs up, and recruit creators who promote their own work. Zapier did the same with integration pages: Ahrefs estimated in 2022 that tens of thousands of integration pages, partly written by partners, drove about 16% of Zapier's organic traffic (Ahrefs, August 2022).
Self-reported. Notion's gallery figures (June 2023) and Thomas Frank's earnings. Vendor. Ahrefs' traffic estimate for Zapier (August 2022).
Cost to test. Your team's time to build the first 20 templates and the gallery pages, usually a few weeks.
Kill it if after a quarter the template pages bring no measurable sign-ups.
Duplications are not sign-ups: Notion has not published how many accounts templates create. It only works if the product has a "create" step. Low-quality submissions dilute search value, so curate. Templates are easy to copy, so the moat is the gallery's scale, not any single template.
The Free Tool, Ship Into the AI Assistants, The Customer Community
A 30-minute call first. If it fits, two calls in one week and a written growth plan you keep.