¥100,765 in six months of side-hustle Notion templates. What happened when sales fell from ¥20,000 to ¥9,000 after losing the "featured" slot

Side-hustle content sales are usually reported as a single headline number, “I hit X yen in Y months”, with no detail on the path there. What makes this case worth examining is that revenue in the final two of those six months fell to less than half of the earlier average, and the person behind it identified exactly why. Omegu, a company employee who also works as a freelance financial planner (FP), publicly tracked her monthly Notion template sales from February through July 2025. Part of the source article is paywalled, but the revenue figures and unit counts are all disclosed in the free portion.

Six months of numbers that add up

She explicitly states each figure: ¥99,012 in template sales, ¥1,753 from note articles, ¥100,765 total, “the first four months averaged around ¥20,000/month,” “71 units in April,” “¥9,000 for 24 units in June,” and “¥8,820 for 24 units in July.” Subtracting June and July (¥17,820) from the total leaves ¥81,192, which divided across four months gives a monthly average of ¥20,298 — matching her own claim of “around ¥20,000 per month.” The disclosed numbers are internally consistent, with no rounding applied after the fact.

The per-unit price can also be reverse-engineered. July’s ¥8,820 across 24 units works out to ¥367.5 per unit. June’s ¥9,000 across 24 units is ¥375. This is a business selling dozens of items a month in the ¥300–400 range. Applying that unit price to April’s 71 units yields roughly ¥26,000, which doesn’t contradict her note that “April was especially strong.”

That fixes the scale of the business: 20–70 units a month at ¥350–400 each. If the goal were ¥100,000/month, without changing the unit price she would need to sell 250–280 units a month. The result over six months (¥100,765 total) simply makes that distance visible.

What was being sold

She began the activity in January 2025 and started paid sales in February. The venue was Notion’s official template marketplace. Her stated best-sellers fall into three categories: task management, customer management, and investment analysis / household budgeting. The latter two turned her professional FP knowledge directly into a product, which she describes as “a niche field, but one with steady popularity.”

The household budgeting template’s design philosophy is also disclosed. Instead of making the transaction log the centerpiece, she made the actual record-keeping loose and put the emphasis on a reflection column, “did you spend money in a way that felt comfortable to you?” It’s built as a reflection tool rather than a tracking tool, a deliberate point of differentiation. In a marketplace flooded with generic task-management templates, it makes sense that a product carrying a specialist’s perspective would attract a loyal customer base.

The tide turned in June

She states clearly when the trajectory changed. From February through May, her templates were listed in the “Featured” section of the Notion marketplace, and in “the top-left corner of the featured section” at that, the most visible spot available. In June, she was dropped from that slot. Revenue fell from a monthly average of ¥20,298 to ¥9,000, a drop of roughly 56%. Units sold fell too, from 71 in April to 24.

What stands out is that the floor after the drop wasn’t zero. Both June and July landed at exactly 24 units. Even without the featured slot, 24 units a month still sell. Put differently, the featured slot had been adding roughly ¥11,000 a month, or an estimated 30 or so units, meaning more than half of this business’s revenue was being generated by a recommendation slot she had no control over.

Her own analysis points the same direction: “Until then I’d been benefiting from the marketplace’s own promotion, and I hadn’t really been actively promoting things myself. That was the cause.”

What didn’t substitute for it

So what did she do after losing the slot? She kept posting on X and note. When she released a new household budgeting template in July, she announced it on X. But her own assessment is blunt: “Promoting in a small way on X and this note account made me realize just how insufficient it is for driving traffic without the ‘Featured’ placement.”

This is where the underlying structure comes in. A marketplace’s featured slot places a product directly in front of people who have already arrived with intent to buy, the distance between the moment of demand and the product is close to zero. A personal X account or note post, by contrast, has to first generate interest, then move someone to an external site, then get them to decide to purchase there, a multi-step funnel. Both get called “promotion,” but the conversion rates differ by an order of magnitude. It isn’t realistic for a personal account with a few thousand followers to substitute for the exposure volume of a top marketplace placement.

The other thing that didn’t work was the note articles as a second revenue stream: ¥1,753 over six months, just 1.8% of template revenue. In dollar terms, it only closed the gap between “short of ¥100,000” and the actual total. It functioned as supplementary income, but it was never a pillar of either acquisition or revenue.

What it would take to reproduce these numbers

The reproducible part is clear. Initial production investment is close to zero, and there’s no inventory. If you already hold specialist knowledge, simply encoding it into a template structure creates differentiation. Niches that generic tools can’t fully address (investment analysis, household budgeting) genuinely sell steadily. And reaching a scale of ¥100,000 over six months while still holding down a day job is a modest, believable target.

What’s hard to reproduce is getting selected for the marketplace’s “Featured” slot, and staying there. Both inclusion and removal are decisions made by the platform operator, entirely outside the seller’s control. In this case, that decision created more than half the revenue, and then erased it. If you’re designing a business to sell on a platform, it’s more realistic to treat the revenue from a month without the recommendation slot (here, around ¥9,000) as your baseline, and everything above that as upside.

Starting in July, she joined a Notion online community and is considering changes to her sales format, such as “customization sets” that bundle several simple templates together. Given the current unit price of ¥350–400, unless she either multiplies the unit count several times over or raises the price, the monthly revenue range won’t change. The six months of numbers have brought that choice into sharp enough focus to force the decision.

Related reading

• 24 Kindle books, ¥50,000–70,000/month in royalties: real data from 16 months and ¥750,000 cumulative of “mass-produced” self-publishing — another case of selling digital products on a platform, offering a comparison in how volume absorbs variance.
• Hitode’s blog operation — a structure similarly exposed to an external factor (the search algorithm) that decides revenue, the same problem as dependence on a recommendation slot.