Thread by @cortexfutura

Templates are actually apps

There's a huge economy out there building templates for different apps: Notion, Excel, and now @tana_inc

I've always thought about these as "information products" – but I think I was wrong.

Earlier this week Tana launched a big new feature: templates.

Templates are an interesting feature, because they build a growth-loop that's otherwise hard to get:

they make using your app easier for beginners AND they incentivize others to build templates.

For Notion in particular there's a HUGE creator economy around building and selling templates. Look at @TomFrankly's business over the last year or so.

But the same goes for Excel and other apps. Hell, Jason Fried made his first money online selling FileMaker templates.

From the sidelines I've always thought about these templates as "information products" similar to courses.

Now that I've built my own template and sell it (Tanarian Brain, check it here: cortexfutura.com/tanarian-brain/) I think that's the wrong way to think about templates.

Because when someone buys a template, they aren't buying information – they are buying a collection of capabilities they would have otherwise had to build themselves.

With Tanarian Brain I give customers implementations of PARA, Zettelkasten, GTD, QCE, and more.

The customers support questions you get are also very different.

For my self-paced courses I hardly ever got any at all. If I did, it was "I don't understand, pls explain".

For templates it's very clear: "This feature isn't working, what's going on, please make it work"

That templates are software/apps becomes also apparent in the update process.

For a self-paced course I record a new video and email customers about it.

No template platform that I know of (Notion, Tana, Excel) allows you to do actual updates to the templates you sold.

That you can't ship over-the-air updates to your customers makes the creation process very different too.

You have to _really_ consider every possible edge case and have a plan in place for how you'll inform customers when there is a bug – instructions mandatory.

I wonder if apps are ever going to figure out how to do "software updates" to these essentially #nocode apps.

Because compared to an app on the iOS app store, the user can actually change the app – and the data model behind the app!

That's very difficult to design for.

In any case, I find it fascinating – and a fun economy to participate in.

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