How two creators turned burnout into $30k per month

Some creator stories start with luck. Some start with virality.

This one started with burnout.

A few years ago, Matty was deep in medical school, barely keeping up. Mike was in residency, filming educational videos at night. They weren’t experts or trying to build a digital product empire. They were just two exhausted brothers who loved teaching.

For the first 6 months, they posted videos into the void. They averaged 200 views per video on Youtube.

The only reason they didn’t quit according to Matty is “I just didn’t want to be the one who quit first”. So sibling rivalry kept the channel alive long enough for things to click.

That eventually became a YouTube education brand, a multi–six-figure template business, and one of the top creator ecosystems in the productivity world.

Lesson 1: Build for the past version of yourself

Matty didn’t set out to create a digital product. He built Extended Brain because he was totally overwhelmed trying to juggle studying, YouTube, and running a startup. He used the system everywhere; in classes, on camera, and people started asking: “What template is that? where can I get it?”

He accidentally surfaced a problem people desperately wanted solved.

That’s where your market already is. This principle is the backbone of every creator business that lasts. This is why good marketplaces matter. They connect specific problems with people actively searching for solutions, not generic templates.

This wasn’t meant to be a product. It became a business.

Lesson 2: Complexity kills products. Clarity sells

Matty published the first version of the Extended Brain Notion template. It had 20+ databases with tons of properties. He made his first sale on day 1. And received a refund request 30 minutes later. The buyer said it was too overwhelming. This is the moment that shaped everything that came after.

After the refund, Matty rebuilt Extended Brain from scratch with a simple, named framework. Creators who simplify win. And one place simplicity matters a lot is checkout. This is where friction kills conversion. A clean 1-click checkout (like Easytools’) often fixes the same problem Matty fixed inside his template: overwhelm.

Lesson 3: You don’t scale with more templates. You scale with trust

Matty says that the part that changed everything for them was when they built a delight system. A mapped-out, step-by-step experience customers go through after purchasing.

Their flow: Landing page → Checkout → Thank you email → Invite to Circle community → Message from Matty himself → Tutorial videos → Dedicated support → Ask for review

Most creators stop at Step 2. They build trust until Step 8. Their current flow is pretty solid but a few tweaks could make a huge difference in conversions:

Landing page

They could host everything in one place instead of several tools. Easypage would let them keep their checkout, customer portal, testimonials, and upsells under the same roof which reduces friction and boosts conversions.

They could also add a simple step-by-step journey section. Creators teaching a system like Mike and Matty could benefit from showing the transformation visually through one of these two layouts:

• a simple scrolling breakdown for quick skimmers
• or an interactive, one-step-at-a-time view for visitors who want clarity before buying

Either version helps visitors instantly understand what they’ll learn, what happens after checkout, and how the whole experience fits together.

Checkout

This is the checkout for their popular Study Quest course with pretty clean UI and minimal fields, but there a few ways they could optimize it with Easytools:

1. Remove the coupon field: Coupons create hesitation (should I go find a code?). An anchored discount keeps the savings while removing friction.

2. Support more payment methods automatically: Their current checkout shows only Card and Google Pay. They’re missing Apple Pay, Klarna / Buy-now-pay-later, PayPal alternatives etc…This especially helps international audiences which their YouTube channel has. Easytools supports all popular payment methods to prevent cart abandonment and build trust.

3. Add social proof inside the checkout: Their page is visually clean but has zero reviews in the checkout itself. Easytools lets you embed testimonials right beside the Buy button, the exact moment buyers hesitate. Even 3–5 screenshots from Circle or YouTube comments would strengthen purchase intent.

Reviews and testimonials

They already have great testimonials but they’re leaving a lot of conversion power on the table.

Instead of selecting a few reviews for the landing page, Easylove would automatically collect feedback at the perfect moment (after buyers experience value).

Every review is instantly turned into a clean, branded visual they can reuse anywhere: on the landing page, inside emails, next to CTAs, even on the checkout page where showing customers’ opinions boosts conversions by an average of 7%.

Lesson 4: Creators evolve and their audience should evolve too

After 5 years of creating study content, Mike and Matty noticed a disconnect. They weren’t students anymore and their content didn’t match who they were becoming.

This one line from an Alex Hormozi video made them rethink what they’re doing:

“If you want a certain type of person, create the content that person wants to see.”

So they did something bold. They pivoted their 1.25M-subscriber channel’s purpose. Their new mission:

• Learn deeply
• Build meaningful products
• Lead people toward transformation
• Teach entrepreneurship
• Help people earn more doing work they actually enjoy

Just like Thomas Frank who ditched his 2M Youtube channel a few years ago to launch a new one focused only on Notion, Mike and Matty realized that audiences don’t just grow, they evolve. Creators who evolve with them build businesses that last. This new identity aligns perfectly with selling digital products.

Lesson 5: Your freebies are your “free trial”

Most softwares have a free trial option. The Koi brothers created the Study Scheduler by cutting out one tiny piece of Extended Brain and gave it away for free. It became the #1 study template on Notion, downloaded over 800,000 times. (More on how they did that in this video)

People think “free” hurts sales. But for them, “free” was the engine. And the one thing that literally got them 1000X more sales.

When your content hits, your systems need to keep up. Easytools checkout, file hosting, and delivery help small teams survive big spikes which is  the exact problem the brothers solved manually at first.

If you’re a creator building your own digital product ecosystem, your systems matter. Platforms like Easytools exists to remove friction from the parts that slow creators down so you can focus on frameworks, clarity, teaching, and delight. This isn’t a story about courses or Notion templates. It’s a story about solving real problems and building systems that make success inevitable. And that’s something any creator can copy.