Last weekend I made a decision that probably sounds backwards on paper.
I took every product I sell — five Notion templates, two spreadsheet workbooks — and built a stripped-down free version of each one. Same design. Same workflow. Same first impression. Just fewer modules, fewer tabs, and a clear upgrade path baked into the file itself.
If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been heads-down on Tynkr Tools & Co for months. Creator OS templates, finance workbooks, the whole stack. The stuff is real, the stuff works, and people who buy it tend to come back for more. The problem isn’t the product. The problem is the gap between “I’ve never heard of you” and “here’s $27.”
Lite versions close that gap.
I want to be honest about what these are, because the lead-magnet ecosystem is full of stuff that’s basically a teaser PDF with the good parts ripped out. That’s not what I built.
The Budget Workbook Lite is a working budget tool. It has the Read Me, the formatting instructions, the Control Panel, and all twelve monthly tabs. You can use it for a full year and never feel like you’re missing something. What’s missing is the deeper layers — the debt payoff modules, the savings goal tracking, the net worth dashboard. Those live in the full version.
Same logic on the Notion side. Creator Business Lite gives you Contacts, Leads, and Deals — the entire core CRM workflow. What you don’t get is the financial side, the proposal pipeline, or any of the connected dashboards. Use the lite version for six months, outgrow it, and the upgrade is right there.
Every lite file has an upgrade prompt built in. Inside the template. Inside the PDF. Not in the Etsy listing description, not on a landing page — in the file the user already has open.
The Etsy reality is that people don’t trust unknown shops with their money the first time they encounter one. Reviews matter, but reviews come from sales, and sales come from trust. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem and most new sellers solve it by either undercutting on price or shouting louder on social.
I’d rather solve it by handing over a working product and letting the work speak for itself.
If the lite version is genuinely useful — not a teaser, not a stripped corpse of a product — then the people who use it become real users. Some upgrade. Some don’t. Both groups talk about it. The ones who don’t upgrade still send the link to a friend, and that friend might be the one who upgrades.
Here’s the actual setup, in case you’re thinking about doing something similar:
Etsy: Each lite is listed at $1 (Etsy’s minimum — they don’t allow $0). The full versions stay at full price.
Notion Marketplace: The five Creator OS lites are listed free, native to the Notion ecosystem.
Lemon Squeezy: Once my account is approved (more on that in a future post), the lites will live there as true free downloads.
Upgrade code:
35% off any full version, no expiration, baked into every lite file.
The upgrade code lives only inside the file. Not public. If someone never opens the lite version, they never see it. That filter is intentional.
I genuinely don’t know if this is going to work. I have hypotheses — the lite versions will pull people who would have bounced, the Notion Marketplace listings will bring in an audience that doesn’t shop on Etsy, the upgrade code will convert at some single-digit percentage that justifies the build cost.
But hypotheses aren’t data. So I’ll be tracking conversion rates, watching where the upgrades come from, and reporting back here.
If you’ve ever tried something similar — a free tier, a lite version, a real lead magnet that wasn’t garbage — I’d love to hear what worked and what didn’t. Reply to this email or drop a comment. I’m building this in public for a reason, and the public part is supposed to go both directions.
More soon.
— Josh
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.