This is the story of how I build a Notion app with 1M+ users (and #3 on Product Hunt).
- Coming up with the idea
- Giving up
- Escape Competition
- Turning Point
- Launching
- How we grew to 1M+ uses
- Lessons
Coming up with the idea
Notion has a huge reddit community. People love requesting new features there. But not all the asks get prioritized and built. Sometimes people get frustrated.
Seeing the opportunity to build different widgets for those frustrated users, I teamed up with my friend Alex to start building.
Giving up
Few weeks into building it, we came across . We realize we’re not the only one who saw this opportunity. Few are actually pretty good. My partner started losing motivation.
Escape Competition
I studied our competitors. I wanted to figure out how our website can be better, be different.
[Break down how I differentiated Indify with other apps. Show case the interfaces]
Value: Easy-of-use, Customization (super power for organize growth), brand (little big details, unexpected moments of delight)
Turning Point
I built a waitlist landing page to valid our project and see if people would still be interested.
We shared it on Reddit and people loved it! We end up getting 300+ signups. We also received tons of feedback and ideas. Having those signups really motivated Alex and I to finish building it.
Launching
After another month of building, we launched! I couldn’t sleep. I remember sitting on my bed and watching the upvotes. I replied to every comments till the next morning. I felt so happy and rewarded.
How we grew to 1M+ uses
We grew organically through words of month. People love to setup their Notion pages. Our widgets give them more creative ways to decorate the pages. After the launch, many people shared their page in Notion community.
Lessons
- Discover ideas from community.
- Pricing - We were afraid to charge because our widgets are nice-to-have. We launched them for free and hoping to create a paid widgets in the future. Good side of free, it’s a growth tool & generate us many traffic. People love sharing their setup with our widgets. Downside, Alex told me they had a hard time charging money later on.
- On Competition - competition will always come. They can be good. You also want to know.
- Don’t obsess with details when shipping MVP – There are too many things to worry about. (Attach a screenshot of our backlog)
- Don’t give up half way. Practice the finishing muscle.
- Shipping Project - great way to meet people.
Landing page
Onboarding
Add widget
Embed to Notion
