AMA – My bootstrapped Notion-2-Knowledge Base SaaS just hit $1000 MRR
Hey fellow Indiehackers!
I'm Dominik, a 24-year-old Indiehacker and after five months of working super hard, my Notion-related SaaS hit $1000 MRR. With no Product Hunt launch (yet) and focusing solely on building in public and engaging with the Notion community. This is a big milestone for me and honestly, a small dream came true.
For some, this might be not that much but for me, it definitely is. This site and community is the reason I started my Indiehacking journey instead of getting caught in a perhaps dull corporate job, so I am incredibly thankful for it. I have already been working on several projects before HelpKit that didn't even come close to this sacred MRR number. Ultimately, listening to basically every single IH podcast episode and the support from fellow makers on Twitter is what kept me going and stay motivated.
I am extremely thankful for all the folks who have supported me so far on my journey to become ramen profitable and... beyond.
I hope I can help you a bit on your Indiehacking journey. Perhaps I have a good answer or a mistake to share that you should totally avoid. Whatever it is, throw it at me!
AMA.
~ ~ ~
Some more information:
What is HelpKit?
In short, HelpKit is a no code tool that allows you to easily turn your Notion docs into a professional help center / documentation page. I started it because I was fed up with the existing knowledge base solutions and I am absolutely loving Notion. You can read more about the background story here in this interview if you are curious.
Show me the stats!
👥 Total signed up users: 408
🎯 Paying customers: 51
💰 MRR/ARR: $1,020 / $12,240
💸 Customers on Essential Plan ($19/m): 35%
💸 Customers on Premium Plan ($29/m): 65%
👋 Churn: 0%
🥰 Happy customers: 99.88% (😉)
40 open-source gems to replace your SaaS subscriptions 🔥 🚀
After 19,314 lines of code, i'm shutting down my project
Need feedback for my product.
We are live on Product Hunt
Don't be a Jerk. Use this Tip Calculator.
Hey Dominik, congrats on the site's success.
What are you using for backend? Can you talk a bit about the tools you use for development?
Any productivity/habit tracking apps?
Thanks.
Hey, sure.
I'm using Strapi as a headless CMS running on Node hosted on Render.com. Strapi is amazing and helps you to easily built out secure full fledged API so much faster than custom-coding them. Can absolutely recommend it! Other than that I'm using Nuxt and Tailwind for the frontend. VSCode to... code. Figma for designing and that's about it :)
Productivity-wise everything is run in Notion. I'm sometimes using Todoist to track todos but I always default to just a plain page in Notion for some reason...
Awesome. I love Strapi, but wasn't aware of render.com, thanks for the explanation!
Hey Dominik, congrats on hitting this milestone! I'm so happy for you. And thank you for offering this AMA!
I know you have already shared some of this advice during the process of building HelpKit. But what would you do from today's perspective if you had to start again from scratch. Like, how would you go about finding a B2B SaaS idea? And what would be your approach to evaluate this idea? In your opinion, is it enough to make a landing page or would you already build a small MVP? And how much time would you put into the evaluation process?
Thanks Niklas! Great question. Also one of the most vague and hardest to answer probably.
Firstly, you absolutely should pursue an idea that you enjoy solving. The first two weeks are always golden and are the equivalent of the German saying "Eine rosarote Brille tragen" or "being in the honeymoon phase". What you want is to have an idea that goes beyond that period. Whatever the idea is; Money aside, think about if you could see yourself waking up 6 months later and still enjoy building it. It is so easy to loose your spirit if you are not passionate about the problem.
This also leads to the next thing. How do you find a B2B SaaS idea? Observe your surroundings. Take cues from your own friends, clients, company or community. If you think you have identified a problem, reach out to potential customers. Don't even start building a landing page. Reddit is an amazing way to find early potential users.
This depends a couple of factors. If you can build an MVP in two weeks (no longer! 👀) then a MVP is better IMO to give potentials users a feel for the product. If the MVP would take you longer then I'd setup a landing page with an email signup form and try to get people to sign up for a beta/early access type of thing.
As an Indiehacker there is one thing you want to avoid; swimming upstream. Ideally you want your product and idea to carry you and not the other way around. As a rough threshold I'd say that if after 1 month of marketing your product you don't see a bit of traction and revenue I'd put it on the side and focus on a new idea. Time is precious. 19/20 businesses fail. Pieter Levels launched 70+ products and only 4 are profitable. That's a 5% hit rate. The reason he is so successful is because he learned how to move on.
Hope that helps a bit!
Yes, that definitely helped! Thank you! :)
Amazing :) Let me know if you have further question. Happy to help.
Man this really inspired me. By the way that quote in German hit me ( weist du was ich meine 😂). I am also planning to built a micro-SaaS around the notion ecosystem… I don’t know so far what it will be but I had some random thoughts
Like
Another one said that notion pages do not so well when It comes to SEO
Here is the blog post I read
https://microsaasidea.substack.com/p/micro-saas-products-around-notion
Your post definitely encouraged me to start built something
I will document my achievement on twitter (because have seen many people doing this)
I am new on twitter so leave a follow so u don’t miss anything
@goddi1999
That's amazing man! 💪
Sending you nothing but good vibes @dominikSo congrats ad more to come
Thanks! I am sending good vibes back! ツ
Congratulations Dominik. 0% churn 😳
Thank you! Yes, I can't complain o.O I had one customer cancel the subscription – so then I reached out asked for reason and they told me they were not ready yet – so I offered them a discount. Two months later the signed up for the annual plan 🥳
This is how it's done 🤯
Congratulations bro I want to know how you Market this.
I have written about it here: https://bit.ly/35I9Iml :) Hope it helps!
thanks for sharing your interesting story. I am wondering what payment method are you using?
I'm using Paddle as my payment provider as well as Merchant of Record which means they take care of VAT and tax remittances for me. Highly recommend a MoR!
Just wanted to say HELL YEAH!!!!!!!!!
Haha, that made me smile more than you think!!!11111 ;)
This is really cool! How did you go about researching that this was something that people really wanted, and would pay for it?
So I have been trying to use every available knowledge base software and was completely dissatisfied. I thought there must be a better alternative to this. Additionally, I keep all my documents in Notion and wondered how amazing it would be to use Notion as a content management system for my knowledge base. So... I decided to take on the challenge and 100% scratch my on itch. Over time I had countless of companies reach out telling me they love how simple and clean HelpKit is and that they tried out all other knowledge base software. I didn't take a complete shot in the dark though. I tweeted about HelpKit's soft-launch on Twitter and it was very well received. This provided me with enough motivation to start working on it.
Here's the tweet: https://twitter.com/sobedominik/status/1436016818079076366
Excellent work Dominik!
I really like the idea and your product. Cant resist so I am going to ask this. As a backend developer I always have struggled finding answer to this question :) How do you plan coming up with your product imagery? The image you posted here looks pretty compelling and these are small but very important things imho. So I wanted to understand how you handle this aspect? I have seen you mentioned Figma but in the end Figma is a complete solution and while trying to hit your MVP target you might not get that much time to designs (at least I never managed this).
I have a tool complements Notion as well but could not even come up with a single imagery to use so I am keen to know a bit more on your flow here.
Thank you!
Hey! Thank you so much :)
I am personally a big fan of design and believer in the business value of design. Therefore, I can only recommend to you to study the basics of design. This will help you tremendously for everything you will do in your Indiehacker career. Take a look at a couple of courses, look at Dribbble and Behance, Landingfolio for inspiration and learn from these design. I haven't personally used this but a friend of mine did some Figma courses here: https://designcode.io/courses and absolutely loved it.
It will take a bit of time in the beginning but it's worth it 👩🎨 Hope that helps a bit!
First of all congratulations! That's definitely a great work you did, and now the rewards are coming 😁 I have a question regarding your use of Strapi... Do all of your clients get a unique instance of the cms on their front? If so, I would like to know how do you handle creating these new instances automatically when customers sign up, and how does hosting costs scale scale with the growing number of customers? Thanks!
Hey! No, actually everything is run on two single Render.com instances. The strapi backend and Nuxt.js frontend. I'm using wildcard domains so that I don't have to engage with the tedious process as you mentioned :)
Great Stuff Dominik - Congrats on your milestone!
Your website is really cool! Have you built it with notion?
HelpKit's landing page is custom built with TailwindCSS and Nuxt.js :)
Fantastic work Dominik! Keen to see where you take this product 😊
Thank you so much :)
Congrats on hitting ramen profitability Dominik! This is huge 👏
What are your next plans for HelpKit and indie hacking as a whole?
Thanks Alex! Really appreciate it.
In terms of HelpKit: I want to start more focusing more on marketing soon. Right now BIP still works great and at this point a lot of word-of-mouth is happening. That said, I still spend quite a lot of time talking to customers, making sure all the features work as they should and listen to feature requests. Based on my customers feedback I could already improve HelpKit 10x which is another sign for launching early and letting customer feedback build the product.
In terms of Indiehacking: There's still a bit more MRR left for me to become comfortably sustainable. While reaching $1000 was definitely my main goal, I see that there's potential for much more to come for HelpKit but also perhaps other Notion related ideas I have. Right now I want to fully focus on growing HelpKit and see where it leads to in a couple of weeks/months :)
Congrats Dominik! This is an awesome milestone.
Do you have any tips with building products in the Notion space that significantly differ from other spaces? What was your GTM strategy looking like?
Thank you!
Hm... yes. So I would say that the Notion community is by far the most engaged no-code tool community I have experienced so far. Generally you will receive a lot of early feedback and cheerful support from Notion fans which is very rare to have.
GTM strategy: The first five months I have almost solely focused on building in public and sharing my journey on Twitter, here and Reddit.
Here's a chart on sign-up acquisition based on the channel: https://imgur.com/a/sN9N4h6
As you can see:
1. SEO/Google
2. Twitter
3. Product Hunt (haven't launched HK yet but another "coding-for-marketing" product)
4. Youtube
Hope that helps!
Congrats! 🥳
Thank you! Really appreciate it (ʘ‿ʘ)╯