How I Bootstrapped My Notion Form Builder $180K ARR
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hello, my name is Julien Nahum and I’m the founder of NoteForms, a SaaS company offering a form builder integration to Notion (the productivity software).
At the time of writing this, NotionForms has a total of 26k users, 850 paid subscribers, and an ARR of $182k.
It has been growing very steadily since its launch, and it’s now being used internally by quite a few huge tech companies!
What's your backstory and how did you develop the idea?
In May 2021, I left my job as an SDE at Amazon Web Services and moved back from London to Paris to focus on my projects. I did not have a specific project idea, I just wanted to give myself some time. I did have some savings (1~2 year), but my plan was not to use them. During my studies, I worked as a freelancer for a few tech companies so I knew I could easily find some gigs if needed.
For a few weeks, I worked on a few small projects. I didn’t finish building the MVPs as I was not convinced enough by the ideas. I also did some open-source work. Around the same time, Notion released its long-awaited API. Being a huge Notion fan, I decided that I wanted to build something with this API.
Finding what to build didn’t take long. A few years before then, I discovered Airtable, a no-code tool to create collaborative databases. One of the cool features of these databases is that they could be transformed into forms in seconds.
These forms would automatically contain one field for each column in their database table and could be shared everywhere. Each form submission automatically lands in their Airtable database, which is super convenient. Notion databases are so similar to Airtable’s, so I remembered this form feature and decided to build a similar tool.
Take us through designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.
I knew that the scope of this project wasn’t too large and that I could quickly build the first version of it, so I decided to build it without any kind of customer/product validation. I had already built many web projects before (SaaS, Marketplaces, etc), and even had a starter project template.
I’ve been building with the same tech stack for the past 8 years. I don’t want to waste time learning new technologies while I’m focused on building a new product. Thanks to this, I was able to ship an MVP in 4 days. With this project, I decided to revive my old Twitter account and build this whole project in public.
Build in public. Just think about the content you’d like to see yourself and produce it. It does not have to be complicated.
A form builder seems to be a relatively simple product. The advantage is that it’s easy to find inspiration from other products, but the drawback is that customers, who are familiar with similar products, come with expectations.
My goal with the MVP was to validate the fact that Notion users would be interested in having a dedicated form builder, offering an advanced integration with their favorite tool. Therefore, I focused mostly on the Notion part of the product, leaving aside some common form features such as logic, advanced customization, multi-pages forms, etc.
During the first 2-3 months the product was entirely free. I built everything myself, so the costs were really low (only a $20/month server initially). NotionForms was ugly and buggy, but because it was free I managed to get quite a lot of early users.
Since the very first days, I added some automations to request feedback from the users, and I created a Facebook group for users to ask questions or get updates on the product. There are so many form builders out there, so it was easy to build the first roadmap, but discussing intensively with users is what helped me focus on the right things. At the time, I was having calls with customers daily.
After a bit, the product was more stable, and I decided that it was time to monetize it. I always disliked usage-based pricing for form builders so I decided to keep it very simple with a unique flat price of $15 per month.
I did not know what people were willing to pay for such a service, so I just picked this price because it was approximately 2 times cheaper than the cheapest plans of most form builders. I then decided on the features that were going to be in the paid plan. Generally, I included all UI customization features or features directly costing me money, such as file uploads.
To prepare for the launch of the paid plan, I emailed all users with a 40% lifetime discount code. It was a very stressful day, but it ended well since I got my first customer!
Describe the process of launching the business.
When I initially launched the first free version of NotionForms in May 2021, I had no budget and no audience, and I was a nobody in the Notion community. I decided to give social media a try and posted in every Notion community I could find.
I posted on Facebook groups, Reddit, and Twitter, and a random person even hunted NotionForms on a Product hunt. It’s not always easy to reach out to communities like this without sounding like a spammer.
I believe that because NotionForms was entirely free, people positively welcomed my posts. The Notion community is very active and super involved. Thanks to this, other people started to share what they created with NotionForms!
A few months into the project, I also did a successful product hunt launch, where NotionForms was voted product of the day. I also was awarded a Maker Grant by Product Hunt for NotionForms.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Here’s the current breakdown of acquisition sources (self-reported by users):
The great thing about form builders such as NotionForms is that they are viral products. Indeed, users will start using your product, they’ll create forms, and they will start sharing them. Form respondents will then see these forms, discover NotionForms, and ultimately create a form.
People also add links to their forms from their websites, essentially creating backlinks to NotionForms, which helps with SEO. Since its launch, it is this viral loop that has been responsible for its growth. The “Powered by NotionForms” below every free form is very similar to the “Sent from my iPhone” that Apple used when launching the iPhone. If we also count word of mouth (friend_colleague) on the graph above, then we can see that the “product viral loop” is responsible for more than 55% of acquisitions.
If you can find a similar feature for your product, an option that can be shared by users, a widget they can embed on their website, etc. then your users can do the marketing for you!
In terms of volume, there are more than 70k unique users that visit the site each month (including form respondents that do not necessarily know about the product).
Producing content is also important for SEO. Unfortunately writing articles takes time, and I don’t like it that much so we don’t have many SEO articles on the main website. We have a help center, with many articles about the product.
We also have a Youtube channel with a few video tutorials showing how to use the product. It has around 13k views so far, and I generally have great feedback for them. We also offered the product for free to a dozen of international YouTubers that produced videos presenting NotionForms to their community.
We have a Twitter account, where we generally post new features & new content. NotionForms has a Facebook group with almost 2k members where we post news, and new content, and answer customer questions.
I very recently started to experiment with Google paid Ads. I hired an expert to help me get started but unfortunately, results aren’t promising. I’m still learning about ads and I haven’t given up yet, but it’s not profitable for now.
I don’t have any particular method to retain customers. Most of the time I spend on this project is to do customer support, and it seems to me that customers value that a lot.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Today the project is profitable. I stopped working as a freelancer more than a year ago. During the past year, NotionForms’ MRR has been growing at least 12% month over month. At the time of writing, MRR is $14.7k. As with many other SaaS products, costs are low.
Here’s what the monthly cost breakdown looks like:
- Salary (for 2 people): $6k
- AWS: $180
- Crisp (customer support tool): $70
- Profitwell (Churn prevention & metrics): $100
- Others: $50
I’m also experiencing different acquisition channels. I’ve recently hired an expert to set up some ads for NotionForms (~$750 per month), a freelancer to produce educational videos showing how to use the product, and a copywriter to start writing some blog articles.
In terms of usage, around 80k people visited NotionForms last month (including form respondents). Every day, around 70 new users create an account and 100 new forms are created. The conversion rate from a free account to a paid subscription is at ~3.5%.
Currently, I work 1h per day to maintain NotionForms, split between customer support and preparation/review of the work done by my developer. Some weeks I work much more on the project, but generally, I try to automate as much as I can.
The short-term goal of the past 6 months was to reach $200k ARR. Hopefully, this will be achieved soon. Longer term, the goal is to reach $333k ARR by December 2023. To achieve this, I will work on improving conversion rates and reducing friction when onboarding new users to the product. Hopefully paid ads will also help.
Building on top of Notion (or any other platform) offers a lot of advantages, but also comes with risks. Notion could suddenly decide to revoke my access to their API anytime, essentially killing the product. I’m currently working on other products. One of them is also a Notion product, but my main projects aren’t related to Notion, as I want to diversify the risks. My goal for the next 12 months is to get another new SaaS to $5k MRR.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
I use the following tools:
- Stripe for payments
- Profitwell for payment retention & financial metrics
- Crisp for customer support & emailing
- Amplitude for app usage analytics
- Google Analytics for website traffic analysis & event tracking
- Github for code repositories, code building, etc.
- AWS for infrastructure, DevOps & monitoring
- Slack for communications and for alerts
- Notion for everything else: Roadmap, CMS, Task planning, Coordination with contractors, etc.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Even though I almost exclusively consume English content, I mostly listen to French podcasts. People I follow on Twitter influence me the most. There are so many inspiring entrepreneurs sharing their journey with great details. I find it easier for me to relate to them than to famous successful entrepreneurs such as Bezos or Musk. It would be super hard for me to list them all, but here are some entrepreneurs I’ve been following since the beginning of this journey: Andy Cloke, Noah Bragg, Damon Chen, Pierre de Wulf & many others!
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
To me, the most important thing is just to get started. I see many people with great ambitions that struggle to get anything done. Don’t be afraid of doing things wrong. Entrepreneurship is nothing like a job, there’s no right way of doing things. You’re going to make mistakes and that’s ok. It’s the only way to learn!
Go fast. Don’t spend a year building a product without showing it to anyone. That would most likely be a waste of time. Only users can decide if your product is excellent, so you should show them your product as soon as possible to start getting some feedback. Nowadays with all the no-code tools and platforms that exist, you should be able to quickly create an MVP. Confronting your product with users early will also help you realize when your product is bad.
Be resilient. Building a company is hard, and you probably won’t succeed the first time. There’s always a part of luck when creating a project, so don’t be demotivated if a project fails. For NotionForms, I had great timing. I built the product right when they released their official API, by “luck” there was quite a lot of demand for it, and the community was growing super fast. But before NotionForms, I worked on many different projects that never made any money.
Finally, build in public. If you’re not a heavy social network user (like I was), this can seem annoying or even frightening, but it’s worth it. Just think about the content you’d like to see yourself and produce it! It does not have to be complicated, many people are interested in seeing how others build companies. Entrepreneurship can also be very lonely. Building in public will allow you to meet other like-minded people, which is super valuable. I have amazing interactions with the people I met on Twitter: we help each other, we share tips, we inspire each other, etc. This community definitely helped me to stay motivated.
Where can we go to learn more?
I’ve been building in public on Twitter since the very first day. It’s definitely the best place to follow my work and to reach out to me. I also have a blog, even though I struggle to post on it regularly. Finally, you can also contact me by email.
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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