Table of Contents
- Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
- How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
- Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
- What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
- What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
- Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
Noah Bragg is the founder of Potion - Create websites with Notion.
Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
Potion allows you to easily turn your Notion content into a full website with a custom domain, custom styles, and speedy page speeds that is great for SEO.
I got the idea for the product when I saw many people trying to create websites with Notion in difficult ways. They were duck taping things together to try to get their custom domain. I also saw that people loved Notion and talked about it a lot so thought this would be a great product that hopefully the community would talk about as well.
When I saw there was demand for this product and I expected Notion was growing a lot, I thought this would be a great wave for me to jump on. I wanted to build solo business and so I figured building on a platform would be a great way to do this without competing with bigger companies
How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
It took me around 3 months to get to 50 customers. All of my original customers came from Twitter. I built in public on Twitter and that got a lot of people interested in what I was building. Some of them ended up becoming my first customers.
Building in public was my first strategy as I knew people that enjoy following building in public are typically also entrepreneurs which is perfect for my kind of customer.
Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
I'm using React, Next.js, Node.js, MongoDB, and Vercel. No real limitations from the stack.
The main challenge is that we have hundreds of websites that we host all through Vercel. Vercel probably isn't typically used for this many sites. So managing them in the Vercel dashboard can be a little slow and harder to manage.
What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
Potion (do lots of dog fooding), Notion, Crisp, Splitbee, Stripe, Vercel, Fathom, Notion Forms, Ahrefs, Chartmogul
What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
Persistence is so key in getting a business to work. It takes a lot of effort but once you know you're headed in the right direction, you just need to keep pushing and learning. If you do that in persist, you're most likely going to succeed. That has been my experience at least.
Another insight I have learned a lot is to really focus on a problem where there is demand. It also helps to jump on a wave that is growing. This makes things a lot easier. So doing some research and understand the problem and the market up front is really helpful.
Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
Atomic Habits
The Bible
The Mom Test
productjourney.fm (My podcast)
My First Million
The Art of Product
Out of Beta
