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.:
- What other products are you working on? (if any)
Julien Nahum is the founder of NotionForms - Simple form builder for Notion
Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
NotionForms is a form builder for Notion users. Because it was built for Notion and only works with Notion it offers a very advanced level of integration. Few years ago, I discovered Airtable. I was amazed by how easy it was for non-technical people to create very advanced database. They have a built-in form feature allowing users to create forms from their existing database. I thought that it was really cool, and as a Notion user, I was missing this feature, so when they released their API I decided to built it myself!
How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
It took me 6 days to acquire the first 100 users, and around 2 months to get the first 50 customers. It took me 4.5 months to get the firs 50 paying customers.
I only relied on organic acquisition channel: social medias (facebook groups, reddit, twitter, Product hunt), word of mouth & SEO. Because the product is a form that's embed by users, I have a lot of backlinks, and NotionForms domain rapidly got a great domain authority score, helping a lot with SEO!
Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
I'm using the PHP framework Laravel in the back-end, PostgreSQL for the database, a single page Vue.js app for the front-end, and TailwindCSS for the styling. I recently switched to a fully serverless architecture on AWS, which allows me to avoid any scaling-related issue.
I can't think of any limitation...
What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
- Notion for organization & CMS
- Crisp for customer support
- Stripe for payment
- Slack for communication
- Amplitude for product analytics
- Figma for design
- ChartMogul for subscription analysis.
What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
This whole entrepreneurial thing is all about calculated risks. If your goal is to reach a certain level of financial freedom, and you want to be as free as possible, then it's not a "risk" to give entrepreneurship a try. In fact it's pretty much the only way to achieve that. Take the risks you can take!
Also, having an audience is so helpful that it feels like a hack! Start building yours today!
Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
I just read Predictably Irrational which I really enjoyed. If you like to understand (and discover weird) human behaviors, you should definitely read it! Conclusions are simple and accessible, it's quite easy to apply them in your business/daily life.
I usually don't subscribe to newsletters.
Somehow, I mostly listen to french podcasts. But I do enjoy a lot business podcasts like MyFirstMillion
What other products are you working on? (if any)
Mainly on another web3 related project. Nothing concrete enough to share, it's work in progress :) But also:
https://vizion.so/ a tool to easily share Notion database viewshttps://tweetsync.io/ a tool to sync SaaS stats on Twitter for indiehackers building in public and
