Bootstrapping a SaaS from $0 to $10K MRR in a year

Julien Nahum writes about his journey building NotionForms from zero to $10,000 monthly recurring revenue in one year 🚀

Notion is a popular productivity tool – with apparently more than 30 million users – and Julien’s software allows you to “create beautiful forms to fill your Notion tables.”

What impresses me most about Julien’s success is that he started with barely any audience and seemingly did a lot of things “wrong” when starting out…

Many people online explain that the hardest part is always to sell the product. They recommend you start selling it (via landing pages for instance), even before you build it. I agree with this, but unfortunately, I’m an engineer. I love to build stuff and therefore started by building the product.

He spent a few days coding up his MVP, then announced it to almost nobody on Twitter…

As soon as I had something visual to show, I tweeted about it. This tweet was retweeted 4 times and got 11 likes. I had around 70 (inactive) followers back then, so this was huge for me!

Julien had more success getting the word out via Notion-related subreddits and Facebook groups. 

Which surprised me, since those places often balk at any kind of self promotion 😡

I think the key for Julien was that he offered NotionForms for free in the beginning. So while promoting it he came across as simply sharing a useful free tool he created.

Anyway, those efforts, combined with some networking on Twitter and someone submitting the project to ProductHunt, landed Julien his first 100 free users in only six days.

Then he got to work adding more features and building a premium version.

Julien goes into lots more detail here about his journey. Highlights include:

• How his freemium viral loop works
• Getting influencers to promote his software
• Adding a second paid plan
• Dealing with copycats
• Relaunching on ProductHunt
• Receiving an acquisition offer of $350,000 😱

Closing words from Julien…

With my old Macbook in France, I created a product used by 330k people, all around the world! SaaS is beautiful.