How I Built It: $37K/Month Notion App – YouTube Dictation Transcript & Vocabulary

1.I just spent 6 days working on it creating like a small MVP and now we are close to 37k of monthly working Revenue how does this guy make over $400,000 a year with an app he built in just 6 days Well turns out he really knows how to find customers obviously there is which is always a big one for this kind of products I was able to get quite a lot of users pretty fast thanks to this Julian Nom started his journey while working a 9 to-5 as a software engineer I was commuting 3 hours day I was spending all of this commute time on my computer working on the side projects after years of experimenting with different side projects Julian finally found an idea that worked and now he's a solopreneur making a doctor's salary while working on multiple passion projects so I gave Julian a call to ask him exactly how he did it and how anyone else can do something similar luckily he shared a ton of good stuff how to find and validate ideas the best places to Market a new product and the viral Loop strategy that got Julian to over $400,000 a year all right let's get into it I'm Pat walls and this is starter [Music] story all right welcome Julian it's nice to have you tell me a little about who you are and what you built okay I'm Julian I'm 28 I'm the founder of not forms which is a form builder for notion users we have close to 100K registered users and now we are close to 37k of monthly working of you got it can you tell us a little bit more about the story of how you found the idea for note forms yeah definitely I was a notion user for maybe two or 3 years I really love the product and one day notion finally released their IPI which meant that anyone could build Integrations and product one notion and I just decided to copy a feature that another database like product named air table had which were forms so you know I just spent 6 days working on it creating like a small MVP timeing was important uh and it really helped going the project it's fine to start small as soon as you get some users and some feedback you're able to iterate much faster and to focus on the you know core value of whatever you're building so you built your SAS around an already existing platform notion why do you like this approach better than doing a traditional Standalone SAS building a one platform is easier you don't have to build the community around it you can kind of cannibalize part of it and try to solve a sub issue which is kind of what I did with not forms right notion already had a huge Community people were really fan of the products they had like a huge sub rect tons of Facebook group of course it comes with its own set of issues you have the platform risk but I think finding this kind of platforms it's really a good way to to start okay so you've already built a couple profitable projects now are there any other methods you have to finding winning ideas yeah I think the easiest way to to find ideas is try to solve your own problems if you're your own user then it's definitely easier to build a great product if you use it you get to see the flows and the issues and improve on them the drawback of this is that sometimes you can have a problem and think it's great to build a tool for this but then you realize you're the only person with that problem because of that I think it's important to ship fast and try and put it in front of other people to get some feedback early other ways to get some ideas I guess is just to be curious talk to people for instance I really love you know with my friends that have totally different career paths and talk about like the way they work their process their daily lives and it's always amazing to me uh with a technical background to hear that you know sometimes they spend one two 3 hours every day doing something that could easily be automated also being on social medias like Twitter I think is really a great way you hear about new tech you hear about New Opportunities you discover new things that later you can apply to new problems I think that's also a great way all right so once you have an idea in mind what's your process for validating the idea and know that it's something that's actually worth building yeah so my way of doing things is just to actually build a product or at least an MVP for it and then share it to as many people as I can and get instantly some feedback from the users focusing on a project for a small short amount of time really helps you get a sense of whether this is valuable or not of course it's hard to apply to many projects you know like there are things that you cannot just build in one week as as I'm a solopreneur you know like I try to avoid this and focus on things that I can build by myself and quickly the more you build I think the faster it is to build now you know like every time I'm starting a new project I can just copy the code base from the previous project keep all the UI and that kind of things and I can just focus on the core logic and the value that I want to bring to the users so you get faster every time my favorite part about Julian's story is he was building side projects while he kept his full-time job and just like Julian I actually did this same thing I started a million-dollar business while I was working in 9 to5 and it wasn't easy it required working on the right idea getting tons of feedback and actually figuring out how to monetize so I could replace my 9 to-5 income but the hardest part above all consistency actually showing up every day and doing the work that's why we created the academy it's a 5we program where you'll find an idea build it launch it validate it all while working just 2 hours a day it's the same framework I use to build a million-dollar business and it's what I've seen thousands of successful Founders actually use it's what actually works because it's all about taking action and actually building which is what I want to see you really take a shot at so if you're curious about building a profitable side project like Julian and me and you still feel like you don't have the time to work on it or work on your ideas well head to the first link in the description if you want to learn more okay so you believe in shipping fast fast but do you have any Frameworks on how to build MVPs really quickly the best way of doing that as a technical person is to focus on the product and not on the technology I've been using the exact same stack for the past 10 years pretty much since I started coding I'm actually using PHP which a lot of developer likes to make fun of with this PHP framework called laravel and now I'm super pro efficient with it I have ton of you know small piece of code that can reuse from one project to the other and that really saves ton of time so yeah you can spend some times if you have fun learning about Technologies but if you want to build projects just do it as fast as you can use what you know and focus on that okay cool now let's talk about marketing yeah how did you get users for your app and what are the best places right now for people to find customers I published the projects and then I just spammed all the notion related communities I could find online obviously there is Reddit which is always a big one for this kind of products usually they have you know like a subreddit dedicated to it people that are really fond of the product so they're curious about discovering new things around it usually people on Reddit and and these kind of communities that really don't like people putting links there trying to get some new users but because it was so new and because the product was entirely free there there's not even monetization in it I feel like they were kind of okay with me doing that and that really helped you know like I was able to get quite a lot of users pretty fast thanks to this but also another platform I found to be super useful our Facebook groups there are many people using Facebook and Facebook groups are super alive there are Facebook groups for everything like for your C for sports for apps for whatever and that was super useful as well Twitter I mean is great the only thing with Twitter is there is a cold start issue when you start twitting you're basically on your own something really important into getting started on Twitter is to find the people that you relate to so the people that inspire you and to try and interact with them genu with times they're going to start you know recognizing your face they will interact with you as well you gain some more followers and you know that's how you get started product I think is a nice way of advertising your product but I think it's a bit overrated I see some people spending weeks preparing for product launch while in the end you just get a bit of traffic a nice backlink and that's pretty much it like when I did the launch for not forms I got you know like of course more eyes on the products but I think I didn't get a single sale from the from the launch you know that's my experience with it I see okay tell us now about your special growth strategy and how someone can implement it in their business to get more users today as people starting using it they were building forms with notion forms and they were sharing the forms because you know that's the purpose of a form Builder you build a form and then you share it you embed it on your website and because of this people that are supposed to F the form they get to see what you built it's easy for you to just add a link back to your product or do some kind of advertisement and that becomes viral because the more users you have the more people see your product and then the more users you have so I think if you have a product for almost every product you can find a way of incentivizing your users to share your product or piece of your product so it could be you know just a small widget that you can put on your website that's exactly what does product hunt by the way you know like they give you this little badge to say hey I was product of the day and then you put this on your website and then it's a it's a back Ling for product so if you can find a smart way of doing this or make it valuable for your users to share what they did on your platform then you can create a viral Loop and I think that's super important to try and build something like this awesome but with all these users coming in how do you manage customer support or all these customer inquiries so for the first year working on it I was entirely alone on the project so I was doing everything myself I was receiving messages like all the time at night so sometimes I would forget you know to turn off notifications and then it would wake me up later on I I hired someone to to help me with this and that was really relief but that being said I really don't regret uh doing this that way it really helped me build a better products understand the user needs but also identify issues within the product so even today we still have the operator you like an agent that's working with me that's uh always on it and we also have an AI chat bot that we train you know on all the product docks and and all the past conversations and really incentivize people to talk to us so within the product we have tons of button you know they can click to report a bug leave us some feedback suggest a feature or just you know like talk to us really since the beginning I've only Built what people ask me to build nice so actively talking to customers is how you actually find the features to add let's now talk about monetization how did you start making money from note forms how did you make your first dollar yeah it's starting taking off slowly I think at some point I which th000 users I had tons of feature requests all of these features that I was adding I was adding you know a little Pro tag and when you clicked on it it says ahey this is free for now because it's the beta but whenever it will launch it will become a paid feature and then one day I built all the subscription system and I just flipped the switch and I told all the users hey now this part of the product is paid since you were there since the beginning here's a 4% discount code that you can use uh for life and it was a long day I remember I was just you know like refreshing the STP page to try and get a a new subscription but nothing came and then later during the night one guy took a a yearly subscription even and I was so happy like I made $90 and then the day after maybe I got two and then three and then I didn't get any subscription for like 3 days started to panic and then I got another one and just went on from there okay now let's talk about pricing how did you decide on the pricing for your product yeah pricing is super hard you don't want to be too expensive but of course you want to make as much money as you can so I didn't know what to do so I just looked at all the for Builders out there and I thought you know hey like this is a new product I have one10 of all the features they offer so I need to be cheaper than all of them and then over time I just experimented a bit I tried you know increasing the price slightly I saw that it didn't really have any impact on the conversion so I did it again and then later on I also added some more expensive plans that also helped you know increasing a bit the revenue and further let's talk about business model how did you choose between a one-time payment and a subscription if it makes sense for a product to have a subscription then it's definitely a good idea because getting recing revenue is amazing because you can you know acquire customer and then for the next X months you will get money for it and I found that selling something for $50 per month is much easier than selling one thing for $500 one time okay let's talk about AI are you currently using it in your business overall I'm super excited about it there was very recently hype about um a new developer tool called cursor which is kind of an AI P IDE and I recently started using it and honestly I'm I'm amazed and it's literally like speeding up by maybe two uh my work nowadays with all the content you can find online with tools like AI I think it's easier than ever to build a product on your own and you know to start working on something so that's amazing and I'm so glad you know I'm living in this period of time because there are just so many possibilities and I'm super excited about all of this okay that's awesome on the topic of technology what are some other software tools you're using to profitably run your business for the Tex tack so the back end framework is a PHP framework named laravel the front end is built with a view framework name next it's all the pages and make sure that everything loads fast the database is post gr SQL we host everything on AWS so of course you know since I work there for a bit it's just easier for me that way now we Ed for subscription billing we use amplitude to track product analytics you know like the user behavior on the platform what they use that kind of things we use crisp for the support chat we use Sentry you know to track uh the errors that happens on the app so that we can you know like learn about them and fix them we use a product called feature base for a road map like a public road map where people can see you know what's going to be built next and of course feature request and Bug reports with three people fulltime and one person that's parttime so the total salary for them is 5K so that excludes me then there is 1K that we pay for servers and all the SAS tools that I mentioned earlier we spend around 3K per month on ads uh so we only do Google ads mostly because I don't know how to do anything else and then usually we spend probably like around 2K per month with random Freelancers so it could be you like UI designers copywriters Sometimes some external developers that kind of thing okay now last question that we ask all founders we interview if you could sit on younger Julian's shoulder and give him some advice when he was just starting out what would you say um Amazon has a set of leadership principles one of them is bios for action and I think that's a really good one the most important thing you can do is start if you spend too much time thinking about it and not doing anything that at some point you'll just get demotivated and and nothing's going to happen the Project's going to die but as soon as you know you start working on it and you get you know to see the first results get the first users it really FS your motivation and of course it helps you shavee the product better because you get feedback and and so on so the first thing would definitely be launch as soon as you as you can don't overthink it don't build too many features just build a simple MVP and then put it in front of the eyes of your customers the other thing is not to be shy so that took me a bit of time as well but try to talk about it to as many people as you can you can only know if it's a good idea or if it's valuable or if it's actually useful uh by getting the opinion of other people no one is going to stop everything they do in their life just to build what you describe them right if that happens that means that you know one guy was more motivated than you by your own ID and that's on you right you should have done it in the end you're not risking that much I think if if if you know you can find a job especially like if you're software engineer six months off working on a project is is nothing the risk seems huge but I think it's not that big all right Julian thank you thanks for coming on and sharing your story I love the business that you built and wishing you luck in the future keep sharing your story awesome cool thanks man yo guys I really hope you all enjoyed the video and wrote down some good takeaways that Julian shared but I do want to say something real quick at the end of the day the point of these videos is to inspire you and show you how other people just like you found ideas and built them hopefully this inspires you to go out and do this thing on your own while learning is important taking action is the thing that's actually going to get you that dream outcome if you still feel like you're struggling to take action no matter what then I highly recommend you check out the starter story Academy it's a 5-we program where you'll come up with an idea you'll build it you'll launch it you'll validate it and you'll get it in front of customers what's even more amazing is you'll do this alongside hundreds of other people doing the same thing building something that will change their life and we will hold you accountable every single day to showing up and doing the work the academy is what I wish I had when I was getting started and I still had a full-time job and it's designed for you to actually build something that changes your life just head to the first link in the description and I'll give you a bunch of more info about it I hope to see you in there otherwise I'll see you in the next one peace [Music]