| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2kwbcvy3a13z41d6k2zwyz |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2kwbcvy3a13z41d6k2zwyz |
| Date | 2024-11-07 |
| Author | Starter Story |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuzxmeUP6ro
I just spent 6 days working on itcreating like a small MVP, and now we areclose to 37k of monthly working revenue.
How does this guy make over $400,000 ayear with an app he built in just 6 days?
Well, turns out he really knows how tofind customers. Obviously, there is, whichis always a big one for this kind ofproducts. I was able to get quite a lotof users pretty fast, thanks to this.
Julian Nom started his journey whileworking a 9 to 5 as a software engineer.
I was commuting 3 hours a day. I wasspending all of this commute time on mycomputer, working on the side projects.
After years of experimenting withdifferent side projects, Julian finallyfound an idea that worked, and now he’s asolopreneur making a doctor’s salary,while working on multiple passionprojects. So, I gave Julian a call to askhim exactly how he did it, and how anyoneelse can do something similar. Luckily, heshared a ton of good stuff—how to findMarket a new product and the viral Loopstrategy that got Julian to over$400,000 a year. All right, let’s get intoit. I’m Pat Walls, and this is Starter[Music].
Story. All right, welcome, Julian. It’s niceto have you. Tell me a little about whoyou are and what you built. Okay, I’mJulian. I’m 28. I’m the founder of Notforms, which is a form builder for Notion.We have close to 100K registeredusers, and now we are close to 37K ofmonthly active users. You got it. Can youtell us a little bit more about thestory of how you found the idea for Notionforms. Yeah, definitely. I was a Notionuser for maybe two or three years. I reallylove the product, and one day Notionfinally released their API, which meant
that anyone could build integrations andproducts on Notion. And I just decided tocopy a feature that another databaselike Airtable had, which was forms. So, you know, I just spent 6days working on it, creating a smallMVP timing was important, uh, and itreally helped going the project. It’sfine to start small. As soon as you getsome users and some feedback, you’re ableto iterate much faster and to focus onthe, you know, core value of whateveryou’re building. So, you built your SaaSaround an already existing platform.
Notion, why do you like this approachbetter than doing a traditionalstandalone SaaS? Building on one platformis easier. You don’t have to build thecommunity around it. You can kind ofcannibalize part of it and try to solvea sub-issue, which is kind of what I did.
With Notion, right? Notion already hada huge community. People were really fansof the product. They had like a huge subReddit, tons of Facebook groups. Of course, itcomes with its own set of issues. Youhave the platform risk, but I thinkfinding these kinds of platforms isreally a good way to start. Okay, soyou’ve already built a couple of profitableprojects. Now, are there any other methods?
You have to find winning ideas. Yeah, Ithink the easiest way to find ideasis to try to solve your own problems. Ifyou’re your own user, then it’sdefinitely easier to build a greatproduct if you use it. You get to see theflows and the issues and improve on them.
The drawback of this is that sometimesyou can have a problem and think it’sgreat to build a tool for this, but thenyou realize you’re the only person withthat problem. Because of that, I thinkit’s important to ship fast and try andput it in front of other people to getsome feedback early. Other ways to getsome ideas, I guess, is just to be curious.
Talk to people. For instance, I reallylove, you know, with my friends that havetotally different career paths,and talk about the way they work, theirprocess, their daily lives. It’salways amazing to me, uh, with a technicalbackground, to hear that, you know,sometimes they spend one, two, three hoursevery day doing something that couldEasily be automated, also being on socialmedia like Twitter. I think is really agreat way. You hear about new tech, youhear about new opportunities. Youdiscover new things that later you canapply to new problems. I think that’salso a great way. All right, so once youhave an idea in mind, what’s your processfor validating the idea and know thatit’s something that’s actually worthbuilding. Yeah, so my way of doing thingsis just to actually build a product, orat least an MVP for it, and then share itto as many people as I can, and getinstant feedback from the users.
Focusing on a project for a small, shortamount of time really helps you get asense of whether this is valuable or not.Of course, it’s hard to apply to manyprojects. You know, like, there are thingsthat you cannot just build in one week.
As I’m a solopreneur, you know, Itry to avoid this and focus on thingsthat I can build by myself and quickly.The more you build, I think, the faster itIs to build. Now, you know, every timeI’m starting a new project, I can justcopy the code base from the previousproject, keep all the UI, and that kind ofthings, and I can just focus on the corelogic and the value that I want to bringto the users. So, you get faster everytime. My favorite part about Julian’sstory is he was building side projectswhile he kept his full-time job, and justlike Julian, I actually did this samething. I started a million-dollarbusiness while I was working in 9 to 5.
And it wasn’t easy. It required workingon the right idea, getting tons offeedback, and actually figuring out howto monetize so I could replace my 9 to-5income. But the hardest part, above all,is consistency. Actually showing up everyday and doing the work. That’s why wecreated the academy. It’s a 5-weekprogram where you’ll find an idea, build it,launch it, validate it, all while workingjust 2 hours a day. It’s the same framework I use to build aMillion-dollar business, and it’s whatI’ve seen thousands of successfulfounders actually use; it’s what actuallyworks because it’s all about taking
action and actually building, which iswhat I want to see you really take ashot at. So, if you’re curious aboutbuilding a profitable side project likeJulian and me, and you still feel likeyou don’t have the time to work on it orwork on your ideas, well, head to thefirst link in the description if youwant to learn more. Okay, so you believein shipping fast, fast, but do you haveany frameworks on how to build MVPsreally quickly? The best way of doingthat, as a technical person, is to focuson the product and not on the technology.
I’ve been using the exact same stack forthe past 10 years, pretty much since Istarted coding. I’m actually using PHP,which a lot of developers like to makefun of, with this PHP framework calledLaravel, and now I’m super proficientwith it. I have tons of, you know, smallPiece of code that can reuse from oneproject to the other and that reallysaves a ton of time. So yeah, you can spendsome time if you have fun learningabout technologies. But if you want tobuild projects, just do it as fast as youcan. 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 nowfor people to find customers?
I published the projects, and then I just spammed allthe Notion-related communities I couldfind online. Obviously, there is Reddit,which is always a big one for this kindof products. Usually, they have, you know,like a subreddit dedicated to it. Peoplethat are really fond of the product, sothey’re curious about discovering newthings around it. Usually, people onReddit and these kinds of communitiesthat really don’t like people puttinglinks there trying to get some new users.
But because it was so new and becausethe product was entirely free, thereThere’s not even monetization in it. Ifeel like they were kind of okay with medoing that, and that really helped. Youknow, like, I was able to get quite a lotof users pretty fast thanks to this. Butalso, another platform I found to besuper useful is our Facebook groups. Thereare many people using Facebook, andFacebook groups are super alive. Thereare Facebook groups for everything, likefor your C, for sports, for apps, forwhatever, and that was super useful aswell. Twitter, I mean, is great. The onlything with Twitter is there is a coldstart issue when you start tweeting.
You’re basically on your own. Somethingreally important in getting started onTwitter is to find the people that yourelate to, so the people that inspire youand to try and interact with them genuinely.With time, they’re going to start you,know, recognizing your face. They willinteract with you as well. You gain somemore followers, and you know, that’s howyou get started. Product, I think, is aNice way of advertising your product, butI think it’s a bit overrated. I see somepeople spending weeks preparing forproduct launch, while in the end you justget a bit of traffic, a nice backlink, andthat’s pretty much it. Like when I didthe 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 salefrom the launch. You know, that’smy experience with it. I see, okay, tell usnow about your special growth strategy,and how someone can implement it intheir business to get more users today.
As people started using it, they werebuilding forms with Notion Forms, andthey were sharing the forms because, youknow, that’s the purpose of a form.Builder; you build a form and then youshare it. You embed it on your websiteand, because of this, people that aresupposed to fill the form, they get to seewhat you built. It’s easy for you to justadd a link back to your product or dosome kind of advertisement.
becomes viral because the more users youhave, the more people see your productand then the more users you have. So, Ithink if you have a product for almostevery product, you can find a way ofincentivizing your users to share yourproduct or piece of your product. So, itcould be, you know, just a small widgetthat you can put on your website. That’sexactly what does Product Hunt by theway. You know, like they give you thislittle badge to say, “Hey, I was Product ofthe day,” and then you put this on yourwebsite. And then it’s a backlink
for Product, so if you can find a smartway of doing this or make it valuable,for your users to share what they did onyour platform, then you can create aviral loop. And I think that’s superimportant to try and build somethinglike this. It’s awesome, but with all theseusers coming in, how do you managecustomer support or all these customerinquiries? So, for the first year workingon it, I was entirely alone on theProject, so I was doing everything myself.
I was receiving messages like all thetime at night, so sometimes I wouldforget, you know, to turn offnotifications, and then it would wake meup later on. I hired someone to helpme with this, and that was really relief.
But that being said, I really don’tregret, uh, doing this that way. It reallyhelped me build better products,understand the user needs, but alsoidentify issues within the product.Even today, we still have the operator,you know, an agent that’s working with me,that’s uh, always on. It, and we also havean AI chat bot that we train, you know, onall the product docks, and all thepast conversations, and reallyincentivize people to talk to us. So,within the product, we have tons ofbuttons, you know, they can click to reporta bug, leave us some feedback, suggest afeature, or just, you know, like, talk to us.
Really, since the beginning, I’ve onlybuilt what people ask me to build. Nice.
So actively talking to customers is howyou actually find the features to add.Let’s now talk about monetization. Howdid you start making money from noteforms? How did you make your first dollar?Yeah, it’s starting to take off slowly. Ithink at some point I had thousands of users.
I had tons of feature requests. All ofthese features that I was adding, I wasadding, you know, a little pro tag, andwhen you clicked on it, it says, hey, thisis free for now because it’s the beta.
But whenever it will launch, it willbecome a paid feature. And then one day, Ibuilt all the subscription system, and Ijust flipped the switch, and I told allthe users, “Hey, now this part of theproduct is paid.” Since you were there,here’s a 4% discountcode that you can use, uh, for life.
It was a long day. I remember I was just, youknow, like, refreshing the STP page to tryand get a new subscription. But nothingcame, and then later during the night, oneguy took a yearly subscription, even.
And I was so happy, like I made $90,then the day after, maybe I got two, andthen three, and then I didn’t get anysubscription for like 3 days. I started topanic, and then I got another one, andit just went on from there. Okay, now let’stalk about pricing. How did you decide onthe pricing for your product? Yeah,pricing is super hard. You don’t want tobe too expensive, but of course, you wantto make as much money as you can. So, Ididn’t know what to do, so I just lookedat all the other builders out there, and I
thought, you know, hey, like, this is a newproduct. I have one out of all the featuresthey offer, so I need to be cheaper thanall of them. And then, over time, I justexperimented a bit. I tried, you know,increasing the price slightly. I saw thatit didn’t really have any impact on theconversion, so I did it again. And thenlater on, I also added some moreexpensive plans, which also helped, youknow, increase revenue a bit. Andfurther, let’s talk about the business model.
How did you choose between a one-timepayment and a subscription?If it makes sense for a product to havea subscription, then it’s definitely agood idea because getting recing revenueis amazing because you can, you know,acquire customer and then for the next Xmonths, you will get money for it.And I found that selling something for 500 one time.
Okay, let’s talkabout AI. Are you currently using it inyour business? Overall, I’m super excited,about it. There was very recent hypeabout a new developer tool calledCursor, which is kind of an AI P IDE.I recently started using it, and honestly,I’m amazed, and it’s literally likespeeding up my work by maybe two.Nowadays, with all the content you canfind online with tools like AI, I thinkit’s easier than ever to build a producton your own, and you know, to startworking on something. So that’s amazing,and I’m so glad, you know, I’m living inThis period of time because there arejust so many possibilities, and I’m superexcited about all of this. Okay, that’sawesome. On the topic of technology, whatare some other software tools you’reusing to profitably run your business?
For the Tex tack, so the back endframework is a PHP framework namedLaravel. The front end is built with aVue framework named Next. It’s all thepages, and make sure that everythingloads fast. The database is PostgreSQL.We host everything on AWS, so of course,you know, since I worked there for a bit,it’s just easier for me that way. Now weuse Amplitude for subscription billing. We useAmplitude to track product analytics, youknow, like the user behavior on theplatform, what they use. That kind ofthings. We use Crisp for the support chat.
We use Sentry to track, uh, theerrors that happen on the app, so thatwe can, you know, learn about themand fix them. We use a product calledFeaturebase for a roadmap, like aPublic road map where people can see youknow what’s going to be built next andof course, feature requests and bugreports with three people full-time andone person that’s part-time, so the totalsalary for them is 5K.
That excludesme. Then, there is 1K that we pay forservers and all the SaaS tools that Imentioned earlier. We spend around 3K permonth on ads, uh, so we only do Google adsmostly because I don’t know how to doanything else. And then, usually, we spendprobably around 2K per month withrandom freelancers, so it could be you,like UI designers,copywriters, sometimes externaldevelopers, that kind of thing.
Okay, now last question that we ask allfounders we interview: if you could siton younger Julian’s shoulder and givehim some advice when he was juststarting out, what would you say, um?
Amazon has a set of leadershipprinciples. One of them is biases foraction, and I think that’s a really goodOne of the most important things you can dois start. If you spend too much timethinking about it and not doing anything,at some point you’ll just getdemotivated, and nothing’s going tohappen. The project’s going to die. But assoon as you know you start working on it,and you get to see the firstresults, get the first users, it really FSyour motivation. And of course, it helpsyou shavee the product better becauseyou get feedback, and so on. So, thefirst thing would definitely be to launchas soon as you can. Don’toverthink it. Don’t build too manyfeatures. Just build a simple MVP andthen put it in front of the eyes of yourcustomers.
The other thing is not to beshy. That took me a bit of time aswell, but try to talk about it to as manypeople as you can. You can only know ifit’s a good idea or if it’s valuable, orif it’s actually useful, uh, by gettingthe opinion of other people. No one isgoing to stop everything they do inTheir life just to build what youdescribe them right if that happens thatmeans that you know one guy was moremotivated than you by your own ID, andthat’s on you, right? You should have doneit. In the end, you’re not risking thatmuch. I think, if you know, you canfind a job, especially if you’rea software engineer. Six months off workingon a project is nothing. The riskseems huge, but I think it’s not that big.
Alright, Julian, thank you. Thanks forcoming on and sharing your story. I lovethe business that you built and wishingyou luck in the future. Keep sharing yourstory. Awesome. Cool, thanks, man. Yo, guys, Ireally hope you all enjoyed the videoand wrote down some good takeaways thatJulian shared, but I do want to saysomething real quick at the end of theday. The point of these videos is toinspire you and show you how otherpeople just like you found ideas andbuilt them. Hopefully, this inspires youto go out and do this thing on your own.
While learning is important, takingaction is the thing that’s actuallygoing to get you that dream outcome. Ifyou still feel like you’re struggling totake action, no matter what, then I highlyrecommend you check out the StarterStory Academy. It’s a 5-week program whereyou’ll come up with an idea, you’ll buildit, 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 dothis alongside hundreds of other people,doing the same thing—building somethingthat will change their life. And we willhold you accountable every single day toshowing up and doing the work. TheAcademy is what I wish I had when I wasgetting started, and I still had afull-time job. It’s designed for youto actually build something that changesyour life. Just head to the first link inthe description, and I’ll give you abunch of more info about it. I hope tosee you in there; otherwise, I’ll see youin the next one. Peace.
[Music]