SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Build a Website On Notion? Founder Gets first 70 Customers at $10/mo!
06 Jun 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I think I would raise like a little bit of capital from kind of like a bootstrapper friendly kind of investor to kind of help me kind of in that stage between, you know, potion creating enough money for me to live on. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
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There, you'll find a private RSS feed that you can add to your favorite podcast listening tool, along with other subscriber-only content. No questions asked. No questions asked. Hey folks, my guest today is Noah Bragg. He started his entrepreneur journey creating multiple projects in college. And then after college, he started his first real startup called Coffee Pass with his roommate.
It was an app like the Starbucks app, but for local coffee shops. After working at that startup for two years, it was acquired. Now Noah is indie hacking building businesses at a similar scale and can at least work for him and his family. Potion.so is his current focus. It's a website builder built on top of Notion. All right, Noah, you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it.
Hey, touch on CoffeePass for a second. Was this revenue generating at any point? Yeah. So it wasn't a ton. And that was one of the problems with the business. We had around 25 coffee shops that were using it, but we were probably only doing like $300 a month in our own profit. A lot of the money was going to the coffee shops and that was the revenue for them. So it wasn't making a ton of money.
And that was one of the problems we saw with the business. Okay. Interesting. Okay, so let's let's jump into potion now. So I mean, should we think about this like we are which are Squarespace, but for Notion? Yeah, basically, I mean, it's a website builder. You can build really, you know, tons of different kinds of websites with it. But yeah, it's built on top of Notion.
So you kind of use Notion to put in your content, kind of create your basic layout. And then with Potion, you can add some extra custom like styles and design on top of it. And it hosts it for you. So yeah, it's a pretty cool kind of website builder. I'm having fun creating. What are companies paying you on or people, you know, builders creating on average per month to use the tech? Yeah.
So I have $8 a month for one site, $16 for three sites, and $24 for eight sites. Those are the different places. The average is $8 or $16? Usually, probably 85% of people are just doing one site. I think my average revenue per customer is around $9. So it just ticks up a little bit. I want to talk about how you've grown this.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Noah to start his entrepreneurial journey?
Uh, visits. Yep. Those are visits. And then you said 50% of those convert to paid. Um, yeah. So, so people that actually sign up, um, with the credit card upfront trial right now, my numbers around 50% of those end up becoming paid customers. We'll see how product time, you know, customers is different with that or not, but yeah. How many, how many trial signups did you get from product time?
Do you know yet? Yeah. So let's say I'm looking at the numbers right here. Just for everyone knows this is just two days ago. Right. So yeah, day of, I got 39 signups with credit card up front and yesterday. So the day after 26. Okay. So, so not horrible. I mean, that's, that's, that's pretty darn good. That's what was that 60, about 60 signups.
Now the question is, can you get more than 50% of them to convert? Yep. That's the question. Yeah. Interesting. What sorts of things are you doing on the onboarding to try and increase conversion rate to the full-time paid? Yeah, and this was actually some of the stuff I was just working on before the launch because I knew that would be an important thing.
I don't want to lose people in the leaky bucket. So I made a video that's the first thing you see, just a two-minute video that really easily walks you through the steps and is trying to push people to see the value of, okay, this is what your site could look like.
Chapter 3: How did CoffeePass evolve and what challenges did it face?
Because that's really the big aha moment, right? Is once people have created a website, then they kind of see the value and hopefully they're locked in. And so I'm trying to push people to that point.
I also created like a six day like email kind of drip that kind of keeps sharing like some tips or some guides or showing some other websites created with Potion to kind of show them the value of it to kind of keep them going. And then also I added some emails based on like events.
So like when they do something in the app, it might have a unique kind of email send to kind of like maybe help them if they're stuck in an area or something like that. So yeah, those are the things that I'm kind of doing to kind of push that onboarding process so that, you know, hopefully people created their site before their seven day trial ends and they see the value. Interesting.
And how many, you know, our privacy problems is one way you've gotten customers. How many total people are paying today? Yeah. So I have right now 79 paid subscribers. And so that's obviously all before product hunt and have around almost that number of people that are on the trial currently. Yeah. So if you can convert it, obviously chunk of them, your revenue is going to grow quick here.
But assuming none of them convert, you're still about what? 800 bucks at your first 800 bucks in MRR, right? Yeah, I'm right at $700 MRR. Yeah, this is great. So yeah, again, depending on how many of these you convert, maybe you double your revenue in your product. It's harder to say you double your revenue once you have like a million or two or three million in revenue. Yeah, sure.
So this is great. So two questions. I mean, where are you in life? Are you working on this full time? I'm not. I have a full time job right now. Okay, so like what has to happen at Potion for you to go, oh my gosh, I just can't go to my full-time gig anymore. I've got to keep building this.
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Chapter 4: What is Potion and how does it differentiate from other website builders?
I mean, that's, I mean, that's the plan already. Like, that's what I want to do. I guess really it's, it's a matter of timing as well as I think I would raise like a little bit of capital from kind of like a bootstrapper friendly kind of investor to kind of help me kind of in that stage between, you know, potion creating enough money for me to live on as
Um, and, and kind of getting to that point. Um, so yeah, I'd like to do that in the next, I don't know, four or five months, basically. How much did you look to raise? Uh, somewhere around like 120 to 150 K. And you definitely sort of want to go down, you, you know, that's, you're going to get about 10, 15, maybe 20% of the business and then really be on that VC track.
Is that something you'd go down or would you look at some of these alternative financing options? Yeah. So I don't want to go on the VC track. I'm more interested in investors like TinySeed or Earnest Capital, things like that. Yep. And same thing there, though. In both those models, you're giving up 10%, 11% of the equity. Now, you can buy it back over time at a certain rate.
But I guess you're not opposed to really giving up equity to make that happen. Yeah, no, I'm not too opposed to that. Yeah. And why do you need that much capital to be able to pull the trigger and jump into this full time? I mean, are you able to imagine you're able to keep your personal expenses pretty low so you have enough runway? Yeah, I do.
I mean, it's, it's a matter of the kind of company I want to build isn't, you know, I'm not trying to build the next unicorn or anything like that. And so I want to, you know, I want to build like a calm kind of, uh, business that I can enjoy that, you know, works at least for me, hopefully a small team at some point.
And, um, I think just, you know, kind of taking it slow a little bit, uh, makes sense. Um, some, some of the other reason is I actually have, uh, some stock options with my current company that come about October. So I'm also kind of waiting for that, but that October cliff. All right, cool. Um, all right, let's keep going down the thing here.
So you're, you're working on trotting conversion, right? We already heard about that.
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Chapter 5: What pricing strategies does Potion offer to its users?
We talked about some of your early launch strategies. It's just you right now, correct? Right. And you want a hundred percent of business. Yep. That's great. Um, I mean, what's the plan? How do you go from, you know, a hundred customers to 500 customers? Yeah. So, I mean, obviously Twitter has been my kind of main place and I'll keep to kind of build in public and do that there.
Hopefully, like I've definitely seen some word of mouth kind of happen on Twitter from that kind of stuff. So I'll keep that, but I definitely want some more, you know, channels to grow. So one of the things I've been starting to look at is like affiliate marketing, partnering with other like notion creators. There's quite a few of...
you know, a few people in the notion space that have, um, you know, decent sized audiences. So if I can partner with them in some ways, I think that can be a really good way to get new people seeing what I'm up to. Um, probably do some SEO at some point, um, kind of do some more in that front. Um, and, uh, Yeah, I mean, those are some of my kind of early things.
I might try to partner with like that Facebook group I mentioned that has like 30,000 people in that. So if there's good ways that I can kind of partner with them, maybe sponsor them. But yeah, still a lot to do to kind of figure out in the marketing space. Um, and, uh, yeah, hopefully really just build the word of mouth. I think that can be a big thing.
And so really just making my product really, really good, I think can be kind of the driver for a lot of that. Um, so yeah, there's still lots of things I can do on the product. And did you develop the product yourself or like, are you a developer? I did. Yep. That's great. And the design. Yep. You did this animation of this lady, like painting the website on the homepage. Okay.
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Chapter 6: What marketing tactics helped Potion gain its first customers?
No, that was like a, I don't know, a hundred dollar like image kit that I bought. I love that. I love getting these stories of like how we make this stuff, how the MVP gets out the door, you know? Right. Very cool. This is great. What about additional features you might be adding on, you know, next 12 to 24 months? Yeah.
So it's cool because there's a lot of directions you could go with a website builder. There's so many different kind of websites that people want to build. And so mostly my niche has been solo entrepreneurs, founders, creating a little business or portfolio kind of websites.
And so one of the things I'm looking to do here pretty soon is make it really easy for people to add and take payments on their website so they can sell digital products and things like that. So that's kind of one of the areas I'm looking into and going to do soon.
And then one of the areas I've really looked a lot into is kind of actually going up market to companies with like API docs and help docs, because there's some companies that already kind of do this on Notion. They'll kind of create like documentation, things like that, that's public. And so kind of creating tools that make sense for them to do that and work well with a team.
Um, there's definitely some, I think growth and area there. And then, you know, the coolest part of that is I could go up market a little bit and sell it to some bigger companies. Hey, it all sounds like a great plan. It'll be fun to watch you execute in the meantime, though. No, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book? Ooh, right now I'd say atomic habits.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Um, Sorry, not really. I follow lots of other indie hackers and kind of bootstrappers. Favorite indie hacker? Kenneth Castle. What's he building? He's building Slip.so. Very cool. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business? Stripe. And number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Um, it's been a lot less this week with the product don't launch, but, uh, yeah, I mean, typically eight hours, eight hours a night and situation married, single kiddos. Yeah. I'm married and have two kids married with two kids. Okay. And how old are you? I'm 26. 26. Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?
Um, I guess I wish I knew just how much opportunity there is to kind of, kind of go and do your own thing. It's crazy once you see just how much you can do kind of being an entrepreneur and stuff and seeing all the possibilities instead of just being on the college track. Guys, Noah Bragg, Potion.so. Build your website quickly in a no-code way right on top of Notion.
He got his first customers by hustling on his Twitter account. Then did a product launch last week, added about 79 new trials, hoping about 50% convert to paid. Currently, 80 people paying about $10 a month, so about $700, $800 a month in revenue. He's hoping to scale this and ideally get to the point where he can leave his full-time gig and build this full-time.
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