How a solo developer reached $37K/month building a Notion form app

Executive overview

Most SaaS founders build standalone products and then struggle to find an audience. Building on top of an established platform with an existing community sidesteps that problem entirely.

Julien Nahum launched Notionforms six days after Notion released its API, copied a feature from a competitor, and distributed it through Notion's Reddit and Facebook communities. He scaled to $37K MRR as a solopreneur by shipping fast, letting users drive the product roadmap, and embedding a viral loop into the product itself.

Timing an MVP to a platform API launch and distributing through that platform's community is a repeatable playbook for reaching early users fast.

Finding and validating ideas

• Build on established platforms: inherit the community, solve a sub-problem
• Solve your own problems first — but ship fast to confirm others share them
• Talk to people with different careers; manual workflows that could be automated are product ideas
• Validate by launching an MVP quickly and measuring real user response, not surveys

Building MVPs fast

• Use the same tech stack for every project — proficiency compounds
• Reuse codebases across projects; focus only on the new core logic
• Avoid chasing new technology when speed is the goal
• Julien's stack: Laravel (PHP), Nuxt (Vue), PostgreSQL, AWS

Distribution and marketing

• Post in niche community spaces first: subreddits and Facebook groups dedicated to the platform
• A free product with no monetisation gets more latitude from community moderators
• Twitter requires patience — engage genuinely with others before expecting followers
• Product Hunt drives traffic and backlinks but rarely converts to sales directly

The viral loop

• Notionforms embeds a backlink in every form users share publicly
• Every form fill is an impression for the product
• Principle: find a way to make users share a piece of your product as part of normal use
• The loop compounds: more users → more shared forms → more new users

Monetisation and pricing

• Launched free, tagged upcoming paid features as "pro (beta)" from the start
• Flipped the paywall once subscriptions were built; gave early users a 40% lifetime discount
• Priced below competitors on launch — one tenth of the features, so cheaper
• Raised prices incrementally; conversion held steady each time
• Added higher-tier plans to increase revenue without changing lower tiers
• Subscription beats one-time payment: a $50/month sale is easier than a $500 one-time sale

Customer support as a product tool

• Handled all support personally for the first year — painful but invaluable for understanding users
• Built only features users explicitly requested
• Now uses an agent plus an AI chatbot trained on docs and past conversations
• Embedded feedback buttons throughout the product to keep the signal flowing

Key advice for founders

• Bias for action: overthinking kills momentum; start anyway
• Launch the simplest possible MVP and put it in front of users immediately
• Talk about your idea openly — the risk of someone stealing it is near zero
• For software engineers: six months of runway to test an idea is a low-stakes bet