MicroFounder - Building on top of Notion

Todo lists, roadmaps, engineering wikis, meeting notes. Many people use Notion to organize their work.

So why not use Notion for other tasks, like scheduling Tweets or building a knowledge base?

Several microstartups – like Potion ($4.3k/mo) – use Notion as a website builder, converting the content directly to a website that can be published on a custom domain, adding some valuable extensions like custom CSS or SEO improvements.

Others are also treating Notion as a CMS, but converting the data into something entirely different. Here are some of the use cases:

✏️ NotionForms ($8k/mo) is an easy-to-use form builder
🧐 HelpKit ($2k/mo) builds a knowledge base from your Notion
🪶 Feather ($190 MRR) is a complete blogging platform
🐦 Queue ($116/mo) lets you schedule tweets

Dominik – the microfounder of HelpKit – has also been using Notion for years, and this is where the need to build HelpKit was born:

"I have been using Notion for a few years now. It's an amazing tool for storing and organizing all of my company's knowledge and documentation. After a while, I realized that I need something that I can expose to my customers."

He started building public on Twitter with only 300 followers but the topic resonated and he was quickly able to gain ~1000 followers.

"The first two sales were actually made as a pre-order to see if someone would be willing to pay money for the product without the product even existing."

Pre-selling your startup can be a great motivation to start working on it, but for Dominik it was actually the positive feedback from Twitter that kept him building.

"I had the pre-order running for two weeks and honestly hoped to have more than 2 pre-orders but the feedback of both was so encouraging that I knew I am onto something."

It's actually quite popular to build a microstartup on top of a popular platform. 14% of all startups on MicroFounder are built for other platforms, and Notion being #2 after Twitter. Maybe because it's easier to grow a tool for an app people are already using, or because it's natural to extend an existing platform's functionality.