Noah Bragg is the founder of Potion, a website builder based on Notion. It lets you simply publish a website straight from Notion without any coding skills! Noah has done a great job growing Potion to $6k MRR. I interviewed him about how he created Potion, his best marketing channels and his tips for founders who want to build a SaaS business.
Edit - In June 2023 Noah actually sold this business for $300k!
Can you tell us about Potion and your achievements so far?
Potion is a website builder built on top of Notion. You can easily create a custom website in a couple minutes with your Notion content. I’ve been building Potion for 2.5 years now and am doing $6k MRR. I have 460+ paying users and get around 20k traffic to the Potion site a month.
Why did you create Potion?
I was looking for my next business opportunity. I knew I wanted to build the business solo the Indiehacker way. I had a thesis that a great way to build a solo project was to build in a niche on top of another platform.
I was a Notion user at the time and really loved the product. I also noticed that there were a lot of people talking about Notion online. I saw this as a great sign. If there was great word of mouth for Potion, maybe there would be the same for a product built on top of Notion.
I started to do some digging of what kind of product I could add onto Notion. I noticed that hundreds of people were trying to hack together a website with a tool called Fruition. It allowed you to point a custom domain to your public Notion page. I had even used public Notion pages as a simple site in the past.
So I saw that the demand for websites on Notion was there. That gave me enough confidence to start building Potion. I also loved that it was a tool that building in public made a lot of sense for. I enjoyed building in public and knew that potential Potion users would be the kind of user that would also enjoy following building in public.
What have been the best marketing channels for growing Potion?
Building in public has been one of my greatest channels. I got my first 75 users from building in public on Twitter. I got my next 75 users from my Product Hunt launch that went pretty well. Was 1st of the week and 3rd of the month. After that I tried to grow my other channels because I didn’t want to be fully reliant on building in public. The Potion affiliate program is now my #1 channel. I have some creators that make over $300/mo with the program. SEO is my second best channel.
Can you talk about how you coded Potion and what your stack is?
My stack is React, Next.js, Node.js and MongoDB. I love my stack and Next.js has turned out to be amazing. MongoDB is good but if I were to build something today, I’d use Supabase instead. I also use Crisp, Rewardful, NotionForms, ConvertKit, SplitBee, and Fathom.
What’s your top tip for people running a SaaS business?
The idea and execution is really important. You need to have both to make a business work well. So start with a good idea and really try to validate it. What are the risks in the idea? Try to solve those first. Once you are confident, go all in!
What does an average day look like for you?
Today Potion is at a pretty stable place. At a minimum I need to do around 30 mins a day of customer support. I usually try to make a post or two on Twitter of what I’m working on and how things are going.
I would usually then spend the rest of the day, (about 5 hours) working on new Potion marketing efforts or features. Recently things have been a little bit in flux and I haven’t been spending all of my time on Potion. I had a baby recently so I have been taking some time off which has been great. I also have been exploring some other ideas that I may pursue.
Where can people find out more about you and Potion?
You can find more about Potion at https://potion.so. We have some great website examples here: https://potion.so/showcase and templates here: https://potion.so/templates that show what’s possible. I have a podcast https://productjourney.fm where I share the journey building a solo SaaS. And of course I share a lot on Twitter: https://twitter.com/noahwbragg
Check out another founder interview - Cory is making $100k from his Django SaaS template
