How Notion Tweet CEO Minh-Phuc Tran grew Notion Tweet to $420 revenue and 5 customers in 2021.

hello everyone my guest today is minfo tran he's building a very interesting company notion tweet dot app he's a senior software engineer previously a fellow at entrepreneur first a global short incubator and loves bootstrapping sas products for creators and makers in public men are you ready takes the top yeah so hello everyone so i'm currently a social engineer uh and trying to bootstrap my first ever business of first ever sas business called notion to it and focusing on helping maker and radios being more productive making more money how's it going do you have customers yet or so you're still pre-customers i i have customers like okay for now so it's at like 30 30 mr now so that's great so five customers what they're paying on average five ten bucks a month something like that yeah like upward of uh seven dollar a month okay and when when did you get your first customer how many months ago was it uh it's like two weeks ago three weeks ago when i first released my mvp and then that's when there's like i i make a landing page and also a twitter handle for notions with and then a lot of people just find interesting and then they just reach out to me even before i view the product so when i just first managed to get the product running there are already a couple people interested in and i try to go and try to get only pet user even at mvp state and that's why i get my first paying customer after mvp like right after i release the mvp number you already you built an audience for this right so when you say people were interested on what platform what where were they watching you was this twitter exclusively where your followers were signing up it's on twitter like even before that i didn't really have a big audience right now i only have like 1k followers but thanks to the fact that in the hacker twitter handle uh interested in the product and then he shared the product uh and then a lot of people know about it and then they just dm me on twitter we're big fans of cortland and his team and indie hackers they're great supporters of future mass counters which we love so this is great now give us more of your back story are you doing this full time or is this a side project it's a side project i'm having a full-time job at a senior software engineer before that i actually quit my job to try to launch a vc bankable startup but then i didn't really enjoy wasting funding at the early stage so i decided to bootstrap and what was that old company what was the old company that you quit your job for and tried to launch on the side yeah so i zone a startup incubator and try to launch a couple of small ideas related to remote work like basically a tool to enable people uh get more remote gigs as well as higher better freelancers and the integrator so got a couple of small customers but then i just didn't really find myself enjoying that so it's kind of a marketplace so do you now with notion tweet dot app you're 100 you own 100 and you're bootstrapped correct yeah i i on 100 okay and what would have to happen at notion tweet for you to quit your full-time job uh i think it's gonna if it's managed to get 5k mri i i will pick my job and what's your plan to get to 5k mrr uh right now i'm going after b2b customers at first i thought it's going to be a fun project but then currently there are quite a few p2p customers who are reaching out and they are much more willing in terms of what they might pay for the product so i i also have a friend who very interested in working with me on the app so hopefully we'll try to see how it goes with that b2b segment now we haven't talked a bunch about the product why don't you tell us what a notion tweet app does yeah sure so the idea the idea is basically a twitter all in one tune where you can schedule manage and blend your tweets and also see the analytics and there's a lot of tools out there for social media creators and i'm just a nursing fan by myself and i need a way to differentiate the product to others and at first i try to look for different tones to roll my twitter but then there's too many options and all of that i need to use another tool on a daily basis which is a problem for me so okay i decided okay that is a problem for me and i am i use notion to blend most of my content so i view the products basically just a tool plug into your notion which is where you blend your ideas and allow you to schedule blender to it and also see full analytics inside your notion what's the value though is it the scheduling the analytics i mean when i look at your landing page the value i see is i can do things like do a bullet list or a check box or nested bullet points and write those in notion and it will automatically translate to twitter when i schedule that tweet yeah so the value is both the landing the landing page is very outdated now like i have no time to update that uh but the products now allow you to schedule and also see analytics and those two integrated to each other so it allows you to customize your own notes and workspace with different properties and topic and all that and then allow you to filter based on the analytics later so moving forward where do you what like what experiments you're gonna run to get you know go from five customers to 50 customers uh honestly i do not have an exact answer for that uh so right now i still focus on building um improving the products based on the feedback of current path customers but i have a wait list of five four hundred people that i didn't even send any email to them yet why not uh so hopefully because i want to really get the products like on the current path customer i'm really really happy using that like on a daily daily basis and then i will send it out also because no send api is not officially released so if i allow public sign up uh there may be some reason so sorry i said again so you're open sourcing and you're worried about data and privacy concerns if you get real signups oh no the notion api is not official uh yet so i'm using an unofficial notion api right and not why i need to yeah get it work with the notion area office or ibi first otherwise like when there are 100 people sign up there might be a problem i see what you're saying because you're going to start pinging their unofficial api you know aggressively and they're going who's this guy who's this guy doing this yeah but that's also fun because even when i'm building on top of an official api it's still paying customers so i love that no we love that very cool now is your plan to keep this bootstrapped or will you go raise more capital to build a team and run more experiments uh i will keep it pushed up for now uh probably yeah unless he has goals but i don't think i will raise any money in one year or two yeah awesome men puke on that note let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book not exactly business but uh the subtle act of not giving a number two is there a ceo you're following or studying is there a founder that you're following or uh there's a lot on twitter like i didn't and i'm yeah i did not i do not idolize any specific photo but yeah a lot of boost up on twitter who's your favorite bootstrapper on twitter uh can it the powder of sleep spell it spell the company i sleep at s-a-o-i-p slip diet number three what's your favorite on number four what's your favorite online tool for building your business uh twitter number four how many hours of sleep to get every night um seven hours and what's your situation uh married single kids single okay and how old are you uh 22 23 okay then last question um what do you wish you knew three years ago when you were 20 uh i wish i started building an audience back there i just yeah guys build an all the audience earlier he sure is now notion tweet dot app enables you to write tweets schedule them and get analytics from notion and then publish them directly into twitter all within notions api or inside of uh inside of notion tweet.app he's got five customers paying seven bucks a month so 35 bucks in revenue his first 35. i hope to have you back on soon and you're gonna be telling me you're doing 35 million a year in revenue thanks for taking us to the top thank you nathan take care one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure 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