How Potion CEO Noah Bragg grew to $360.7K revenue and 79 customers in 2024.

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 starter for two years it was required now noah's 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 no are you ready to take us to the top let's do it hey touch on coffee pass for a second how many so did was this revenue generating at any point yeah so it it wasn't a ton and that was kind of 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 dollars a month in our own profit a lot of the money you know was going to the coffee shops and that was you know 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 interesting okay so let's let's jump into potion now so i mean should we think about this like weebly or wix or squarespace but for notion yeah basically i mean it's 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 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 eight dollars a month for one site 16 for three sites and 24 uh for eight sites those are the different averages eight or sixteen um usually you know the probably 85 percent of people are just doing one site i think my average uh revenue per customer is around nine dollars so that that's it just ticks up a little bit yeah i want to talk about how you've grown this so um big in terms of getting new users on the platform the last 12 months what was sort of the biggest tactic you did yeah so mostly what i've been doing is just building in public on twitter i'd say probably about 85 percent of my customers have have come from that and then the other percentage have been either word of mouth or this uh facebook group call a notion facebook group with 30 000 people in it what's the name of that of the group uh notion made simple did you build the group uh i did not no it's it's a notion group that's already been there and i've kind of been sharing some things there along the way and that's where i got some customers that's smart now when did you launch this um about four-ish months ago okay so on 2021. yeah i started working on it at the end of 2020 um like november but then i launched it uh like a private early access in january and then actually launched early access access in february and then like a month later kind of opened it up to everybody um so yeah it's been around four months so the facebook group is one way you did this you also had a very successful product on launch on may 24th you got over a thousand up votes how much traffic did you get from this ranking yeah so i got a 2.8 k on the first day and then um yesterday i got another 1.5 k um and about half of those were from product hunt um the other half kind of from the buzz going around on twitter but yeah the product hunt launch went pretty well so i was pretty stoked at that um and seen a lot of signups come in so that's been good sorry is that 2800 visits or sign ups 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 hunt you know customers is different with that or not but yeah how many how many trial signups did you get from product do you know yet yeah so let's say i'm looking at the numbers right here there's just two digits for everyone knows this was just two days ago right um so yeah day of i got 39 sign ups with credit card up front and yesterday so the day after 26. okay so it's not horrible i mean that's that's that's pretty darn good that's what is that 60 about 60 signups now the question is can you get more than 50 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 so and this was actually some of the stuff i was just working on before the launch because i knew that would be a you know important thing i don't want to lose people in the leaky bucket so i made like a video that's the first thing you see just a two minute video that really like 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 um because that's really the big aha moment right is once people have created a website then they're 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 a six day like email kind of drip um that kind of keeps sharing like some 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 um and then also i added some uh 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 i'm kind of doing to kind of push that on boarding 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 productivity products are just 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 that's obviously all before product and um 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 an mrr right yeah i'm 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 uh from five you know it's harder to say you double your revenue once you have like a million or two or three million in revenue but yeah for sure by this at this page so this is great so questions i mean where are you in life are you working this whole 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 i mean that's i mean that's the plan already like that's what i want to do um i guess really it's it's a matter of timing as well as um i think i would raise like a little bit of capital from kind of like a bootstrapper friendly kind of investor um to kind of help me kind of in that stage between you know potion uh creating enough money for me to live on 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 would you look to raise uh somewhere around like 120 to 150k and you definitely shouldn't want to go that you you know that's you're gonna get about 10 15 maybe 20 of the business and then really be on that vc track is that something you'd go down would you look at some of these alternative financing options yeah so i don't wanna go on the vc track um i'm more interested in investors like tiny seed or earnest capital things like that yeah and and same thing there though you're still you know in both those models you're giving up 10 11 percent of the effort you know you can buy it back over time right right you know at a certain rate um but are you i guess you're not a post 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 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 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 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 the thing here so you're working on try to conversion right we already heard about that we we've talked about some of your early launch strategies it's just you right now correct right and you 100 business yep that's great um i mean what's the plan how do you go from you know 100 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 um 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 those are some of my kind of early things i might try to partner with like that that facebook facebook group i mentioned that has like 30 000 people in that um so if there's you know good ways that i can kind of partner with them maybe sponsor them um but yeah still a lot to do to kind of figure out in the marketing 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 a product yourself or like are you a developer i did yep that's right and the design yep you you did this animation of this lady like painting the website on the home page okay no that was like a i don't know 100 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 very cool this is great um what about additional features you might be adding on in the next 12 to 24 months yeah so it's it's cool because there's a i mean there's a lot of directions you could go with the website builder you know there's so many different kind of websites that people want to build and so mostly my niche has been you know solo entrepreneurs founders like kind of like creating a little business or portfolio kind of websites um 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 like digital products and things like that um so that's kind of one of the areas i'm looking into um and and gonna do soon and then one of the errors i've really looked a lot into is kind of actually going up market to companies um 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 makes sense for them to do that and and work well with the team 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 to some bigger companies hey it all sounds like a great plan it'll be fun to watch you execute in the meantime don't know 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 no not really i i follow lots of other indie hackers and and kind of bootstrappers favorite indie hacker uh 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 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 i knew just how much opportunity there is to kind of kind of go and do your own thing guys it's crazy once yeah what's crazy once you see like just how much you can do um kind of being an entrepreneur and stuff and and seeing all the possibilities uh instead of just being on like the 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 they did a product launch last week added about 79 new trials hoping that 50 convert to paid currently 80 people paying about 10 bucks a month so about 700 800 bucks a month in revenue he's hoping to scale us and ideally get to the point where he can leave his full-time gig and build this full-time noah thanks for taking us to the top yeah thank you nathan 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 you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in 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