Bootstrapped un constructeur de formulaires Notion de $0 à $10K MRR en un an

A single post to Notion's dedicated subreddit describing the tool.

“it reached 26 upvotes. It brought a bit more than 20 users during the first week”

The post's long-term value came from ranking organically in Google search, not from the original Reddit audience.

“today it is in the top 5 Google search results for the “create a form with notion” query”

Julien joined several Notion-dedicated Facebook groups and posted the same launch announcement to each; the largest, 'Notion Made Simple', responded best. He credits prior experience running acquisition through a Facebook group for an earlier marketplace project for pointing him at this channel.

“I found a few Facebook groups dedicated to Notion. I joined all of them and I published the same post.”

The group was large and topically exact-matched (Notion users specifically), which the founder had already learned was a high-leverage channel from a prior project.

“This “Facebook funnel” was responsible for probably more than 80% of all the marketplace acquisitions”

Julien did not launch on Product Hunt himself; an unknown user 'hunted' NotionForms two days after the public launch, and he scrambled to ask people to upvote an unprepared, unfamiliar-platform listing.

“someone hunted NotionForms, only 2 days after I publicly launched the first version! I tried to ask people to upvote the launch, but as it was totally improvised it didn’t do well (only 27 upvotes)”

He was unfamiliar with Product Hunt norms and the listing was created by a third party without preparation, visuals, or an audience mobilized to vote.

“I knew the website but wasn’t really familiar with it”

About six months after the flopped first (accidental) listing, Julien deliberately relaunched on Product Hunt himself, promoted mainly through his own Twitter audience (no email blast to users), and this time it finished #1 Product of the Day. He was later also awarded a Product Hunt Maker Grant.

“This time NotionForms ended up #1 product of the day, which was a great win for me!”

By the second launch he had a small but real Twitter following built from months of building in public, and used that audience deliberately instead of relying on an unprepared, accidental listing.

“I mostly shared the PH lunch on Twitter, I didn’t even email my users about it, so I can only thank my small but growing audience for this success!”

Julien documented progress on Twitter from before launch (screenshots, milestones), starting from a base of about 70 mostly-inactive followers, and continued interacting with other Notion-tool builders and asking for partnerships with more popular makers in the space.

“I decided to share my progress on Twitter along the way. As soon as I had something visual to show, I tweeted about it.”

The initial audience was too small to make the launch tweet itself a real acquisition event; the actual MVP launch announcement, which he expected to do at least as well as an earlier progress tweet, underperformed his own low bar.

“I was expecting a successful launch, with at least 10 likes! Unfortunately, my non-existing audience didn’t support me.”

NotionForms is freemium with no usage limits on the free tier, so every free form a user builds and embeds/shares publicly becomes an indexable page carrying the product's name and a link back, compounding organic reach over time.

“I have never tried any paid marketing channel for NotionForms, nor I have been producing content consistently. Yet, the traffic has been growing almost every month for the past12 months.”

Beyond the single documented Reddit and Facebook posts in the founder's own blog, the later Indie Hackers interview describes a broader early tactic of posting into essentially every Notion-related channel he could find, tolerated because the Notion tooling ecosystem was still small and uncrowded at the time.

The novelty of the Notion ecosystem in 2021 meant users tolerated repeated self-promotion that likely would not work in a more mature, crowded niche.