Dominik Sobe is a self-taught developer from Villach, Austria who studied business and economics but learned to code by shipping his own products. While building a mobile app, he needed a help center for the App Store listing and found every existing option either clunky or overpriced. He was already living inside Notion for his notes, so he asked a simple question: what if Notion's editor could power a real, branded help center? When no such tool existed, he built it himself and called it HelpKit.

The pitch is narrow on purpose. Customers write their support articles in Notion, the way they already work, and HelpKit renders them as a fast, searchable, custom-domain knowledge base. That tight focus on Notion users meant the product solved a concrete problem from day one rather than chasing a broad market. HelpKit reached $1,000 in total revenue by December 2021 with 14 customers, then climbed to $1K MRR in about five months and $2K MRR roughly six weeks after that.

By June 2022 HelpKit had passed $3,000 MRR with more than 130 paying customers, ranging from solo content creators to publicly traded companies. That number was the threshold Dominik had been aiming for: he had set a summer goal of $1K for ramen profitability, and hitting three times that let him commit to indie hacking full time while still finishing his university thesis. He had already fielded and turned down several acquisition offers by that point.

A big part of the early traction came from building in public on Twitter, where Dominik shared revenue numbers openly. The transparency created accountability, pulled in early customers who wanted to back the story, and generated word of mouth in the indie hacker community. He later stopped posting exact figures once copycats started cloning his landing page, but by then the product had momentum. HelpKit went on to cross $10K+ MRR with 400+ customers, all bootstrapped and solo, much of it built while traveling as a digital nomad through Lisbon, Bali and Southeast Asia.