Back in 2021, Notion, a popular productivity and collaboration platform, announced that they would launch a public API. Once that came onto my radar, I noticed a few things about Notion:
* users loved it to the point they complained loudly about their problems
* there was no native backup solution
* since an official API didn’t exist back then, there were no competitors
In January 2021, I had sold my (mildly unsuccessful) business and was looking for a new opportunity. After procrastinating for a few months, I started building a backup/restore tool for Notion because there was clearly demand.
I put up a basic landing page (here's an early iteration of it: https://web.archive.org/web/20210116150212/https://notionbac...) to gather email addresses (but I made a mistake of not keeping those leads warm). I launched the MVP in November that year, a few months after working on it. On December 4th, I received my first payment.
To support myself while the business was picking up, I did consulting on the side. In July 2023 (2.5 years in), I went full-time on Notion Backups.
Growth has been challenging because Notion's pricing acts as a cap -- people don’t want to pay more for an extension than for Notion itself. I started with a single plan and kept increasing prices until I hit resistance from potential customers. Later, I introduced Pro and Lite plans to capture different segments of the market. So far, SEO has been the biggest channel, followed by word of mouth. I tried Reddit ads (limited to the Notion subreddit), but they didn’t move the needle.
As I talked to customers, I realized that this business wouldn’t go far without a proper "restore" feature, which is the bread and butter of backup companies. But the problem was (and still is, to some extent) that Notion’s API isn’t fully developed, making the restore feature incomplete. Every competitor who announced this feature later decided to abandon it for the same reason.
While building on top of a platform is always risky, if you go into it with your eyes wide open, distribution can be much more straightforward. My previous business failed to gain traction because I couldn’t nail a single distribution channel, so I knew I had to enter a less saturated market. So far, so good!
No comments yet.
