In short
When making my second video on my YouTube channel, I had the idea of creating this little product, which is a curated list of Notion Third party tools, templates and resources. So I made it in a few hours and posted it on Product Hunt and on Reddit in October of 2020. It worked nicely and I got some feedback, so I decided to create a second version in June of 2021.
Why ?
At the beginning, I made this product because I wanted to test out launching something on Product Hunt to try it out, and also because I wanted to use it to promote my YouTube channel.
I made the second version because I wanted to have fun with Webflow, so I built it in a few days.
Challenges
- Creating it was not a big challenge for the V1, it was just a bit tedious to collect the data
- The V2 was doable too because I've been using Webflow for years (I basically had to make a Frankenstein of this and this)
Results
Version 1
I posted it on Product Hunt, and only got 10 up votes in one week, I can call this action a fail, but it is not surprising as Notion Tools does not solve any really painful problem.
On the Reddit side of things though, I got more interesting results, as the two posts (here & here) got about 500 up votes together, brought me about 600 views in 2 days on YouTube, and doubled my subscriber count, which was not bad for a channel with a few dozen subs at the time. Posting on Reddit was a small win!
Version 2
I did a better Product Hunt launch and got a few hundred upvotes:
The results were better with this one, here are some results I got over during the 5 next days after posting Notion Tools:
- Twitter Subscribers: 44 ➝ 57 (30% Growth)
- YouTube Subscribers: 190 ➝ 240 (23% Growth)
- Email List Subscribers: 4 ➝ 55 (1275% Growth)
(pretty easy when I start with 4)
Notes
- Notion Tools is supposed to be an open source resource, but I was tho one who added most of the elements in the initial version, which I guess is normal for a small free project like this one. Thanks to all the people who added their suggestions! ;)
- I spent a bit of time on Reddit, and I think that I was able to understand how to “advertise” on it: by being humble, nice, and as wholesome as possible, providing value and making people curious, and by not actively advertising on it.
I recently came across this blog post, and I think that it has a similar spirit on Reddit promotion to what I did. - Promoting my channel by creating free stuff is efficient, yes, but only doing this cannot be a sustainable long-term strategy, as creating free things is not financially viable if I want to live from what I create online, but it still was really cool to get positive feedback for my Notion video and Notion Tools.
- Doing the second version was a good choice as I had a lot of fun building it!
- I'm just starting out when it comes to creating content online, so I think that it is totally okay to focus on things that don’t scale to kick start my presence online.
- I think that in 2021 I’m going to focus on growing my audience to around 1k email subscribers by sharing cool things online. And I will start monetizing once I have the audience.