NoteForms: A Notion Form Connector Built in 3–4 Days Grows Into $37K/Month — 18 Months of Solo Support

Dollar figures below carry an approximate yen conversion at ¥150/$1.

From a weekend build to a $37,000/month business

Julien Nahum, 28, grew up in Paris, studied engineering, then moved to London to study computer science. He kept building side projects while working at AWS, and committed to indie hacking full time once he and his partner moved back to Paris.

When Notion opened its API, building the first version took him “maybe three or four days.” He called it NotionForms. What it did was limited: connect a Notion account, build a form, and let database properties be rearranged as form fields — all without asking the other person to share access to the underlying database. That last detail was the practical key to its usefulness.

That rough MVP is now a $37,000/month MRR business (about ¥5.55 million/month, or roughly ¥66 million annualized). For the first eighteen months, both development and customer support were his alone.

The numbers along the way

Only three data points ($3,000 (about ¥450,000), $10,000 (about ¥1.5 million), and $37,000) but the fact that the first milestone was simply “can pay the rent” is worth recording. In this business, the moment he cleared the bare minimum needed to sustain himself was the moment independence’s carrying cost got covered.

The decisive move: the night he cut off three months of free access

The first shift in trajectory is straightforward. NotionForms was fully free for three months. Then he slotted in a $15/month Pro plan.

All day one I kept waiting for that first payment notification. It came that night, and it felt really good.

That first customer is still a paying customer today. The switch from free to paid is the step most indie developers keep pushing off. Here it happened at three months, and the very first day already produced a payment. The three free months functioned not as revenue given away, but as a period to confirm who would actually pay.

Subsequent price increases were also staged: $15 to $19, then to $24, plus a new upper tier for teams. The fact that the business kept growing even as the price on the same product rose 1.6x shows how high the switching cost becomes once a form is embedded in someone’s workflow.

What worked: the product itself was the distribution channel

Growth wasn’t driven mainly by advertising. Nahum’s own explanation fits in one sentence.

Build a form, share it, embed it on your site.

A form is a product that gets seen by third parties the moment it’s used. Respondents always exist, and some share of them need a form themselves. A “Created with NoteForms” attribution link rides along. Exposure and links grow at the same time, and the latter is also an SEO asset. The more customers you have, the stronger both the distribution surface and the search rankings get, simultaneously. Under conditions where solo development leaves no marketing budget, having this self-propagating channel can outweigh differences in community luck or ad spend.

The other pillar was early community outreach. He put himself into Notion-adjacent communities (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Slack) and manufactured his own exposure. A viral loop can’t spin from zero starting speed, so the first rotation had to be supplied by hand. Manual exposure and product-native spread meshed together here.

A second move to cut dependence

This business’s weakness was visible from the start: all its revenue sits on top of a single platform, Notion. If Notion officially ships forms, or changes its API policy, the business could be cut down overnight. He himself names two pressures from the period he ran it alone: support load and platform dependence.

The response, launched roughly 18 months ago, was OpnForm, a standalone, open-source form builder that doesn’t assume Notion at all. An Airtable-facing form builder is also in development, deliberately scattering the revenue base. The product’s name itself has shifted from the original NotionForms to NoteForms, loosening even the naming tie to a single platform (the source doesn’t state the exact reason for the rename). On the technical side, the backend runs on Laravel, the frontend on Nuxt + Vue.

Risks and limits

Even with diversification underway, the current center of revenue is still Notion integration. Open-sourcing OpnForm reduces dependence, but it also creates its own demand for self-hosted deployments, and the source material doesn’t reveal how that nets out financially.

The eighteen months of solo support shouldn’t be read only as a heartwarming detail either. As he himself notes as a source of stress, this is a structure that eats more of a person’s discretionary time the more the business grows, and it’s natural to assume that being able to raise prices was partly driven by the need to limit the volume of requests coming in. Also, the disclosed MRR is only three data points. Month-to-month fluctuation and churn rate are unknown.

What generalizes, and what doesn’t

What’s reproducible: shipping with features cut down to whatever fits in 3–4 days, drawing a hard line on a free period measured in months before introducing a paid plan, to confirm early whether real payers exist. And choosing a product form where usage itself becomes exposure. Forms, invitations, public pages, embeddable widgets, any product whose output is seen by third parties can benefit from this.

What’s harder to reproduce is the timing, right after Notion’s API went public. When an ecosystem is just standing up, there’s a window of a few months where demand exists but supply doesn’t. Shipping in 3–4 days mattered precisely because that window was short. On top of that, there’s the premise of an engineer with real AWS experience who could handle everything from MVP to support alone. He himself says “the most important thing is just to start, and build something as fast as possible”, and also advises against quitting your job right away.

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