HelpKit: $10K MRR Turning Notion Docs into Help Centers, and Why the Solo Founder Stopped Sharing Revenue

The answer has less to do with the numbers and more to do with who was reading them.

HelpKit turns documents written in Notion into polished help centers. It carries $10K+ MRR and more than 400 customers.

It’s run by one self-taught developer, with zero outside capital.

What makes the case worth recording is the trajectory rather than the amount.

Founder Dominik Sobe disclosed his revenue from day one and grew as a build-in-public practitioner. Then, on reaching $10K MRR, he cut off the numbers himself.

The trigger was copycats cloning his landing page wholesale.

The build-in-public story usually gets told up to “sharing helped me grow.” A documented decision to stop sharing, with reasons, is rare.

$1,020 at five months, then on to $10K

The early figures come from Sobe’s own Indie Hackers AMA.

The $10K MRR, the 400 customers, and the decision to stop sharing come from the Superframeworks case study.

Sobe was 24 at the time. After several failed attempts, HelpKit was his first product to reach $1,000 MRR.

Not building an editor was the real design choice

HelpKit doesn’t build an editor.

Customers write help articles in Notion, and HelpKit serves them as a searchable, professional help center.

That split pays off twice.

It slashes the build. Document editing, the heaviest part of a product like this, goes wholesale to Notion, so a solo developer can focus on rendering and delivery.

And nothing changes in the customer’s workflow. A team already writing internal docs in Notion gets a help center without adopting a new tool.

It also means distribution is decided from the start.

People who want a help center on Notion have clear search terms and communities. You can simply wait for them inside Notion’s enormous ecosystem.

It’s the same platform-leverage pattern as Potion, the Notion website builder that went from indie project to a $300K exit.

Line up micro-SaaS tools by real numbers: HelpKit at $10K MRR, Data Fetcher for Airtable at $23K MRR, and Bannerbear, built on an image-generation API, at $10K MRR.

Tools wedged into the gaps of bigger platforms cluster in one band.

Distribution: one free tool and hundreds of hand-written emails

The lead channel in the Superframeworks case study is a free “Notion Table Generator.”

A free tool solving a small Notion-user problem ranked well in search. It got shared across Reddit and Facebook groups and kept generating organic traffic for months.

Zero paid ads.

It’s textbook engineering-as-marketing, and the funnel collects exactly the prospects the paid product wants.

The other pillar was manual labor.

Early on he sent hundreds of cold emails, each one personalized, and ran demos and onboarding by hand.

1. SEO

   The top channel at the time of the AMA.

2. Building in public on Twitter

   The runner-up behind SEO.

3. YouTube and Reddit

   Listed as the channels that followed.

He’s also described building the product while traveling, working from cafes and co-working spaces.

A cost structure that light is what subsidized the manual approach.

At $10K MRR, the revenue updates stopped

HelpKit’s numbers were disclosed in detail through the 2022 AMA.

At $10K MRR, though, Sobe stopped publishing exact revenue.

Copycats had appeared, cloning his landing page outright. The published revenue was working as a blueprint: this market, with this design, yields $10K a month.

Build-in-public is a free acquisition asset. It also lowers the cost of imitation.

Sharing beats the cost of being copied only while the business is too small to be worth copying.

That’s the boundary this case draws.

The current state, with university and enterprise customers among the 400-plus and $1,000-a-year prepayments, is the return earned in exchange for that risk.

After the numbers stopped, HelpKit can’t be measured from outside

Copycats were the reason disclosure stopped.

Seen that way, the gap is rational from the business’s side. From the reader’s side, it’s where the record ends.

For HelpKit, full transparency helped only up to $10K MRR, while the business was still too small to be worth copying.

The early tactics come with conditions too.

Hundreds of personalized cold emails and hand-run demos were labor-intensive work that a nomadic life with flexible hours made possible. A different setup or life wouldn’t supply the same volume.

Sources

• Dominik Sobe’s Indie Hackers AMA, “My bootstrapped Notion knowledge base SaaS just hit $1,000 MRR” (February 2022)
• Superframeworks, “How HelpKit Built a $10K+ MRR SaaS Using Notion as a Moat” (July 2025)