Noah Bragg sold Potion, a Notion-based website builder, for $300,000

Selling a Notion-Based Website Builder

Noah Bragg sold Potion, a Notion-based website builder he had started in late 2020, for $300,000 in April 2023. A small SaaS run without employees had found a new owner in about two and a half years.

Turning What Notion Users Already Did Into a Product

Bragg worked as a software developer and tried several businesses. After an attempt with a university classmate to build a big startup did not go as hoped, he turned his attention to businesses he could run alone and that would generate steady cash flow. Before Potion, he had also built and sold CoffeePass and Supportman.

His hypothesis was that starting a business on top of an existing platform makes it easier to find customers. Notion, which he had used for about a year, had an active community sharing how to use it online, and he could see people trying to use Notion pages as websites with a tool called Fruition. Bragg found the possibility of a more convenient paid product in usage behavior that had already appeared.

Potion used documents in Notion as website content while offering a personal domain, design changes, hosting, and search engine optimization. Users could run blogs, portfolios, and product landing pages while managing their writing and materials in familiar Notion. The product's value was in reducing the work of learning a separate content management tool or deploying a website yourself.

He built the first version in about two months while working a day job. He used and contributed to the open source project react-notion-x, which converts Notion data to HTML, to reduce the implementation burden. The initial price was $6 a month per site, later raised to around $12.

Build in Public Brought the First Customers

Bragg published his development process from the day he started building the product. Creators and solo business owners were people who took an interest in another maker's process while also needing a website themselves. He considered at the product selection stage that people who enjoyed watching public development overlapped with Potion's potential customers.

What he published included the feature development process, decisions about the product, monthly recurring revenue, visitor numbers, churn, and paid conversion rates. He filmed short videos with ScreenFlow and finished them in one or two recordings to cut production time. When the numbers went up, he also explained the background behind the change, trying to offer information other founders could use.

The first build-in-public teaser post brought in about 1,000 followers in 24 hours. According to Bragg, the first 75 customers came from people who had been following the development process on Twitter. Through the comments on his posts, he got feedback about the product and built relationships with other founders.

On May 24, 2021, he launched Potion on Product Hunt. The product reached No. 1 for the day and No. 1 for the week, and ranked third for the month of May that year. It was another public stage for telling people about the product beyond those who had followed the development process.

The business he ran alongside his day job later led him to go full time. In a Userlist interview after going full time, Bragg disclosed about $4,150 in monthly recurring revenue and about 350 paying subscribers. At the time his main traffic sources were Google and Twitter.

A Growth Plateau and a Product Rebuild

The biggest obstacle to growth was customer churn. Bragg recalled an early monthly churn rate of 10 to 12 percent, and around the summer of 2022, churn offset new signups and growth stalled for about six months. He later lowered churn to about 5 percent, but during the plateau he lost motivation and also reduced the time he put into the business.

The first sale attempt at this time fell through when a partner on the buyer's side dropped out at the last minute. Bragg then spent about two months working intensively on the product, improving the domain connection process and display errors in Notion documents. Growth recovered after the product overhaul and affiliate marketing, and he recalled that the later sale price was about twice what the previous negotiation had offered. He could not, however, separate out how much any single improvement contributed to the recovery.

The free plan was also an important experiment. At first he chose a trial that required a card, to identify customers willing to pay, but later he lowered the barrier so people could try the product without a cost burden. Free sites got a Potion subdomain while connecting a personal domain stayed a paid feature, so the domain setup problems that generated many support requests were not extended to all free users.

In a February 2023 interview, Bragg explained that after introducing the free plan, weekly trial users grew from about 30 to 200. At the time the free-to-paid conversion rate was about 4 percent, and the expected surge in support burden did not appear. Because some users completed a site over several weeks before paying, judging by the first month's conversion numbers alone could have ended the experiment too early.

For affiliate marketing, he offered people who made Notion-related content 30 percent of payments for as long as customers they referred kept paying. About 100 affiliates signed up, but meaningful customer traffic concentrated among the top three. He proposed partnerships directly to the authors of posts that already ranked for related search terms.

He also reduced the operating burden. By strengthening documentation and usage guides so customers could solve problems themselves, he cut technical support requests that had once come three or four a day, and later could run the business on about two hours a week. Since there had also been a period when he developed it full time, this figure should be understood as maintenance time after things stabilized.

How the $300,000 Deal Came Together

When he pursued a sale again in 2023, Bragg wanted to build a new product. He felt the limits of the features he could add and the growth activities he could run, but he planned to keep running the business if he did not get the price he wanted. The sale was to be executed among several options when the terms were right.

The asking price he first listed on Acquire.com was $400,000. After talking with potential buyers and seeing that they found the price high, he adjusted the asking price to $350,000. The deal that actually closed was $300,000.

After the listing went up, about 25 interested parties signed confidentiality agreements and reviewed the details. He spoke with six of them, received three offers, and took about two months from listing to closing. Even a product known through public growth records went through separate information disclosure and price negotiation in an actual sale.

The buyer was software developer Bruno Morency. He had SaaS exit experience, and after serving as managing director of Techstars Montreal AI, he was looking to acquire small revenue businesses. At the time of the acquisition he saw Potion's recurring revenue and the Notion ecosystem as the basis for growth potential.

The scale disclosed at the time of sale was more than 500 paying customers, about 20,000 monthly visits, and $6,300 in monthly recurring revenue. Annualizing that revenue over 12 months gives $75,600, so $300,000 is about four times annualized revenue. This is a multiple calculated on recurring revenue at the time, and does not mean a profit multiple or the seller's personal take-home after taxes and transaction costs.

The trickiest part of the handover was transferring the Stripe account used for payments to the new owner. It shows that selling a software business includes not just code and a domain but also the transfer of payment and operational authority.

The deal was the result of Bragg's desire to build a new product and Morency's plan to acquire revenue businesses matching up. The elements that created Potion's sale value were recurring revenue, a lowered operating burden, and demand from a new owner to carry it forward.