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[00:00:00] Igor Benić
Hi everyone. So in this episode we are talking about building a SaaS in public and I have with me Noah Bragg and if you don't know who that is then you're not following the building in public Twitter accounts because Noah Bragg built Potion and I've been following that journey of his for about I don't know almost when he started it, something like that. So it was always interesting to me how he approaches his problems, how he works on solutions and also sharing the struggles of for example if I remember correctly you had a problem with something around Notion that they changed so you had to jump quickly and change it yourself on your SaaS so the sites built with Notion will still work, that is built with Notion on Potion, right. So yeah, you can introduce yourself, you can even though I know my audience probably knows who you are and yeah talk about a little bit about building in public because I wanted to know more from you since I actually started building my own SaaS so the whole part of how building in public actually helped you and did it help you with marketing and how would you approach if you were building something new and you probably are but yeah how would you approach today. So yeah, really interested in hearing you.

[00:02:01] Noah Bragg
Hey, Igor. Thanks for having me on this cool async podcast. And yeah, so I built Potion. I started about two and a half years ago. As you said, it's a website builder for Notion. It allows you to kind of easily customize your website, but pulling all the content from Notion and you can just update things in Notion and it kind of automatically updates your website. So yeah, I mean, building in public was definitely a big thing for me, especially two and a half years ago when I started Potion. It's really how I got my first 75 customers for Potion. And I think building in public is definitely big now. There's a ton of people doing it today. And I think in some ways because of that, it doesn't work maybe as well as it did when I started. But it was definitely a great way for me to get feedback, kind of share what I'm doing, share the progress as I'm going, and kind of learn out kind of in the wild. And kind of the nice thing about it that I think really can make sense for your product. If your product is built for other entrepreneurs, then building in public can make a lot of sense because entrepreneurs are typically the kind of people that enjoy following building in public kind of stuff. And so that's what worked pretty well for me with Potion where I wasn't trying to make it like this marketing thing, but it just kind of happened to kind of work out that way because I was sharing what I was doing. And it was just kind of valuable to people because I was kind of showing the behind the scenes and then they happened to maybe need a website and so they'd try out Potion. So that's definitely the benefit of it. And so that was kind of how I got my first 75 customers and kind of grew my following on Twitter. And if I was, your question about if I was to start again today, what would I do? I think I would more or less do a similar kind of thing. I think in a lot of ways it doesn't hurt to build in public. There has been some people talk about how once you get to a certain level of building in public, it kind of starts to maybe not be that valuable or just be cause issues where you start to get copycats and things like that. And I think that's definitely true. But in the early days, I don't think there's too much harm to building in public. And if you enjoy doing it, it might make sense. And so that's kind of how I would start today is like, what's the niche of users that I'm trying to build for? You know, are they on Twitter? Are they somewhere else? Are they on Reddit or somewhere? And start sharing kind of what you're doing, trying to get feedback. You know, if you're just building in public or just sharing things with maybe even just a small group of 20 people, if those people are communicating back to you, that can be super helpful for you to get feedback. And so you can almost in some ways do this just in private DMs, like just messaging people, sharing what you're doing. You know, if it's helpful to them and they're willing to kind of help you give feedback, that I think is a great way to start. And so that's kind of how I would start today, like just trying to learn from people. Another way this could kind of work is doing like actual like customer interview, like finding potential customers, doing interviews with them. This is the kind of stuff I've done in the past where you jump on a call. It's just a great way to learn. I think in the early days, you really want to optimize for learning because you're really just trying to validate your ideas, right? You're trying to validate your assumptions that what you're building is the right thing to build and that people are willing to pay for it. And so any way that you can learn those things, I think that's what you do in the early days. Maybe that's some research, researching what other competitors out there, what's working for other people. Maybe it's going out and talking to people, or maybe it's doing some building in public, getting that feedback, or maybe it's even building a small little prototype that you can get in people's hands. So then you can get some better feedback. So yeah, that's how I would start today. And it's definitely fun in those early days.

[00:06:00] Igor Benić
So I saw you while I was following you, I'm still am of course, that you shared a lot of different types of videos or content, especially in the beginning, right? So you were sharing the revenue, of course, because I guess the revenue in the early days is something that first validates your idea, second shows others that people are paying for a product so they could do as well. And I guess I listened somewhere that, I don't know, sharing such revenue is fine, for example, until you hit, I don't know, 5 or 10K MRR. After that, it's kind of pointless because you already validated your idea with that, you already showed others that your product is good enough to earn the trust of so many users or customers. But you shared also videos, if I remember correctly, where you would sit down and you would just go over and share your thoughts over how you imagine your product, where it will go or what kind of actions you plan to take. And also, so that's kind of a business logic or marketing, I would guess, in a way. And then the other also part, which was also, for me as a developer, it's really interesting is the technical part, where you sat down and you shared how are you going to approach a technical, right? How are you going to, I don't know, fetch data and how are you going to process it because, I don't know, the notion changed the format and stuff like that. So I really like that. So how do you decide when and what to share? Is it just random? Like, I don't know, this happened to me now, it's related to my product, I'll share it now with the public because that's something that others can learn. You were really focused on somehow of getting feedback through sharing your struggles and thoughts and also your approach. So you might get feedback even before you build it. And that's also an interesting stuff. So yeah, how did you decide what and when to share? And personally, how do you go to a quiet room or stuff like that? Because me with dogs and baby, it's hard to just sit down and share. Do you maybe note it down somewhere and share it afterwards? Or what's your approach?

[00:09:31] Noah Bragg
So, yeah, this idea of sharing and building in public, a lot of it I started around like two and a half years ago before it was, you know, there weren't a ton of people doing it back then. And so it was kind of this newer thing. And really, I just did it kind of for myself, kind of for fun. Like I enjoyed kind of documenting my process and documenting what was going on, just because I wanted to see that later, like just like kind of see the story unfold for myself and be able to document it. I think it also just kind of helped me to kind of just process my thoughts and process like my thinking around the decisions I was making. And so that's the kind of stuff I was sharing. And that's kind of why I started sharing in the beginning. But then I kind of saw that, like, you know, it was helpful to other builders, other makers. And so I kept doing it and kind of how I decided what to share is just like, OK, what decisions I'm making, what things do I think would be helpful to other creators that were building stuff and just sharing those things. And the cool thing about my product, Potion, is that it is a product for other creators. You know, it's usually for pro consumers is kind of the target market. And so it fits a lot where it kind of makes sense. You know, I wasn't thinking this in the very beginning, but it makes sense that the kind of people that would like following along to like the build in public kind of stuff are also really good fit for potential customers. So in that kind of scenario, I think it makes a lot of sense for people to build in public because then like the people that are hearing what you're sharing also might be a good fit to be your customers. If that's not the case, then maybe it's not worth the time for you to kind of build in public and do that kind of thing. Now, of course, there are downsides, kind of, as you mentioned, like people can copy and things like that. And I have definitely more recently started to not share in public as much just because that's definitely something I've seen where people kind of are following along and then they start to build a competitor. And so that is kind of annoying and kind of frustrating. I don't know if it's really at least for me, I don't think it's really been something that's really affected the business negatively yet. I've heard other entrepreneurs talk about that and other entrepreneurs have started to not share things in public because of those reasons. And I think those can be very valid as well. But I think the other thing is building public can make a lot of sense if you're trying to kind of build a brand around yourself instead of your business. Like if you plan on creating more businesses and launching more products, then having kind of that one brand throughout is kind of your personal brand can really help with that and make a lot of sense. So I think there's some reasons where it could outweigh and be more beneficial to do it. Now I think at the same time, I don't think building in public works as well now just because so many people are doing it. That works like you have to kind of differentiate more, like do something more unique and different because there's just so many people that are trying to do it and it makes it kind of overload for people. Back when I started, I think there was just a lot less people doing it, which made it easier for me to kind of start doing this.

[00:12:55] Igor Benić
Yeah, I get what you're saying. This is definitely now kind of a saturated space, at least on Twitter, where I'm trying also to build an audience there. So yeah, definitely. And also, I guess it's also kind of... Maybe I'm wrong here, so you can correct me, but it's important also to pick a niche, right? Like you created something with Notion. And if I remember correctly, at the death time, there were also other people building on Notion. It was kind of popular to use Notion as a content source, a single source of truth, per se. I don't know. There were Notion forms. There were a few similar page products to build pages and show them through a domain while they're actually on Notion. I don't know, there are also some that I think are used for viewing tables, the data in Notion to, I don't know, make graphs and stuff like that. I think I saw that as well somewhere. So I guess when you are building in public, it definitely helps you that if you are in that category, that niche, that is now popular at the time of building it. Like for now, while we are recording this, it's really popular to build something with AI, using open AI. It's called Dream Journey or something like that. And stuff like that. So I guess if you are now building something in public using AI, on top of AI, you'll definitely get much more traction than if you were to build something completely different. Of course, it depends on your audience as well. So I guess that's also to be on time, to time it right when you are sharing in public. Maybe that's the correct wording or something like that. But yeah, so now that we have covered that, I would like to, if you don't mind, share what are your next steps with your SaaS. So let's kind of share it on quotes on this podcast in public, if you don't mind, of course. So what do you think are the next steps for Potion? Or if you have a feature you would like to announce, you can do it here as well.

[00:16:02] Noah Bragg
So what's next for potion? I haven't talked about this a ton in public anymore and that's probably why you haven't seen me tweeting as much. I don't tweet as much about potion and it's kind of because I'm in kind of this weird in between. I'm kind of in this lull and so I haven't talked about it much but I'll talk about it here. Yeah so basically I haven't really spent much time on potion recently, maybe the last four months or so and kind of that is I'm just a little unsure of the future of like where it makes sense to spend my time on it. You know I think the product is to a really good spot where it's pretty stable like my customers aren't asking me for as much anymore and so there doesn't seem to be a ton of new features where it's like oh if I have that feature it will just kind of change the game and just make it grow a ton more. I even tried doing some of that like last year like adding some features, adding some things and I didn't really see a ton of benefit from those things. I was like okay well maybe that wasn't worth my time and you know I spent some time on marketing and I think there's definitely places I could do in the marketing side to make the business grow faster but again I spent some time in the marketing space and didn't really feel like I saw a huge benefit from that and so yeah I guess I've kind of gotten to a point where I'm just I'm not sure if it makes sense for me to spend a ton more time on the business trying to grow it and well so if I'm gonna kind of continue with my strategy of just like focusing on Notion I think there is another path where I could try to kind of go into a little bit of a new niche. Maybe I tried to build websites on top of other platforms like Notion or I tried to build Notion into or Potion into its own kind of website editor where it's completely standalone and I basically just decide like I don't want to go those routes like I just think that would be a ton of work, be a lot of extra marketing and things like there's just a lot more unknown there to try to build it out and expand the business and I'd rather basically start something else and do something else I find interesting and just I'm really interested in doing and so that's kind of what I've been doing with my extra time I've been kind of exploring different ideas, prototyping things and I haven't really shared much about that on Twitter but I'm kind of spending more of my time in other places right now and just kind of letting Potion kind of just grow. Thankfully it's still like growing on average around 6% a month and it's still kind of doing its thing and I'm just kind of doing the minimum on Potion right now. I'm spending like 20-30 minutes a day with customer support on Potion and that's about it and so yeah it's been an interesting time. It's definitely great to get to the business to a point where it's kind of pretty maintainable but I just feel like there's not as much to share about anymore and that's why I haven't been posting as much about it or sharing as much about it. So yeah hopefully that answers the question and you know I'm still in kind of a transition phase where I'm trying to figure out what it makes sense for me to work on and so it's kind of this weird wall where I don't really know what I'm doing right now just trying to figure things out as I go and thankfully Potion's been working out pretty well on the side and in the meantime.

[00:19:33] Igor Benić
Yeah, I guess that happens when you have built a product that's self-sustainable. So you don't have a lot of customer support, the only tickets are something regarding probably questions about how to do something with it. Rather than that, yeah, I guess it's a product like that, so you actually can now benefit from all the hard work you've done before. Now you can actually just sit and relax a bit and enjoy the fruits of your labor. So yeah, it can be for us, IndieHackers, builders who are always grinding with something and building new ideas, it can be probably a weird place to be when you don't have anything much to do on that product. So, but yeah, I would definitely like to be in that place, like yourself, where there is a nice profit from it. And then you can spend some days completely off work, or you can just test out other ideas and work on them. And know that your bills are paid, and it's an awesome place to be. At least that's my opinion, so yeah. Thank you now for being here. If you have anything else to share or do, please do. This was really a pleasure to talk to you. And also thank you for testing my Async podcast solution. Have a great time and good luck with your new product idea.

[00:21:41] Noah Bragg
Thanks for having me Igor, it's been fun.