7
2 Comments

How and why I started 🍐 Pear - Subscriptions for Notion.

It all started with this tweet

John's question made me research about the Notion subscription space and find out that there is no easy way to do it.
Either you have to create a Super / Potion page and add Memberstack or you can sell your content on Gumroad with the risk of having your links re-shared for free.
If there isn't an easy way to do it, it doesn't mean it should be done.

The next step was research.
A quick google search showed more than 2800 notion products listed on Gumroad (it's more than 3000 now)

google search: "notion site:gumroad.com"

After that I needed to talk to those users who sell content on gumroad to validate the problem and solution.

So, I create da lading page https://notionsub.carrd.co/ and sent twitter messages to some of those sellers I found on gumroad.
Most of them have a contact link in their pages so they were open to receive cold-messages

One thing I did was not try to sell them anything but try to understand if they had any issue with losing sales in Gumroad.
Here's my messag:

"Hey, I've found your twitter on Gumroad and I wanted to reach you to ask you how are your Gumroad sales going and how are you protecting your notion content?"

Out of the 10 responses I had 8 confirmed that they had that problem and that the solution I presented after was a good Idea.
It was also clear that it wasn't the solution for every notion content.
Pear will not work for templates, since the buyer will always have full access to the content, but it will work for courses and other type of content that has some sort of recurring update like a blog or newsletter.

So I started to develop the MVP.
Came up with the name and brand - 🍐Pear - https://pearhq.com/

There's still some bugs in the MVP but this week I started onboarding the first sellers to test out the first product pages and flow.

If you're interested in joining this beta testing and helping me out, send me a message on twitter https://twitter.com/gonelf and I'll let you in for testing.

  1. 1

    Great idea!

    However, I'm wondering if for non-template pages that you only give access to read (not duplicating), it is enough to just pay notion $5/month and add notion users as guests.

    You can add unlimited guests. In this case you can ask users for monthly subscription and assign them as guests to your page. If they don't pay for the next month, you just revoke their guest status.

    That is much cheaper than memberstack and etc. But it has a downside, that every user needs to have a Notion account and to log in via this account to access your course, etc.

    At the same time, huge amount of people have notion. If a content creator aims at entrepreneurs, indie hackers and other similar audience, 90% of these users have notion account, I believe.

    All in all, if you can figure out a better way of doing this, you might have a great success.

    Good luck!

    1. 1

      Hey Klience,
      Great points.

      Ofc any creator can add all subscribers as guests and send stripe payment links to them but in the medo of the day you’d have to manage everything.
      I believe that some might be doing that today and pear is for those creators.
      The idea is to simply this process for everyone so you can focus on content and not management.

      Thanks for your support.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 48 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 13 comments Use Your Product 13 comments