How I built a Notion competitor by accident (and got 100 signups in 1 hour)

How it started

My co-founder and I had this amazing idea to build a learning platform for entrepreneurs and side hustlers. Think Duolingo meets Asana.

The problem we wanted to solve is that side hustlers lack the time and experience to make their businesses profitable, assuming they had a full-time job, family, and other responsibilities.

Our solution aimed to solve both struggles (time and experience) by (a) gamifying your side hustle progress, similar to Duolingo, and (b) providing a personal knowledge space to keep track of your integrations, data, and analytics in one space.

My partner and I were crazy passionate about this idea. After some validation, we went ahead and started building the MVP. This is when things took a sharp turn.

We thought the most intuitive method to start building the MVP was to build the personal knowledge/productivity side of our app, and the Duolingo content can be mounted later or even be user-generated. Especially as we, the founders, weren't rich serial entrepreneurs that were invited to keynotes every other week. We were just college students.

Building the MVP

So we went ahead and started building.
The app initially looked like Google docs, then we integrated more data types, then we added a templating functionality, then links between pages, then graph view, universal search, etc...

As the sole engineer on this, building the app was one of the most challenging yet rewarding experiences of my life.

First red flag

Ok, so here's where things took a turn.
After 4 weeks, my partner and I were satisfied with the note-taking side of things. I was coding the final touches in my CS class (sorry, professor) when a random student behind me was curious and asked me about what I do.

I told him about the app idea.

"No, I meant what do you have there right NOW" - He said.

I showed him the current prototype at that stage, which was buggy and ugly. He took some time to mess with it on his own.

After an awkward pause, His eyes lit up.

"That's exactly what I need, you just solved everything I hate about Notion" - He said.

I didn't think much of it at the time. I just appreciated the compliment and moved on.

Anyways, we added some mock courses and launched a private beta session. It went TERRIBLE. The biggest mistake we made is we assumed everyone had no entrepreneurial experience, whereas everyone has a different starting point. Another issue is the fact we're basically teaching pseudo-science. So our content was sometimes questionable, even controversial. So some people disagreed with our content and used their success stories as evidence, which is really not that refutable if you think about it. Another mistake we did is we were teaching the YC-inspired and universal step-by-step guide. Whereas most users were interested in more niched areas of side hustles such as eCommerce and flipping sneakers, our content wasn't that helpful.

At the same time, the feedback from the beta LOVED the knowledge base side of things, and hated the Duolingo sides of things.

The long-awaited pivot

That's when me and my partner said F it.

No Duolingo.
No gamification.
No side-hustles.

Let's just release the app as is. As a productivity app.

Within 24 hours we rebuilt our branding and landing page and announced our pre-launch everywhere.

I woke up with a waitlist of 70 users the next day!

So this is the story of Carton.

Carton 📦: The next-gen personal knowledge and productivity platform that’s designed to think like you.

Carton’s ultimate goal is to remove the barrier between you and your digital workspace, so you can express ideas authentically.

We're redefining the traditional notion of "documents" to function more like interconnected "nodes," and we've created a fast and intuitive keyboard-first user experience to make your workflow as smooth as possible.

Carton offers powerful features to help you work more efficiently:

• ✏️ Create without limits: Blocks give you the freedom to add any type of content to your page. From plain text, to fully-functional dashboards. Each block can have its own style, layout, and embedded content.

• 🔗 Graph view: Pages can be linked together in a functional graph, giving you the flexibility to filter, group, and re-pivot information as needed.

• ♻️ Reusable pages: Transform pages into templates to differentiate ideas and organize repetitive content. Use templates for people, books, team retros, and more.

• 🐇 Fast & intuitive: Carton is built for fast-flowing ideas with a keyboard-first experience and lighting-fast interactions.

• 🔍 Global search: Search your entire workspace with context-aware global search, which executes sophisticated actions from simple prompts. Easily find related content, connected pages, and execute tasks in seconds without confusing shorthand notations or literal text matching.

I am thrilled to announce the beta release of Carton! 🎉🎉🎉 Visit our website at 👉 https://www.trycarton.com to join the beta waitlist. Please feel free to reach out to me via DM or leave a comment below if you have any questions - I would be delighted to answer them.