Startup idea report: Obsidian-based blog and course publishing platform (a solid opportunity for a $1k-$10k side project)

Hey everyone! I post regularly about startup ideas, opportunities, and trends. My goal is to help indie hackers to discover product ideas they can build and turn into profitable lifestyle businesses.

In this report, I will cover an an idea for an Obsidian-based blog and course-publishing platform, successful startups in this niche, and some guidelines for building and marketing an MVP.

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🔎 Background

Personal knowledge management platforms like Notion, Obsidian, and Coda are wildly popular. They are extremely powerful tools for writing, content management, and organizing data. People already love using them to create blog posts, courses, and books.

💎 Opportunity

Create a platform for:

• Blogging (think Ghost)
• Selling courses (think Teachable)
• Selling curated information (think NomadList)
• Or hosting docs (think GitBook)

which uses Notion, Obsidian, or Coda as its CMS.

🚀 Startup Examples

• Super
  Create a website with Notion in less than a minute. Easy to manage, looks great, instant page loads, SEO optimization, and no-code. All your content stays in Notion so you can focus on creating while Super handles the rest.
  Revenue: zero to $1k/mo in 30 days
  Pricing: $12/mo for premium, $28/mo for pro.
• Feather
  Notion to Blog in minutes. Write your content on Notion and automatically publish it to your SEO-friendly blog – no coding or design skills required.
  Revenue: zero to $25k/yr ($2,090/mo) in 8 months
  Pricing: 2 months free, then $25/mo for up to 10k views.
• Potion
  Your content is already in Notion. Why not use it for your website? Potion makes this possible with a custom domain, speedy site, custom styles and great SEO.
  Revenue: $5.6k/mo
  Pricing: $10/mo for a website with a custom domain and no branding.
• Obsidian Publish
  Effortlessly publish your notes from Obsidian.
  Pricing: $20 per month or $192 per year per site.
• RPG Adventures and Courses
  A platform for publishing adventures for roleplaying games, and courses on writing adventures, that was built using Obsidian as its CMS.

⚛️ Building an MVP

MVP Features:

• Publish content from Obsidian/Notion/Coda as blog posts.

Future feature ideas:

• Publish content as premium courses, sold on the same convenient platform.
• Paywalled or password-protected pages for other kinds of premium content.
• Integrate with newsletter providers like ConvertKit to offer offer forms for collecting mailing list signups.
• Customize the website design with configuration and templates.
• Great performance and SEO optimization.
• Let people create an unlimited number of websites (each website is simply a separate folder inside Obsidian).
• Integration with Plausible for easy and convenient analytics.

Building guidelines:

• Manually parse the Obsidian markdown files, or fetch the content using Notion API or Coda API.
• Put the content into a database, or a local JSON file.
• Use any webdev framework you’re familiar with to render this data (I recommend Next.js).
• Add payments with Stripe Connect, it makes it very easy for your users to make accounts and create their own payments.
• Figure out how to offer custom domains to your users.

🌱 Marketing

Pitch:

• You're already writing your content in Obsidian. In minutes, you can turn it into a website.
• Publish blog posts, capture emails to grow your audience, make money by selling digital products and courses.

Differentiation:

• The existing platforms don't offer people a way to sell premium content. Making it possible is a great way to offer value that they don't.
• The existing platforms don't offer a way to publish courses. Creating courses with Obsidian can be extremely convenient, and I bet it's a feature that many content creators would find extremely valuable.

Target market:

• Obsidian/Notion/Coda users.
• Content creators in general or in a specific niche (course creators, bloggers, fiction writers, etc).

Traction channels:

• Obsidian discord community and forum.
• Obsidian subreddit.
• Communities for creators in your niche.
• Sponsored youtube videos and newsletter posts.
• Free websites made with your platform have a link back to the platform in the footer.

💰 Figures

Pricing suggestions:

• Offer a free plan with a limited number of pages and a link back to your sales page in the footer.
• Offer a premium website for $20/mo (or $200/yr) on a custom domain, and without the footer link.
• Offer a $50/mo pro plan with advanced features.

Path to $1k/mo:

• 50 premium users at $20/mo = $1k/mo.
• At a 5% conversion rate, you'd need 1000 free users.

I hope you liked this report! If you have any feedback or ideas on how I could make these reports more useful for you, please leave your suggestions in the comments. And don't forget to subscribe to my newsletter to receive reports on promising startup ideas, opportunities and trends every week.