SiteMyNotion
Use Notion as a CMS to generate websites from templates
In the last two weeks, I've set the goal to "get the MVP live tomorrow" for every day and never did, until now. Why?
Somehow there always seemed to be small things I needed to add or adapt and the whole thing just didn't feel "ready" for a live environment.
Finally, and in the end, I realized that what I really need to do is: clean up the existing parts enough to give me some confidence that I won't have to migrate the whole DB schema in a few days and to skip every feature that isn't completely necessary for now.
There will be multiple templates later on.
There will be Google Analytics integration for pages.
There will be the possibility to set SEO tags.
There will be better ways to build a navigation.
There will be customization possibilities for the templates.
There will be sites that are hosted on subdomains.
But for now. There's a way for users to log in. Create a site from one template and just try out the free tier.
And that's okay.
It's interesting, projects often seem so small and easy in the beginning, but often some of the details turn out to take more effort than expected.
A similar thing happened to me with SiteMyNotion, while the prototype was easy to set up, there is some complexity in hosting this kind of application in an efficient way.
I'm extremely glad that one of the first tasks things I created for this project was the landing page with an actual pricing table. Creating a pricing table actually forced me to take a deep look into what will be valuable for the customers and the project's value proposition (in terms of features listed per tier). Even more importantly, it showed me early that I will need an efficient way to host the sites to be profitable.
While I'm now mainly working on the backend and DevOps part of the system to allow the first customers to host their notion sites, I still want to release the project as soon as possible. Therefore, I'm decreasing the scope again and again and hope that I will be left with nothing but the most essential parts of the application.
However, to give people an early way of testing the basic concept, I've quickly added some functionality to the landing page to preview what your notion page could look like.
This is now available under the "Try It" section on https://sitemynotion.com/ .
I'm curious to see if people will give it a try, how to promote it and if there will be some feedback.
Have you ever built something for days, weeks or months, without ever showing it to somebody? You hack away at the thing, try to imagine features and... doubt creeps in, you're getting overwhelmed with all the detailed choices you're making before the launch.
It certainly has happened to me in the past.
This is not how I'm building this app!
Today I've set myself the goal to have the landing page online. My starting point for this? Nothing. Not a single line of code.
With such a tight deadline,
I just
- quickly registered a domain,
- looked for landing page templates (next.js and tailwindCSS based, so I could edit them easily)
- copied the analytics setup from one of my other sites
- adapted the landing page and added some rough copy to it
- added a pricing table
- draw a super simple logo
- added a google form to capture sign ups
- pushed the whole thing to the easiest hosting option (vercel in my case)
- started promoting the landing page
It's interesting how creating the pricing table and adding the features per plan, even if they're just a rough estimate, was the hardest part about all this. Pricing tables are probably the most complex part on a landing page, in terms of what you put there.
Is the site the prettiest? Does it have the best copy? Is the code any good?
"NO" to all of these, and many other, questions.
But I'm glad I did it this way. By getting a simple landing page out there, I have something that I can work with.
Therefore, this is already going better than many of my other projects before.
It was a strange moment for me, when I listened to the IndieHackers podcast interview with Andrey Azimov of Sheet2Site.
His story struck me as so similar to my current situation. While I might not be in Bali at the moment, I'm currently staying in Bansko in Bulgaria, another digital nomad hub.
During the last months I've spent hours on creating beautiful and performance optimized website templates (I'm a freelancer and webdeveloper) and when I heard the story of sheet2site, it struck me how I've been stumbling upon so many Notion "websites" lately. How everybody loves the tool, but most people still need to migrate their content to their "real" CMS (me included).
So the journey of SiteMyNotion began. It doesn't need to serve everyone, it doesn't need to be for every website there is out there.
But it shall be the easiest solution to generate professional websites from Notion for a few common use cases.
6 Comments
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Congrats on shipping the MVP!
Congratz! The landing page looks nice. Best of luck!
Congrats - getting the first release out the door is sweet!! Nice job!!!
Nice landing page! I understood what the site was about immediately.
My opinion: Why don't you list out all the benefits of professional package instead of saying "Everything included in Starter"? I believe people will see the differences in the packages when it is listed.
Haha, that's actually really surprising!
I used to spend a ton of time on my landing pages. The one for this project is just a premade template on which I spent as little time as possible (max 1 hour).
If you're into next.js and tailwind you can find it here: https://github.com/ixartz/Next-JS-Landing-Page-Starter-Template
Thanks for the feedback regarding the tiers! I'll check if it looks better if I list the points out separately. Currently, I'm not 100% sure what features will go in which tier, as many of those features don't exist yet.
I'll implement them, once people show an interest in upgrading to a non-free tier :D
Ok, I am currently working on a landing page as well and knowing all the features I want to do is hard. Nice portfolio as well as I just checked it out. I am just getting into freelancing and I am glad I found you. Can I connect with you?