The makings of a Notion product — and launching it on Product Hunt 🚀

Published on

July 29th, 2021

Author

Ben Lang

Category

How To

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As a Product Hunt user since January 2014, and as the person leading community at Notion, I try to keep a pulse on all the Notion products launching on Product Hunt. Here's what caught my eye.

Notion's connection to Product Hunt goes way back. Five years ago, Notion 1.0 launched on Product Hunt. It was well-received by the community and ended up reaching the #1 spot for the entire month. Because of all the amazing feedback we received from the community, we launched Notion 2.0 in 2018 on Product Hunt — and it became one of the all-time top posts on the site. It’s safe to say Product Hunt and its community has a special place in the hearts of Notion Co-founders, Ivan and Simon, and our company as a whole.

With the growth of Notion’s product and our community, we’ve seen a lot of folks start creating products built on top of Notion, like template packs or integrations. It's been inspiring for the whole team to see how much creativity and passion people have for this growing ecosystem around Notion.

We believe if every business and person can tailor software to their problems, the world will be better at solving its problems. Our mission as a company is to make that a ubiquitous reality. We’re seeing that mission come to life on Product Hunt and all the tools people create using Notion.

As user #1880 on Product Hunt and as the person leading community at Notion, I try to keep a pulse on all the Notion products launching on Product Hunt. Here are some of the products that caught my eye and some of the most successful ones — plus some tips on how you, too, can be successful in launching your Notion product.

Types of Notion Products

Surveying some of the recent launches, we began noticing patterns in the types of products people were launching on Product Hunt. Much of the time, they’re related to templates or resources that help people get the most out of Notion.

Individual templates

Notion Templates - Notion Portfolio

These templates generally serve a singular function, and are duplicated by other users directly into their workspaces.

What’s so powerful about templates is their impact in the community. You might have created something that you find useful — like a really cool portfolio of your work — and others can likely benefit from it. All of a sudden, your template is getting hundreds or thousands of downloads, filling the need of community members.

Here are a few examples of templates launched on Product Hunt:

Notion Portfolio - Showcase your work using this portfolio template
Portfolio Manager - Track your investments directly in Notion
Link Manager - Organize your links in one spot

Template packs

Notion Template Packs - Notion Growth Workspace

We’ve seen a growing number of template collections. These are like one-stop-shops for entire workspaces — with one download, you can have an engineering wiki, a task management system, and a meeting notes database. Often, template packs are paid resources, but people find value in them because they make it super easy to get your Notion set up off the ground with one click.

A few recent examples for you:

Notion Growth Workspace - Collection of templates to help you launch your next project. Includes task management, sales pipeline, fundraising, email marketing hub, and more.
Notion TrackerSuite - Productivity pack helping you achieve your goals.
Unipack Notion Templates - Everyday productivity systems. The collection includes day-to-day planning, finance management, ideation, and more.

Tools & Resources

Notion Tools & Resources - Joey for Notion

With the recent launch of our beta API, we’ve seen an uptick in Notion tools launching on Product Hunt. These plug right in to help automate your workstreams.

Here are a few examples:

Super - Connect a custom domain and build your own Notion based website
Joey - Interactive blocks to upgrade your Notion pages
Trove - Create highlights across the internet and save them in Notion

Success stories

As we mentioned, there’s been a ton of Notion products launched on Product Hunt (and there are more launches every day).

Here are a few, with techniques that helped make them so successful.

Notion Pack: This pack of templates for freelancers ended up as #2 product of the week on Product Hunt. The maker of this pack, Ben Issenmann, put together a concise walkthrough video for viewers to quickly learn what the pack includes. Showing users (through video) how the templates could be used helped catapult Ben to the top of Product Hunt.

The Bulletproof Notion Workspace 2.0: This workspace setup garnered more than 500 upvotes when it launched. William Nutt's tagline for this project was "the intelligent framework for any Notion workspace,” a tagline that resonates with all users on Product Hunt. He also made sure to respond to every comment in the conversation. William understood his audience, knowing how to speak to them and the importance of community-building by responding to comments, which helped build excitement around his setup.

Newsletter OS: Maker, Janel, created this dashboard for newsletter managers. In a Mashable article from last April, she said she made more than $35,000 from it since launching in October 2020. Janel received a lot of support from the no-code community, she now leads the On Deck no-code fellowship. Janel identified a community need — and the results speak for themselves.

Best practices

As a serial Product Hunter myself, I've hunted over 300 products and seen how best to prepare ahead of time for launch. Here’s three tips for Notion makers in particular.

1. Make sure your assets look good! The icon and product photos make a big difference. Take a look at Notion Pack as an example. If you're using our logo in the design, please make sure to follow our brand guidelines.

2. Put together a list of people who could help support you on the day of the launch. Give them a heads up as soon as your product is live. This takes a little bit of planning, but it’s worth it to create a “moment” around your launch. Share your launch in the Notion communities you belong to.

3. Let the Notion team know about your Notion product! You can reach me on Twitter @benln or by email at ben@makenotion.com.

It’s helpful to have a list of things you’ll do for every launch, which makes the process repeatable and builds your muscle memory for the next time you launch on Product Hunt.

Happy hunting!

Comments (5)

Samyak

Co-founder at Humming World

This was a great article. Congrats!!

Share 2yr ago

James Gill

Building EcoSend, CEO of GoSquared

Absolutely love this article! Thanks for putting it together, Ben! I think I bookmarked at least 5 links here. Not sure if this is a handy addition or just Notion overload now but I also wrote a piece about our use of Notion with our templates for running a SaaS business here (I never packaged it up as a Product Hunt release though!): https://www.gosquared.com/blog/h...

Share 2yr ago