A long time ago when doing an internship in a startups, I discovered Airtable and I was amazed to see non-technical person working with databases. Airtable has a built-in form feature that was used a lot in this Start-up.

Later on I was using Notion a lot, and as I dev I was a bit frustrated that they didn’t have an API. I was super excited when they finally released their API, so I decided to build something with it. I remembered the Airtable forms and decided to go with it!

I built the MVP in a few days, and shared my progress on twitter along the way. When I had something “usable”, I made it available to people. I shared it on twitter, on Notion-related Facebook groups and on Reddit.

Here’s the breakdown, as reported per users (graph shows for last few months). It’s a mandatory field on the registration form.

Products like NotionForms are cool because they have a “virality” built-in. People create forms, they embed them on their site/notion page. Respondents discover the tool, but more importantly, Google sees the embeds, and consider them as backlinks, which is amazingly effective for SEO.

I think the hardest thing is just to start. Personally, I decided to go full time even before I had a project in mind. It was a very stressing decision, and even though my close ones were supportive I did feel some kind of peer pressure.

Leaving one of the Big Tech to go solo can easily make you sound crazy. I think what really made me do it (aside from the amazing support from my girlfriend) was to think about the risks I was taking. I realized that:

- I didn’t need a lot of money to live (no children, I just need to worry about my own survival)
- I had some savings from a previous exit. Nothing huge to be honest.
- I could easily make more money than I need by freelancing
- I could easily find another job if I needed to
- By doing it I could potentially be 1000x happier than I was as an employee. It turned out I am a lot happier now.

Take the risks you can take!