What I learned growing Notis on $3K/month (and why messaging-first changes everything)

I didn’t start Notis because I wanted to build “yet another productivity app.” I started it because I was tired of having good ideas at the wrong time.

You know the moment. You’re walking to a meeting, you’re in a taxi, you’re between two calls, and something important pops into your head. You open Notion on mobile, you wait, you try to find the right page, you lose the thread, and the idea dies right there.

So I built the workflow I wanted for myself: an AI assistant that lives where my day actually happens. In WhatsApp. In Telegram. In email. You text it like you’d text a teammate, and it updates Notion for you.

Notis launched in October 2024. The first paid users showed up in January 2025. And since then, I’ve been running what is basically a founder-led growth lab with one constraint: we’re bootstrapped, with roughly $3K a month to play with.

The wedge: messaging-first beats “another app”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned building Notis, it’s this: the product isn’t just the features. The product is the habit.

Most people don’t need a more powerful dashboard. They need less friction between the moment a thought happens and the moment it becomes something useful. Messaging apps already have that habit baked in. They’re instant, familiar, and always open.

That’s why the integration with Notion matters. Notion is an incredible home base, but the mobile experience is still… let’s be polite and call it “inconsistent.” The pain is real. You know it. I know it. We built Notis to make Notion usable when you’re not at your desk.

The early numbers (and what they’re telling me)

I’m a builder, but I’m not allergic to spreadsheets. Early-stage growth is just product feedback, except the feedback is paid for.

Right now we’re sitting at about a 50% trial-to-paid conversion rate. That number makes me happy because it means the promise is clear and the product is doing real work for people.

The less fun part is unit economics. Our target cost to acquire a trial is $50. Our average CAC across channels is around$ 89. Churn is roughly 15%. And for the business to really compound, we want the first-year LTV to land around $200–$220.

In other words: we’re close, but not comfortable.

We’re building in multiple markets from day one: the US and UK are strong for obvious reasons, but we also see healthy demand in France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and Hong Kong. The distribution is a feature, not a bug. When your product lives in messaging apps, behavior patterns are surprisingly universal.

What’s working: Twitter/X is still underrated

Twitter/X has been our best-performing platform.

Part of it is the audience. If you target Notion followers and tech-forward people, you find a sweet spot: they already love systems, but they’re also the first to admit that those systems break the moment they leave their laptop.

The other part is creative. The ads that win don’t look like ads. They look like a founder sharing a workflow. They feel organic because they are organic. It’s basically me saying: “Here’s the thing I built because I was frustrated, and here’s how I use it.”

No app switching. No formatting. No friction.

What’s promising: Meta, if you respect the loop

Meta is a different game. You don’t really “win” on the first impression. You win by building a loop.

We’ve been leaning on video view campaigns and building retargeting audiences off engagement. The current plan is simple: ship 12 short videos a month, keep them educational, and let repetition do its job. Not in a spammy way. In a “oh right, that exists” way.

The point isn’t to go viral. The point is to be remembered the exact day someone feels the pain.

What’s expensive: Google will sell you intent… at a price

We’ve been running Performance Max campaigns on Google. The intent is real, but so is the bill.

CPC hovers around $3, and CAC tends to land closer to $150. That doesn’t mean it’s “bad.” It means it’s a lever you pull once the rest of the funnel is tighter, or once you’ve got stronger monetization.

At our stage, I’d rather earn the right to scale Google by improving onboarding and retention first.

Newsletters: the most humbling channel in existence

Newsletter sponsorships are a casino if you don’t have a tight feedback loop.

We had one placement that did great for a small spend and drove a lot of conversions. We had another that cost meaningfully more and produced almost nothing.

The lesson isn’t “newsletters don’t work.” The lesson is “distribution fit is everything.” Two audiences can both look “AI” on paper and behave completely differently in reality.

The hidden boss fight: tracking in a messaging-first funnel

If your acquisition happens on one device and your activation happens inside WhatsApp on another, you don’t have a marketing problem. You have a measurement problem.

People click an ad on their laptop, then later scan a QR code with their phone, then finish onboarding in chat. Cookies don’t survive that journey. Attribution gets messy fast. And if you can’t measure, you can’t improve.

So we’re implementing server-side tracking with UTMs, Conversion APIs, and server-side events. Not because it’s sexy, but because it’s the difference between guessing and iterating.

Where this gets really interesting: B2B and white-label

Notis started as a personal workflow. But users keep pulling it into teams.

We already have customers buying five to ten seats at a time. And the white-label angle is real: a company-specific WhatsApp assistant that can answer questions, push updates, and connect to an internal knowledge base.

That’s where the multi-agent architecture becomes more than a fun technical choice. It becomes a distribution strategy.

What I’m focusing on next (and why)

The next step is not “more channels.” It’s sharper math.

I want to improve our key metrics by about 30%. Lower CAC. Higher conversion. Lower churn. It’s not glamorous, but it’s how you buy your freedom.

At the same time, we’re systematizing what currently lives in my head: how we partner with newsletters, how we produce content without burning out, and how we do B2B outreach in a way that doesn’t feel like spray-and-pray.

And yes, I’m considering a raise. Not because bootstrapping is failing, but because it’s working. If we can turn $3K/month into a repeatable growth engine, then a $500K pre-seed becomes a way to scale what’s already proven, not a way to “find product-market fit with money.”

This is the part of the journey I love most: the phase where the product is real, the numbers are honest, and every improvement compounds.

If you’ve ever felt the gap between “I should write this down” and “I’ll do it later,” you already understand why Notis exists. The rest is just execution.