This is a reedition of an old Twitter post. LinkedIn to Notion, then called recruitivity is no longer being maintained.

A fairly good MVP

In 2022, I built a chrome extension. After a single post on LinkedIn, I had 100s of installs and an estimated ~50 active users.

Small numbers, and yet I saw a spark of traction. Which is why, a year ago, I teamed up, in an attempt to grow the extension from 50 to 50k active users.

A story 🧵

Genesis

Notion fan boy

Not so long ago, I was a freelance talent sourcer. My job was to find potential hires for my clients.

As a die-hard Notion fan, Notion databases were absolutely pivotal to gather the profiles I’d found for my clients on LinkedIn.

But one problem remained…

Copy-pasting

I spent HOURS copy-pasting info from LinkedIn to Notion, just to get the names, job titles, companies, etc. in the database.

Needless to say that productivity is of the essence in recruitment. If you're slow, you recruit less, so you earn less.

Notion launched their API

I knew exactly how to leverage Notion API. I just needed the same chrome extension that most CRMs had: one that saves LinkedIn profiles in databases.

Mine would save them in Notion databases.

I’d actually worked on a similar extension not long before, so I was quick to ship my small extension vanilla html/css/js.

Everything was well until…

In a few weeks I’d already saved hours of copy-pasting. Until I realised that what I had coded could be useful to others.

But before letting them know about what I’d built, I needed some betas to refine the MVP. Tbh, I even believed I’d monetise the extension.

But something happened…

Some developers did the same thing — but better

Some French indie hackers (Ben Issen, whose work I admire) had launched the exact same extension. It was better than mine and less expensive than what I’d expected.

At that time, I couldn’t compete.

I just let go of the idea of ever earning money with the extension and let other recruiters in my network know I’d built a small tool for them. I offered it for free, something like two years ago, and somewhat forgot about it.

Meanwhile, I’d tanked my “““agency”””

When Recruitivity (the recruitment agency I was trying to launch) tanked and I ended up with a world of new possibilities…

So I looked back at the extension, and saw that despite my small-to-non-existent advertising, I had a decent seed of early adopters to start iterating.

“Iterate to do what?” you might ask.

From Chrome Extension to SaaS

To build a REAL product, not just a productivity tool. I firmly believe that we could build something better, that trickles much further down the value chain of recruitment.

Something that pays the rent, at the very least, but has potential for €1m ARR. Why do I believe that?

Why I thought it was a promising idea

1. As I said, little communication got me ~50 active users.

2. The number of freelance recruiters had soared over the past few months.

3. There was a myriad of ATS but freelancers were still under-served and looking for cheaper products.

4. Notion is pivotal to most freelancers, not only for sourcing. Supercharging Notion instead of offering yet another ATS seemed legit.

5. Freelancers were increasingly prone to pay ~€10/mo for a chrome extension.

I took up the promise I’d made

Since I pledged never to launch a project alone again, I teamed up with Gauvain, my ex-manager at PayFit.

We were both growth engineers (he’s now a proper software engineer though), but he’s a much better programmer than I am. So he took the lead on tech and I took the lead on growth.

The corner stones of our agreement

We signed a gentlemen’s agreement that stated a few things.

First, we’d build in public because:

1. Creating hype on a product was a valuable skill I wanted to train

2. I wanted to partake in the indie hacker community

3. It had become cool and mainstream lol

Second, the project was going to be open-source because:

1. There’s nothing to steal (anyone can code what we have).

2. Extensions can get messy, but we have a stack that others can learn from.

Next steps

1. Switch the original vanilla js extension to the new tech stack

2. Get a better sense of who our ICP really is

My bet was that our ICP was amongst freelance recruiters. But it could also be talent acquisition managers in SMBs, business developers, partnership managers, ...