2 things worked well for NotionBackups:

* SEO - I started way before I launched the product. I wrote an article on how to back up a Notion workspace using their (then newly-launched) API. It still brings in traffic to this day. Granted, there was almost no competition when I started

* r/Notion subreddit - only in relevant threads when someone is looking for a solution. After some time, some of my customers began recommending this tool to others

I've been building https://notionbackups.com for almost 4 years now.

It's mostly feature complete at this point, but there are still some rough edges.

Notion's API is far from complete, and updates are few and far between. This has led me to work around some of its limitations in creative ways. For example, there is still no way to create top-level pages in Notion, which makes restores impossible. Instead, I ask customers to create a top-level page themselves and write backups there.

Personally, the hardest part of working on a project for an extended period is not getting burnt out repeteadly. Sometimes it helps to work on something else, and other times you just need to step away from the game entirely for a while

Rails is pretty good - built my current business on Rails, building a new one on Rails as well.

In fact, I switched to Rails from Django because the latter was lacking.

What was it lacking?

I built a website that draws 144 rectangles, where each rectangle represents 10 minutes of your day. Some people even use it every day!

https://rectangles.app

ruby on rails, sqlite, sidekiq + redis, and caddy, all hosted on a single hetzner dedicated server. no front-end frameworks, only tailwind.

tarsnap and restic for offsite backups.

I push code to github; then capistrano (think bash script with some bells and whistles) deploys that code to the server and restarts systemd processes.

I've been running this saas business for 3+ years and wouldn't change a thing. I'm also working on a new business with the exact same stack.

in 2021, after selling my unsuccessful saas business, i began searching for the next thing. as a result of my research, i noticed several things:

* Notion.so had a growing user base, and customers loved it

* More and more people (and businesses) were storing important info in their workspaces

* Notion users were publicly complaining about the lack of a decent backup option (i.e. they cared enough to complain)

* Notion announced that they would be launching an API soon

Basically, there was untapped demand and no competition whatsoever. I was undecided between 2 ideas, so I built 2 landing pages and started talking about both. I noticed that one of them received more attention than the other. As soon as I gained the early access to the API, I started building.

The rest is history.

https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm - a forum for small internet business owners. we still have the archive tho!

if you're running a small operation, as I do, there aren't many reasons to use Big Cloud.

i've been running my tiny business on the same provider as op for more than a year, and i've done very little maintenance to keep things up and running. granted, you need to set things up the first time, but after that, it just keeps chugging along.

for folks running their own businesses, have you managed to switch from xero to ledger/beancount? anything to look out for?

xero keeps raising their prices every few months, which is annoying (the whole attitude of 'you won't switch anyway, so we'll do whatever we want').

I'm in my 3rd year with Notion Backups, helping Notion users back up and restore their workspaces:

https://notionbackups.com