Table of Contents
The Story Behind
Those of you who follow me will know that I'm currently building stomod.com - a Notion to blog platform which is now live and is generating MRR.
While pitching Stomod to prospective customers, one of the common questions I got was: does it support building knowledge bases?
The answer was no.
Stomod is a purpose built tool for blogging using content from Notion. You write in Notion and it publishes those posts as a blog. I built it to scratch my own itch where I blog about my adventures at traveladventures.stomod.com and hirve.sh
Taking the incessant requests about knowledge bases as a cue, it occurred to me that the demand for a Notion to knowledge base platform is more than a Notion to blog platform.
It makes sense to be honest and I kind of feel stupid not realising it earlier. People use Notion mostly as a way to organise information - brain dumps, second brains, documentation, knowledge bases. Moreover, several companies use Notion as their repository for company information: policies, handbooks, product documentation, etc.
With my already intricate knowledge of how to process Notion content to build blogs, I felt there was an opportunity to tap into the knowledge base/help center/documentation kind of sites.
The next question which came up in my mind was: Should I build this into Stomod (minimal effort) or build this as a whole different product?
My gut feeling said to go with a different product. Upon thinking more deeply about it, it reasons out pretty well.
Building a different product allow Stomod's core message not to be diluted.
Right now, the message is simple: Build beautiful blogs effortlessly, with Notion.
I felt if I tack on another value proposition built into Stomod, the marketing message would become less clear.
Build beautiful blog/knowledge bases/documentation sites/help center effortlessly, using Notion? Nah.
In my opinion there's something more appealing in purpose-built tools where there's a feeling that if it does only that one thing, it will do it better than a more generic tool.
Idea Conception
Hence the idea of creating a sister product: AssistFlare.
AssistFlare will probably share 90% of the codebase with Stomod but it will be a totally separate product with a more knowledge-base focused experience.
With that in mind, I decided to go ahead with a 15 days MVP challenge for building out AssistFlare.
Previously I have been guilty of drawing out shipping a product. This time around, I'm cutting out the cruft and building the bare minimum to launch as soon as possible.
You can follow my updates on Twitter/X here: https://twitter.com/hirvesh. You can also join the AssistFlare waitlist here: https://assistflare.com
What do you think about my thought process? Does it makes sense to you or is there something I am missing?
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