A few things I've learned this year from building a small, profitable internet business from zero to $100k ARR in 8 months.
Ride the wave:
People often ask what we do for marketing, and I don't really have a good answer. You don't have to push your product as hard if you're building for a vocal community of passionate people within a growing market. They'll do most of your marketing for you.
Scratch your own itch:
If you don't experience the problem you've set out to solve, you’ll have a slight disconnect between what your problem actually is, who’s experiencing it, and how to reach them. I’ll probably never do another user test in my life.
Get specific:
The web hosting space may be crowded, but the web hosting space for Notion is not. I used to think a niche would limit the total size of my business, but If we capture 1% of all Notion users, we'd be making at least $720k/month—far beyond what's enough for me.
Use side projects as marketing:
Some of our record signup days came from one of my side projects. The only mention of it was a link to it in the footer of the page. Your side projects don't have to be clearly correlated in order to still correlate.