Stackbase
A £6k MRR Notion template shop built from a spare bedroom
- Founder
- Raj P.
- Location
- London
- Founded
- 2023
- Structure
- Ltd
- Revenue
- £74k ARR
- Team
- Solo + 1 part-time editor
Raj sells Notion templates and small productivity systems to founders and operators. No team, no warehouse, no inventory — just a Gumroad store and a Twitter following he built in public.
Background
Raj was a product manager at a Series-B fintech in London on £72k. He'd been a heavy Notion user since 2019 and had built dozens of internal templates for his team. The business started as a way to share one of those templates publicly — never intended as a full-time thing — until the maths started making more sense than his day job.
The spark
Raj shared a free Notion CRM on Twitter in early 2023. It hit 1,200 downloads in a weekend. He turned the next iteration into a £19 paid template and made £600 in week one.
First real sale
He set up a Gumroad shop the same evening as his first viral post. The first paid sale arrived 11 minutes after the tweet went live. He spent the rest of the year shipping a new template every two weeks.
The turning point
Month 7 he launched a £49 bundle (CRM + content planner + finance tracker). It tripled average order value overnight. By month 10 he was over the VAT threshold and incorporated as a limited company.
Scaling without overhiring
Instead of hiring a team he hired one part-time editor to clean up screenshots and copy. He reinvests roughly 30% of revenue into a small ad budget and sponsoring two niche newsletters.
Where it is today
Stackbase is at £6.1k MRR with 27 live templates. Raj works four days a week, takes Fridays off and is shipping his first cohort-based course next quarter.
Timeline
- Jan 2023Free CRM template tweeted
1,200 downloads in 48 hours. Email list goes from 0 to 480.
- Feb 2023First paid sale
£19 template. £600 in week one.
- Apr 202310 templates live
Revenue £1.4k/mo. Still employed full-time.
- Aug 2023Launched first bundle
£49 'Founder OS' bundle. AOV jumped from £19 to £41.
- Nov 2023Incorporated Stackbase Ltd
Crossed £90k cumulative revenue. VAT registered.
- Jan 2024Quit the day job
MRR £3.2k + £18k in cash. Took a 3-month runway view.
- Jun 2024Hired part-time editor
£900/mo for 10 hrs/wk on screenshots, copy, support.
- Feb 2025First newsletter sponsorship
£1,200 for a 4-week slot. Returned 3.2x in attributable sales.
Revenue & profit by year
| Period | Revenue | Costs | Profit | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 (2023) | £28,000 | £2,100 | £25,900 | Sole trader. Gumroad fees + domain only. |
| Year 2 (2024) | £54,000 | £11,800 | £42,200 | Incorporated Nov '23. Editor hired Jun. |
| Year 3 run-rate | £74,000 | £19,400 | £54,600 | Includes ad spend + 2 newsletter sponsorships. |
Challenges & fixes
Problem · Post hit 2.1M views but drove only 14 sales. The CTA was buried in a reply, not the main thread.
Fix · Every product tweet now opens with the price and the link, then the demo. Conversion on viral posts went from 0.0007% to 0.04%.
Problem · A complex 'CRM Pro' template was too dense for non-Notion-native buyers. Refunds wiped out a month's profit.
Fix · Added a 90-second Loom demo to every product page, plus a 'Lite' £19 version. Refund rate dropped to 1.8% within a quarter.
Problem · At £6k MRR Gumroad's 10% fee was costing £600/mo — more than the editor.
Fix · Moved to a Lemon Squeezy + Stripe stack for higher-priced bundles, kept Gumroad for the £19 entry tier. Saved ~£3,800/yr.
The playbook
Every product starts as a free template. If it gets 500+ downloads it gets a paid 'pro' version.
Every progress update ends with a product link. ~70% of revenue is attributable to Twitter.
Never run sale prices. Always raise AOV by bundling — protects the perceived value of each template.
Cohort launches with a 5-day window outperform always-on by ~3x on first-week revenue.
“I spent 9 months building an audience for free. The first paid sale felt like a switch flipping — same effort, suddenly compounding.”
“Going Ltd before I needed to gave me cleaner accounting and made the day-job-quit conversation easier.”
“I'd rather sell 100 copies at £49 than 1,000 at £9. The support load is a tenth of the size.”
What worked
- Building in public on Twitter was worth more than any paid channel.
- Bundling was the single biggest revenue lever he pulled.
- Going Ltd before the VAT threshold gave him cleaner accounting and limited liability.
Raj’s advice to founders starting today
- Build the audience before the product. A 1,000-person email list is worth a year of ad spend.
- Charge from day one. Free users teach you nothing about willingness to pay.
- Treat refunds as feedback. A spike means your page or product is mis-selling — fix the page first, the product second.
- Don't quit until MRR covers your fixed costs for 6 months in a row.
What’s next
Raj is launching 'Stackbase School' in Q3 — a £495 cohort course teaching operators how to build internal Notion systems. Capped at 40 seats per cohort, 4 cohorts a year. Long-term he's exploring a lightweight SaaS layer on top of his most-used templates.
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