About Feather

Feather is a (SaaS) blogging platform that uses Notion as the CMS. You write all your content on Notion, and Feather automatically publishes it on an SEO-friendly blog connected to your custom domain.

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Feather handles everything for you, like:

• Creating a professionally designed and SEO-friendly blog.
• Hosting the blog and putting it on your custom domain.
• • Your blog can be on a root domain like domain.com
  • It can be on a subdomain like blog.domain.com
  • It can also be on a subfolder like domain.com/blog

All you have to do is write your content on Notion, and Feather takes care of everything else.

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Picking the Product

I am picking Feather as my choice for this project. I am the solo founder of Feather, which was launched in early 2022. I handle everything, including product development, customer support, and more. Since I am the only one working on the product, I know the ins and outs of the product, users, and the market.

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Use case & Users

Feather is a blogging platform. You come to Feather to create and manage a blog for you or your company. The main USP of Feather is that you can use Notion to write content and manage the blog directly from Notion. Once your blog is set up, you and your team can collaborate directly from Notion.

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It's not entirely a B2B product. I have both businesses and individuals as the customers. So, it's a combination of B2B and Prosumer.

Some of the customers I get are:

• Indie creators or course creators who want to publish their content on a blog – to grow their personal brand.
• Founders of small SaaS products – mostly indie/bootstrapped or at the pre-series funding stage.
• Companies with a dedicated content team and established processes for writing and publishing content.
• Established bloggers who write and monetize their content in some way (affiliate marketing, ads, etc.)

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What people are saying

Here are some of the things people are saying about Feather when comparing it to other competitors in the Notion space:

• "I love the clean design."
• "All my blog content is now managed directly from Notion."
• "Very easy to set and simple to manage"
• "Pricing is based on page views, making it an affordable option for bloggers of all sizes."
• "If you’re looking to start an SEO-friendly blog, I’d suggest going with Feather.so undoubtedly."
• "If SEO is your main source of traffic, it seems to be the best option."​

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Feather is uniquely positioned compared to other competitors in the Notion ecosystem. Feather is positioned as a blogging platform, while other competitors are positioned as website builders. You can also build regular websites with Feather, not just blogs. However, I intentionally positioned it as a blogging platform and built features around that positioning. The result of this positioning is that if someone wants a blog and wants to use Notion to manage it, they would recommend Feather instead of other alternatives. This positioning also means that the market size has reduced significantly for Feather.

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ICPs

I am picking and listing down 3 ICPs who are using Feather and are a good fit.

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ICP Prioritization

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Adoption Curve

• Small SaaS Companies
• • They are likely early adopters because they always search for new tools to gain competitive advantages.
• Course Creators
• • They may be more cautious about adopting new tools and want to see proven benefits before adopting a tool. They are also looking for new tools to help grow their personal brand and increase course sign-ups.
• Notion-Integrated Companies
• • This ICP already uses Notion, but since their team size is large and doesn't have a flat organizational structure, they will need convincing to adopt an additional platforms, despite the clear integration benefits with Notion.

Frequency

• Small SaaS Companies:
• • It's high as they want to continuously publish new content, which is crucial for their SEO and lead generation efforts.
• Course Creators:
• • It may not be that high. It will depend on the number of courses they offer and how often they update or market them through blogging.
• Notion-Integrated Companies:
• • High frequency as they have a dedicated team for publishing and managing content.

Appetite to Pay

• Small SaaS Companies
• • They are ready to invest in tools but need a clear ROI before spending money.
• Course Creators
• • Medium because they might have budget constraints compared to companies.
• Notion-Integrated companies
• • High because they already have an established team for publishing and managing content.

TAM

• Small SaaS Companies
• • Medium because the number of companies that would benefit from such a niche product that uses Notion will be low.
• Course Creators
• • Compared to SaaS companies, the number of course creators is high, and they are more likely to benefit from a product like Feather.
• Notion-Integrated Companies.
• • Low, because they need to be an established company. They should use Notion internally and have a dedicated team to manage and publish content, which will have low TAM when combined.

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Distribution Potential

• Small SaaS Companies
• • High because it's easier to reach them through social media and other startup forums.
• Course Creators
• • Medium because it's a bit difficult to reach them as they usually be available in niche forums and communities that is related to the niche of their courses.
• Notion-Integrated Companies
• • Medium as it's low in number but can be reached through professional networks and sales-led strategy.

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Choosing ICPs

Based on the ICP Prioritization framework, I am picking the two ICPS below:

• Small SaaS Companies:
• • They have a high distribution potential, strong frequency of content, and early adopters. They will likely see the value in Feather and adopt it quickly.
• Course Creators
• • This ICP has Medium in many columns, but they have a high TAM compared to Notion-Integrated companies. Their needs also align with Feather's capabilities.

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Reason for not Choosing Notion-Integrated Companies

Even though Notion-Integrated companies ICP have a high appetite to pay and a high frequency of usage, their distribution potential is not high, and they take time to adopt, which makes them not ideal for a product like Feather.

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TAM, SAM, and SOM

I am using the Bottom-up approach to calculate TAM, SAM, and SOM for Feather.

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My chosen ICPs are Small SaaS Companies & Course Creators. Since Feather is a blogging platform that uses Notion as the CMS, let's start with the number of Notion users.

Some Facts

• Number of Notion users as of August 2023:
• • 30 million
• Number of paying Notion users
• • 4 million
  • Notion's free plan is generous enough that not everyone might want to upgrade to a paid plan.
  • • So Feather customers might include both paying and non-paying Notion users
• ARPU for Feather
• • $36 MRR (or) $432 ARR
• Retention for Feather
• • 40-45% after 12 months

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TAM

• Let's assume that 10% of Notion users are interested in blogging, which is 3 million potential users.
• ARPU of Feather is $432 annually.
• So TAM for Feather is (10% x 30 million x $432/year) = $1.296 Billion / year

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SAM

• My ICPs are Small SaaS companies and Course Creators. So let's assume 2% of the Notion creators fall into these two ICPs
• So SAM for Feather is (2% x 30 million x $432/year) = $259.2 Million / year

SOM

• Let's assume we can capture 1% of these targeted segments realistically.
• So SOM for Feather is (1% x 2% x 30 million x $432/year) = $2.592 Million / year

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Core Value Prop

For Small SaaS companies and course creators, effortlessly turn your Notion pages into an SEO-friendly professional blog, enhancing visibility and engagement without leaving the Notion workspace you love.

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Stage of the Product

I have plotted the cohort-wise retention rates for Feather in the graph below. We can see that the retention curves are flattening out after some time, and the product has 40-60% retention.

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So Feather has achieved Product-Market Fit. Now, it's time to focus on Early Scaling. So, I am considering the product to be in the early scaling stage.

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Acquisition Channels

• Content Loops
• Referral Design
• Organic Search

Content Loops

Feather is a blogging platform. User comes to Feather, sign up, create a blog, connect it to their custom domain, and then publish content on their blog.

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Users of Feather publish content on the blogs that they create with Feather. This content becomes the hook in the content loop, and the users are the ones who are publishing content, so they are the content creators.

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Google is the one distributing this content. So Google is the distributor.

But one thing remains: the product needs to be discovered somehow for the loop to exist. Since the blogs are published on the user's domain, there is no way for the loop to exist. However, a small optional "Published with Feather" badge is in the footer to help users discover that the blog is published using Feather.

So here is how the loop goes like:

1. Let's say the user creates content about [Topic #1].
2. The user then uses Feather to publish that content to their own Feather blog.
3. A new potential user searches for [Topic #1] on Google.
4. Google then shows the blog in the search results.
5. The potential user clicks on that search result and reads about [Topic #1].
6. The user likes the look and feel of the blog. They try to find what platform is being used to publish content on this blog.
7. They will see the "Published with Feather" badge on the footer, and clicks on it.
8. The new user then navigate to Feather, signs up and create their blog.
9. They then creates content about [Topic #2] and the loop continues.

Here, one crucial thing to consider—if we make the "Published with Feather" badge optional, the user might choose not to show that badge, and the content loop would break. So, we need to incentivize the user not to remove the "Published with Feather" badge.

One way to incentivize the user not to remove the "Published with Feather" badge is to turn the link into a referral/affiliate link. Every time Feather gets a new customer through this badge, the user receives some platform currency.

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I will define the platform currency in the referral section below.

Referral Design

The brag-worthy thing about Feather

I have already mentioned in the above section what my customers keep talking about. I will copy them over here again just for reference.

• "I love the clean design."
• "All my blog content is now managed directly from Notion."
• "Very easy to set and simple to manage"
• "Pricing is based on page views, making it an affordable option for bloggers of all sizes."
• "If you’re looking to start an SEO-friendly blog, I’d suggest going with Feather.so undoubtedly."
• "If SEO is your main source of traffic, it seems to be the best option."​

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People love the opinionated design of Feather, likes that it helps them get organic traffic, and mainly they like that they can keep using Notion and manage/publish their content directly from Notion.

Platform Currency

The ICPs of Feather are small SaaS companies and course creators. The #1 job they hired Feather is to get traffic to their blog, which helps them get leads and customers for their main product/course.

So, the platform currency they would like is organic traffic, to be more specific.

Feather's domain has a high Domain Authority of 54.

So, a backlink from Feather would mean a very good boost to their SEO in the eyes of Google.

Feather also gets thousands of page views every month, so having a mention of their blog on Feather would mean boost in traffic to ther own blog.

So, the referral program needs to be designed around this aspect – a backlink from Feather and a mention of the blog on Feather's showcase.

The more referrals, the more prominent the blog placement will be on the showcase page. This way, users with more referrals will have higher visibility on Feather's showcase page, which means higher traffic.

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All the links on the showcase page will initially have no-follow links. The exponential reward (like 10+ referrals) would mean their link would turn into a do-follow link. A do-follow backlink from a domain like Feather would be very valuable since it has a DA 54.

Who to ask for a referral?

The user would have experienced the core value prop of the product when they published their first blog post and connected their custom domain to their blog. Another happy moment is when the organic traffic to the user's blog crosses a milestone, say 1k visitors. So we can ask for referrals to these types of users.

How will the user discover the referral program?

When the organic traffic to a user's blog crosses 1k visitors, I will email them to congratulate them on the milestone. I will ask the user how likely they are to recommend the product to others (with an NPS question). Once the user clicks on the answer in the email, saying they are very likely to recommend it to others, I will show them the referral program.

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This way, I also validate whether they had a good experience with Feather.

How will referees share the referral link?

They can copy the referral link and also send the referral link to others via email.

How will the referees track their referrals?

They will get their referral dashboard, which clearly shows all users who clicked on their referral link, whether each user signed up or not, whether they started the free trial or not, whether they created their blog or not, and whether they became a paid customer or not.

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This way, the user will know and see where their blog placement will be on the showcase page.

How will the referral invite look to a non-user?

When the user clicks on the referral link, the landing page will be personalized to show the name of the person who gave the referral – something like "Bhanu got 1k visitors to their blog in the last week, now they want to help you get the same traffic to your blog". The button can have CTA text of "Get more visitors" or "Get more leads".

How will you encourage the referee to continue referring?

As I mentioned previously, the more referrals there are, the higher and more prominent the placement will be on the showcase page. At ten referrals, there is an exponential reward of backlinks from a domain with 54 DA.

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Product Integrations

https://www.notion.so/integrations/all

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Notion has an integration marketplace. Feather can partner with Notion and allow Notion users to automatically publish their content on their custom domain seamlessly.

The integration can add an option in this menu (shown in the screenshot from Notion below) that says "Publish with Feather."

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