What's your personal background? What motivated you to start your own company?

A long time ago (2015) in a galaxy far far away (New York), I started college at NYU and my first startup. A few years later, that venture failed costing me $50,000 and a sad amount of college parties; I also didn’t graduate.

However, there was an odd silver lining — an emergent obsession with digital productivity. As I explored this, I learned, mastered and churned through every app (Airtable, Asana, Trello) known to a typical productivity-obsessed oat milk latte sippin' millennial.

Unknowingly, I became a "no-code productivity expert". And then, in 2018, this side hustle accelerated when I discovered Notion on Product Hunt (or did Notion discover me?). I started using it and fell in love.

Next thing you know, I evolved from an obsessive user to an ambassador to a certified consultant. Apparently, people are willing to pay up to $15 per hour to have their Notion setup….”Let's try to make a business out of it”, I thought.

Fast forward two years, and all of this comes together when I found Optemization as a "remote productivity" agency in March 2020, which to say the least, was fortunate timing. Since opening up shop, we delivered 82 projects for 55 clients, most of whom are agencies, startups and VCs.

Now, we're on a mission to empower a million distributed teams to work better together.

What no code tool(s) did you use to build Optemization and what purpose did each play in the final product?

There is no final product because we’re a service-based organization. However, we build workspaces for teams using Notion, which, as we found out, is very similar to software development.

Obviously, therefore, our main tool no-code tool is Notion.

Using Notion we organize all our notes, tasks, meetings, projects internally and do the same for our clients externally.

What were the initial costs to get Optemization off the ground?

Most of our business runs on Notion, for which I have a compensated license, so that’s free.

So with the exception of labor salaries, the initial costs were minimized to a few hundred bucks per month for SaaS.

What was the process of building your product from idea to launching?

There is no product. To “launch” the consulting practice I just had to get good at building Notion workspaces and more importantly, confident that I can do this for other people and organizations. And on top of that, gain a sense of acceptance that some of these projects are going to fail and that’s okay.

How do you attract customers?

Twitter and Notion.

Well initially, a few friends hired me to build stuff with Airtable and Zapier.

However, things really picked up as a result of my, once again, obsession with Notion. Before becoming a consultant, I became a Notion Ambassador in New York. It’s a voluntary role where my responsibility was to host events about Notion and gather users together. I had a background in event management and I really liked Notion, so I put together some cool events.

The first non-friend client approached me at an event I hosted.

Also, I posted promotions for and photos/videos from those events on Twitter. Every time, Notion would retweet those Tweets, I’d gain a couple hundred followers. After the initial take off, I started sharing the things I do in Notion like dashboards and websites. Soon enough, I was known as the “Notion Guy” on the platform.

Then came Nik Sharma, a very popular DTC agency owners and influencer. He posted about wanting to hire a Notion consultant. I was tagged a bunch, so I sent a DM proposal and we ended up working together. Even though the project wasn’t that successful, Nik and I became friends and he started referring friends and RTing my stuff, which contributed to more growth and new customers.

Eventually, Notion launched their Certified Consultants program. As part of it, their team would refer leads to us and people discovered my profile on their website at notion.so/consultants.

What are the biggest challenges you've overcome building Optemization?

I got lucky and managed to build an incredible team. Usually, that’s a big challenge for service-based business because of cash flow. We’re four full-time and 11 total.

I connected with each team member in and around the Notion community across Slack, Telegram and Twitter.

How much money is Optemization making per month?

We’re still figuring out the business model, so it’s a feast or famine kinda thing right now.

What's your advice for non-technical people who want to start a company?

Get started. Now.

The longer you wait, the less likely you are to do it.

It’s not a giant process where you have to risk it all. Detach yourself from this notion. Start with small activities that you enjoy doing consistently. It might be building one mini app that you launch every month. Do it for 12 times (one every two weeks) in a row and see how many users you can retain.

Or it might be one writing a Twitter thread / article per week. Do that 26 weeks in a row and see how large of an audience you can build.

Iterate and do better each time. In a while, either of those achievements will lead you to some sort of monetization opportunity.

Ship often enough, and one day you will “stumbled into” starting a company.

What are your future plans for Optemization?

We’ve aligned ourselves to pursue a gigantic mission. Now, we have to just keep working to move closer and closer to accomplishing it. But we’re struggling with cash-flow.

So in the near-time that we have to push hard on marketing and sales. In the medium-term we have to productize our services to become much more efficient at service delivery and detach our revenue from services. In the long-term we have to establish ourselves as the de facto thought leader in our industry.

In the forever-term, we will become a “McKinsey for remote work” — the default partner for enabling distributed teams to work better together.

How do you think the rise of no code tools will impact entrepreneurship?

Honestly, I don’t know.

On on hand, the barriers to starting a business will keep dropping because it’s so easy to launch a product.

On the other hand, the frequency of new products will hyper increase competition and discourage people to become entrepreneurs.

At the same time, businesses leverage no-code to improve internal operations and retain employees who might’ve quit otherwise.

Is there anything else you'd like to add

Don’t forget to have fun y’all.