The story
so far.
No hockey stick. 600 projects, a few brutal flops, a lawsuit, a forced rebrand — and a founder who still believes boring workspaces deserve better.
I’m a builder
who gets bored.
I hit 600 projects by college — that’s when I stopped counting. It might be 700 by now. Somewhere in there I learned it’s never the number that matters.
The flops taught me
more than the wins.
I said yes to everyone — and lost a lot of time wandering into fields I didn’t know.
The impossible job.
7,500 educational games for UNICEF & Turkey’s Ministry of Education. Mid-project: “they have to run offline.” I was a web dev. So I invented the tech.
Then it got dark.
Sued for $10,000 — for embedding a YouTube video. I won. It drained nearly everything I’d earned. Then a health scare put me between life and death. I came out rewired.
The funny part? I got sued over embed — then paid it off with money I’d earned from embed. From NotionPlus.
Then, a spark.
A stranger’s exit story in a newsletter. A Notion widget tool. It threw me straight back to copy-pasting “clock codes” off the web as a kid.
Start from scratch. Twice.
First sell.
Then build.
Before the tool, I shipped a Notion template — NotionPlus Classic — and sold it. It gathered my first customers and proved the rule: find buyers before you build the product.
Then the real one:
NotionPlus.
I wanted Notion.Plus. Couldn’t get it. Settled for NotionPlus.dev — and later loved that “.dev” nodded to my roots.
Plot twist: I didn’t even know Notion’s paid plan was already called “Plus.”
My rules this time: a PHP monolith, my own hosting (not AWS), LemonSqueezy webhooks, and a logo carved straight out of Notion’s SVG — bent into a +.
Then Notion asked us
to drop the name.
I asked them for six months. It was stressful — finding a good domain was brutal.
I even grabbed thepl.us — then learned it needs US citizenship. Never got to use it.
New name. New design. New domain. All at once.
Rebrands are brutal.
A new domain and a new look reset years of trust overnight. And while I wrestled with the rebrand, I stopped shipping new features — standing still became its own decline. Churn spiked, sales went quiet, and to everyone who knew NotionPlus, the new brand felt foreign.
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The honest version: we’re climbing out of the dip.
So I tore up
the old pricing.
A messy stack of tiers, gone. Three honest choices instead:
A confession.
I used to live inside Notion.
I don’t anymore.
But me walking away didn’t make the problem disappear. Every morning, millions still open a blank, boring workspace.
Boring workspaces
still deserve to feel like yours.
I still believe I can bring a little comfort to them. That belief is the whole reason this story isn’t over.
