Who is Dominik Sobe?
Solo founder of HelpKit. Known for HelpKit, which serves a Notion workspace as a branded help centre on your own domain, and the free Notion Simple Table Generator.
This page recognises Dominik Sobe for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“I want to know whether to run my documentation on Notion through HelpKit, and whether the person behind it is worth learning from.”
This page traces how Dominik Sobe went from a Figma mockup in July 2021 to a paid product, how he priced and sold it by hand, and what he has shipped since. It does not compare HelpKit against other Notion publishing tools and it does not list current plan prices, so read helpkit.so for those.
In July 2021 he posted a Figma mockup of a Notion-powered help centre to roughly 300 Twitter followers. Around a hundred people from the Notion community followed him overnight, and within a week two of them had pre-ordered a discounted annual plan for software that did not exist yet. An encouraging email from one of them was enough. He built the first working version in the next 30 days.
The idea came out of his own backlog. He was shipping a mobile app, the App Store listing needed documentation, and none of the help desk tools he tried fit what he wanted. He was already keeping the whole business in Notion, and as he put it in a Starter Story interview, he was "already documenting my entire business in Notion. Then it just clicked."
HelpKit has been his main business since. He runs it alone, has taken no outside money, and works from wherever he happens to be, often Southeast Asia. In a 2025 interview on the Niche Pursuits podcast he described it as past 10,000 dollars a month in recurring revenue with more than 400 customers, ranging from small startups to universities.
The help centre he needed was one he was already writing
Two years before HelpKit he had built Filmtypes, an analog film database that drew a crowd on Hacker News and Product Hunt in 2019 and never earned anything. HelpKit started from the opposite end, with a bill and a deadline. He could not find a help desk product he wanted to run, so he wrote the articles where his company notes already lived and built the layer that publishes them. HelpKit reads the pages out of Notion through the API and renders them as its own site: a custom domain such as support.yourcompany.com, full-text search, per-article analytics, reader feedback, SEO control, password and email gating, plus an embeddable widget and mobile SDKs. The writing stays in Notion. The reader never loads a Notion page.
The free table generator did the selling
For a long stretch Notion had no plain table. You got a database, which is heavy for three rows of specs, or a layout hack. Dominik worked out that a static table could be faked inside the math equation block with LaTeX, then wrapped that workaround in a visual editor so nobody had to hand-write the notation. The Notion Simple Table Generator lets you add and remove rows and columns, import a CSV, bold the header row, switch between sans, serif and mono, adjust padding, and copy out the equation code. It is free, it needs no account, it lives under helpkit.so/tools, and it travelled through Reddit threads and Notion Facebook groups without him pushing it. The only sales copy on it is a single line asking whether your company might need a help centre built on Notion. He ran the same play again in November 2023 with Notion Expert GPT, a free ChatGPT assistant pointed at the Notion help centre, guides and template library.
Hundreds of emails before anything compounded
The first stretch was hand work. He sent personal emails, took demo calls one at a time, and set up early knowledge bases himself, which is slow and is also how he learned what to build next. Pricing opened at 19 dollars a month and climbed as he understood what buyers were actually replacing, in some cases help desk software costing several hundred a month. He skipped freemium and settled on a seven-day trial with no card, two months free on annual billing, and article limits per tier so an account grows as the customer does. He also published revenue figures on Twitter while he built, which brought early adopters and, later, imitators: the first episode of the BootstrFM podcast in October 2023 has him working through where inspiration stops and copying starts.
An AI add-on, then two products with no Notion in them
In September 2023 he shipped HelpKit AI, a chatbot trained on the Notion knowledge base a customer already hosts with him, sold as a 49 dollar a month add-on to any plan. He wrote afterwards that the launch had slipped by two months, mostly on interface design and on learning how LLM products behave in real use, and that competitors were shipping thin wrappers around ten lines of LangChain. In the first two weeks of public beta more than 15 customers had switched it on and the bot had handled over 2,000 conversations. Since then he has shipped away from Notion as well: Redreach, started in 2024, surfaces Reddit threads with buying intent for B2B companies, and Juicy, a macOS battery app from 2025, was picked up by Apple for its Apps We Love shelf on the Mac App Store. HelpKit keeps running alongside both, and its blog keeps publishing Notion material, including a comparison of Notion Sites against a dedicated help centre and guides to custom domains and web publishing.
Why Dominik Sobe is on this list
He gave the Notion community two working tools it never had to pay for. The Notion Simple Table Generator patched a gap in Notion itself with a LaTeX trick most people would never have found, and it circulated in Reddit and Facebook groups for years on its own merit. Notion Expert GPT did something similar for anyone stuck in the Notion docs. On top of that, HelpKit let companies keep their documentation in the place their team already writes while giving readers search, analytics and a branded domain, and Dominik logged the entire build in public from the first mockup onward, which left an unusually honest record of what a Notion-adjacent SaaS costs to get off the ground.
We wrote this from public sources and we would rather get it right than get it first. If you are Dominik Sobe and something here is wrong, missing, or you would prefer this page did not exist, tell us and we will fix or remove it.
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