Who is Jatin Arora?
Co-founder and technical half of NotionApps. Known for NotionApps.
This page recognises Jatin Arora 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 keep hitting the same wall in Notion: I want a client or a contractor to see one slice of a database, and Notion wants me to share the whole thing. Someone built a product for exactly that. Who was he, and is his track record worth paying attention to?”
Jatin Arora built the engineering side of NotionApps with Sameer Sanagala. It was the first serious attempt to put a permissioned front door on Notion data, it ran for years with paying customers, and the two of them sold it through Acquire. The product is still running under new ownership, and Arora is no longer the person behind it.
On 21 September 2023, NotionApps finished as the number two Product of the Day on Product Hunt. Behind it was a team of two people. Jatin Arora handled the technology, Sameer Sanagala handled the rest, and the product did one specific thing: it took a Notion database and put a login screen in front of it, so somebody outside the workspace could use the data without being handed the workspace.
Arora is based in Bengaluru and studied at Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology between 2010 and 2014. He describes his own split on his Product Hunt profile in plain terms: "I handle technology and some parts of business/marketing at NotionApps." The same profile carries the line he used as his bio for years, "Dreaming about Notion."
NotionApps was a second act. Before it, Arora and Sanagala spent about three years on Utilize, a no-code tool that built apps from spreadsheets, and watched that market fill up around them. The Notion version worked. It reached a version 2.0, it collected a wall of five-star reviews from people who had built client portals and training systems with it, and then the two founders sold it.
The spreadsheet version ran out of room, so they pointed the same idea at Notion
Arora and Sanagala started with utilize.app, a no-code tool for turning spreadsheets into apps. Arora has been direct about how that went. On his Product Hunt profile he writes that they began with Utilize, "But as the market got crowded, we needed to look elsewhere to gain significant traction. This is where we start building NotionApps." The spreadsheet-to-app category had filled with well funded competitors while their own growth stalled. What they had already built was an engine for reading a structured data source and rendering a usable interface on top of it, and Notion was a structured data source with a large, committed user base and no equivalent tooling. They repointed the engine. The first NotionApps launch on Product Hunt landed in September 2023 as an MVP, and it took second place for the day.
The hard part was permissions, and that is what people actually bought
The pitch for NotionApps sounds like a website builder, and it is worth being precise about why it is a different problem. Notion sharing is coarse. Give someone access to a database and they can see the database. The recurring complaint from people running agencies and small teams was that they could not show a client the progress on that client's own project without exposing every other client in the same table. NotionApps answered that with row-level permissions: each signed-in user sees only the rows that belong to them, edits write back into Notion, and Notion stays the system of record. Nothing gets copied out into a separate database. Around that sat forms, approvals, automations and a component library the product describes as lists, menus, forms, login, user permissions and 40+ components. Reviewers on Product Hunt kept naming the same use cases: a client portal with visibility but not full access, a staff training system that records acknowledgement centrally, a contractor who needs to edit a handful of tasks in a shared table. The product page still frames it the same way, as portals and tools for the people who should not have to live inside Notion.
A lifetime deal bought them the runway to keep going
By late 2022 the company was running low on money and the founders had a decision to make about whether to continue. Arora has written about what they did next. "As a last-ditch effort, we launched a lifetime deal. The idea was that LTDs would help us stay afloat while we built up recurring revenue. It worked!" Lifetime deals are usually a warning sign, since they trade future revenue for cash today and load a company with customers who will never pay again. In this case the trade bought enough time for the Notion product to find its audience and for recurring revenue to build underneath it. Arora also describes the trajectory in his own numbers: over 6000 Notion users built apps for their companies on the platform, and those apps were used by more than 100,000 end users. The two of them ran the company with freelancers and interns instead of full-time hires, and Arora stayed close enough to support that reviewers on Product Hunt credited "Jatin and the team" by name for fast bug fixes and feature turnaround.
Version 2.0, then handing the whole thing over
NotionApps 2.0 launched on Product Hunt on 14 May 2025 and placed fourth for the day. Sanagala announced it as the small team of the two of them finally getting a rebuilt version out. It was a ground-up revision, built, as they put it in a Notion Discussion Forums AMA, from first principles for the Notion experience instead of borrowing the shape of existing no-code platforms. That AMA is one of the few places Arora speaks in public at length, and his own contribution to the thread was characteristically short: "It has been a long journey indeed. :)" Not long after 2.0, he and Sanagala sold NotionApps. Arora has said they went through Acquire, formerly MicroAcquire, and that the platform's team helped through the tricky parts. He has also been useful about the mechanics: their first listing drew little interest, so they redid it with a full profit and loss statement, a breakdown of lifetime value, customer acquisition cost and churn, and a running question-and-answer document for buyers. With NotionApps sold, they announced they were also shutting down utilize.app, closing out the spreadsheet product that started everything. NotionApps itself continues to operate and publish under its new ownership.
Why Jatin Arora is on this list
For a long stretch, NotionApps was the only real answer to a question the Notion community kept asking: how do you let an outsider touch your data without handing them your workspace? Arora wrote the technical half of that answer. Thousands of people who had no intention of learning to code shipped client portals, ticket queues and training systems on top of databases they already maintained, and kept Notion as the place the data actually lived. That is a genuine expansion of what a Notion workspace could be asked to do, and it came from a two-person team that nearly ran out of money before it worked.
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