Who is Karthik?
Co-founder of NotionChefs and Drotion. Known for Drotion, NotionChefs.
This page recognises Karthik 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.
“You ran into Drotion or a NotionChefs template and want to know who made it, what it actually did, and what happened to it.”
Karthik built both with Nithin Jawahar. NotionChefs shipped marketing templates for Notion through 2022. Drotion put a drag and drop landing page builder inside a Notion workspace, finished second Product of the Day on Product Hunt on 29 May 2022, reached 90 paid users and $3,134 in revenue, and was acquired for a four figure sum. He published the numbers and the launch sequence himself, and both write-ups are still online.
On 29 May 2022, Drotion finished second Product of the Day on Product Hunt with 278 upvotes. The pitch was strange enough to make people click: a drag and drop landing page builder that ran inside a Notion workspace, with more than 60 prebuilt components and custom domain support, promising a live page in under ten minutes. Karthik built it with Nithin Jawahar.
Drotion grew out of NotionChefs, the template shop the two of them had started earlier that year. Both had worked as digital marketers in regular jobs before Notion. Karthik told the No-Code Exits newsletter that they fell in love with the Notion community on Twitter and then noticed how few templates were aimed at marketers and creators, so they started making those. NotionChefs launched a Hashtag Planner on Product Hunt on 20 February 2022 and a Social Media Performance Tracker on 3 March.
He also wrote the work down while it was still running. A Medium post dated 6 June 2022 lays out the five step sequence that earned more than $500 in pre-orders before Drotion shipped. A No-Code Exits interview published 17 November 2022 closes the ledger: 90 paid users, $3,134 in revenue, acquired for four figures. Both pieces name the figures instead of rounding them into a story.
Two marketers who went looking for a gap in Notion templates
NotionChefs was built around a single observation Karthik and Nithin made after joining the Notion community on Twitter: plenty of people were making planners and personal dashboards, and very little was pointed at the marketing work they knew from their day jobs. So the catalogue skewed that way. The Social Media Performance Tracker paired a data hub with a dashboard for follower growth, post engagement, reach and year over year performance across Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. Notion Everything lists it at $3, marks it a staff pick, and notes it runs on Notion's free plan. A Hashtag Planner, a Link in Bio page and a Social Media Ads Planner followed on Gumroad, and NotionChefs registered as a creator on Notion's own template marketplace. Every purchase carried a membership to NotionWrapped, a weekly email of Notion hacks and resources they ran alongside the templates.
The bottleneck that became a product
The idea for Drotion came from their own workflow. As Karthik put it to No-Code Exits: "After we created a notion template, it used to take 1-2 weeks of time to create a landing page for it, host it and then test it before launching." Two weeks of setup for every template is a tax that gets heavier the faster you ship. Their answer was to build the page builder out of Notion itself. The build took 30 days and leaned entirely on tools the Notion community already had lying around: synced blocks carried the component library, Indify handled carousels and buttons, Apption supplied the Product Hunt badge, Tally covered forms, and Fruition took care of custom domains. A buyer duplicated the workspace, dragged in the pieces they wanted, and pointed a domain at it. Nothing left Notion.
The launch playbook, with the receipts attached
The Medium post from June 2022 is the most useful thing he left behind, because it is written as a method with the outcome of each step recorded. Announce the idea on Twitter and in Facebook groups to test whether anyone wants it. Build in public and post the design work daily. Run a waitlist page, which brought in more than 100 subscribers. Give away a free landing page template as the demonstration. Then open pre-orders at early bird pricing, which produced 28 sales split across the waitlist (13), the people who took the free template (9) and the wider subscriber list (6). That sequence cleared $500 before the product existed. The Product Hunt launch added roughly $2,000 in sales on the day. When he was asked in the No-Code Exits interview what he would tell someone starting out, the answer was short: "The easiest way to learn any No-Code tool is to start building with it."
Where he went after Drotion
Drotion was sold for a four figure sum to a buyer Karthik described as having the room to add features he was not going to build, and he moved on to the next idea. That turned out to be LaunchPedia, which bills itself as the Wikipedia for product launch and collects guides, workbooks and directories for founders trying to find their first users. Its ListMySaas section lists more than 150 places to submit a SaaS product, with traffic figures and domain authority attached, plus a done for you submission service priced between $99 and $499. His Product Hunt profile headline reads "Quit my 9-5 and building LaunchPedia full time," and he still writes on Medium under the byline Karthik Tatikonda. Drotion itself is no longer his, but its Product Hunt page and the two write-ups about it remain up for anyone curious how far you can push a Notion workspace.
Why Karthik is on this list
He aimed at a corner of Notion that was underserved when he got there, making marketing templates for creators when most of the catalogue pointed elsewhere, and then he built something the Notion community had not seen before by turning synced blocks into a landing page builder that never left the workspace. Just as valuable, he documented all of it in public: the pre-order sequence, the launch day figures, the total revenue, and the size of the exit. Template makers who came after him can read exactly what worked and exactly how small the numbers were.
We wrote this from public sources and we would rather get it right than get it first. If you are Karthik 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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