I decided I wanted to do startups around a month and a half ago. Going to walk through what I’ve done in that time, and what’s next.

The TLDR going into this first sprint has been: I want to be an executive & build big business(es) → I have no experience building businesses → I need to learn how to execute on solutions → build a business.

Because I haven’t done anything in the business and startup world yet, the first thing I decided I needed to do was develop my skills as an executive. The capacity to execute (a.k.a make things happen) is the defining quality of successful entrepreneurs. Therefore, it’s what I decided I need to develop the most, as well as showcase an aptitude for. Evidence builds trust, and trust garners investment. Executing is hard and becoming a good executive takes reps. Developing these skills and that trust define what I view as the first leg in my journey.

I concluded that one of the best first steps towards accomplishing my goal was to build a small business.

My first product.

While setting up the system to turn Notion into my blog’s text editor and content management system (CMS), I remarked that there wasn’t a super easy way to export Notion pages as Markdown.

I also remarked that folks on Reddit were experiencing a similar problem:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/1cldx4s/is_there_a_programmatic_way_to_export_notion_to/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/1ee14id/tool_to_export_content_as_markdown/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/xjozdm/exporting_a_notion_page_as_markdown/

Turning Notion into my blog’s CMS was such an unlock that I thought I could:

1. Make setting this up easier, and
2. Make exporting Notion pages to Markdown easier, as a whole.

Enter N2M (Notion to Markdown): a service for converting Notion pages into Markdown content. You can directly convert page(s) into Markdown online, or you can create an automated workflow that will export pages, or any page inside of a database, when created or changed.

You can additionally configure Markdown frontmatter, and set up a webhook to be executed when a workflow is run.

Dashboard view of this blog’s workflow.

The service has a useful free tier and a much richer premium tier. In terms of revenue, I will consider this project a win if I earn a dollar; big bucks is not the point.

N2M is now the driving force behind this blog, and I’ll be writing a post to describe how I set this up (hint: it’s much simpler than before).

If you write a blog and use Markdown files as your post format, using Notion as an editor is miles better than anything I’ve worked with before.

• Drag and drop images
• Markdown rendering
• Convenient links
• No need for git
• Publish a new post in < 60 seconds

It’s definitely worth giving it a shot!

I started writing N2M when I was in a hostel in Japan. Overall, it’s taken a little over three weeks to get to where it is today.

For those interested, it’s built with:

• Next.js
• tRPC (zod is beautiful)
• Tailwindcss
• Prisma
• Supabase

and hosted on Vercel, with some help from my home server for CRON jobs.

The funnest parts were writing the workflow execution pipeline and creating the queueing and execution system. I used a mix of shadcn and custom components for the UI.

I believe getting into a start-up incubator and connecting with more people who are driven to build businesses is where I eventually want to be.

Until I apply and get admitted to one [1], I believe the most pragmatic things for me to do are:

1. Find a co-founder.
2. Builds more businesses.

Exporting from Notion to Markdown is a small problem and it will help a small number of people. Next, I would like to solve a larger problem, something I can see tens of thousands of people experiencing, and build a business around the solution. I do not expect this to take less than a month, but I also won’t define success as making a single dollar (which I did for N2M).

The journey continues.

I am actively seeking out a technical co-founder to build things with. If you’d like to chat, DMs on 𝕏 are open!

[1] I want to apply to an incubator with a co-founder and a moderately big problem we have identified and would like to solve.