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Write in Notion, publish an SEO-optimised blog — a fourth-attempt product that hit $500 MRR two months after switching on payments, built by a 24-year-old in India who first survived a $10,000 hosting bill
plus a spun-out backend product (useNotionCMS) with 2 customers at $29/mo and ~$120/mo
"Even my monthly bill went to 10K — 10K US dollars — one month. I had maybe 20 or 30 customers." The product worked; the infrastructure nearly killed it before the pricing page did.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Bhanu graduated and took a software engineering job at a startup in India. The pay was good by local standards and he quit after six months anyway — "I just felt like that's not the lifestyle for me." He knew he wanted to build something of his own and had no idea what. Attempt one was a course platform built with a friend. They worked on it for over a year, entirely in private, and "one day when we launched, nothing happened." He describes himself in that partnership as purely the tech guy who did not get involved in anything else. They moved on. What rescued him was writing. While building the failed platform he had started a developer blog on Hashnode, publishing what he learned as he learned it. That is where his network came from — other bloggers and developers found his writing, reached out, and started conversations. It also created the itch that became the product: he was writing articles in Notion, then copying everything into Hashnode by hand to publish. Attempt two was MDX1, which automated exactly that. It launched to a burst of hype, picked up a few paying users, and then Notion changed their API and MDX1 stopped working for roughly a month. The momentum died with it. Attempt three was useNotionCMS, the rebuilt backend, spun out as its own product. Attempt four is Feather — the same core idea as MDX1 with a very different product and a completely rebuilt infrastructure. At the time of the interview Feather had just crossed $500 MRR, roughly two months after he started charging, and he was 24 years old.
The channel was Twitter, and it started before any code existed. For MDX1, Feather's predecessor, Bhanu put up a basic landing page and a waitlist first, then posted every small increment — "so today I did this" — and each post brought a few more signups, until the waitlist sat at 400 to 500 people.
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Data credibility: Founder interview on the Indie Worldwide podcast, conducted by a host who is also Feather's first paying customer — so the product's existence and the customer relationship are directly corroborated, but every financial figure is self-reported and no dashboard is shown. The $500 MRR is cited by the host from Bhanu's own tweet nine hours earlier and confirmed in conversation. The $10,000, $5,000 and $1,800 hosting bills, the refunds, the 400-500 waitlist, the move from Vercel to Cloudflare, and the useNotionCMS customers at $29 and ~$120/month are all founder-reported. Feather's price point, customer count and current margin are never stated and we have not estimated them. Location is founder-stated: he began his career as a software engineer "around here in India" and speaks from India throughout.
The first dollar arrived before the product did. The customer, who hosts the podcast, messaged him out of a Slack community while Feather was nowhere near finished; Bhanu told him plainly it would not be ready in time and suggested he use Ghost in the meantime.
The interviewer, who is also customer number one, states the mechanism best: people write on top of the platform and create hundreds and hundreds of pages, so the growth engine gets stronger as it grows. That is really two loops.
There are two dead stretches here and the second one was chosen. The first was the year he and a friend spent building a course platform entirely in private: "one day when we launched, nothing happened."
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