When building or creating anything, there always comes a point when the excitement of starting fades away and the reality of the work sets in. This past week was one of those weeks for me as I continued to develop my Notion template. I made solid progress, but also faced a few challenges and frustrations along the way.

Building the Main Hub Page

The biggest accomplishment I made this week was creating the main hub page of my template. This is the area that acts as the central dashboard where users can navigate to and see many different parts of the system. Getting this part built was a huge milestone because it ties together all of the backend and template work that I worked on in the previous week. At this point, I’d estimate that I’m about 75-80% complete with the template. With the main page done, it makes the template feel much more real and tangible and it gave me a clearer vision of what the final version is going to look like.

I spent most of my time this week working directly in Notion, which has given me many breakthroughs but also has been increasingly frustrating. The work I did this week gave me the same sense of how vastly complicated Notion can be, just like I noticed last week. I used ChatGPT, again, as a helpful resource to give me step by step tips to get me through a few challenging road blocks I faced. Even though Notion has its own AI assistant, I found it more helpful to use ChatGPT as a resource and completing the steps it gave me rather than letting Notion’s AI do it for me.

Smooth Sailings and Rough Patches

Just like last week, I found that the formulas and databases in Notion were hard to figure out. It can be difficult to get parts of the template to pull data and talk to each other how I want them to. It definitely took more trial and error than I expected. However, once I was able to figure out what I needed to, the rest of the build felt much easier to handle.

The worst part of my week was when I realized I accidentally had overwritten some part of a template that I had built last week. This was extremely frustrating to me and was a set back, but instead of letting this derail my momentum, I went back, fixed it, and kept moving forward.

Looking Ahead While Staying Motivated

This week, I didn’t have the opportunity to run any user testing sessions which puts me back a little. To be honest, I didn’t feel like my template was in the best stage to put it in front of others. I do plan on conducting my tests very early this week because I now feel like I’m in the right position to do so. Despite this, I’m very proud of the progress I made this week. I stayed persistent even when I felt very frustrated because I’m learning something new. Notion has been harder to gat the hang of than I thought, but I’m glad I’m sticking with it.

Next week I will be focusing on adding the final touches which include:

• Running test sessions with a few of my avid audiobook listener friends.
• Adding example books marked in different categories so users can see how the system works.
• Writing the listing description and user instructions to get the product ready for launch.

I’m also going to start exploring the platforms I want to list my template on. I’m thinking about looking into Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy, as well as the Notion Marketplace as options.

Final Thoughts

This middle mile of my product development felt very messy and frustrating, but in the end, I felt like this is where the real progress happened. Even with the setbacks I faced, I feel like my Notion template is getting very close to the finish time. Now it’s time for some final polishing up. I’m excited to see how other people interact with it and even more excited to get it on the market.