60% of Notipo signups never finished onboarding because Notion was required. So I built a markdown editor that publishes to WordPress directly — no Notion needed.
The Data That Changed Everything
When I launched Notipo, the pitch was simple: connect your Notion workspace, change a status, and your post publishes to WordPress automatically. Images, SEO metadata, code highlighting — all handled. I thought the Notion integration was the product.
Turns out, I was wrong.
A few weeks after launch, I opened PostHog and looked at the funnel. People were signing up — that part was working. But 60% of them never finished onboarding. They'd create an account, see the "Connect your Notion workspace" step, and leave.
At first I assumed the OAuth flow was confusing. Maybe the Notion permissions screen was scaring people off. So I simplified the copy, added a video walkthrough, made the button bigger. Nothing changed.
Then I started talking to users who did make it through. The pattern was obvious: the people who loved Notipo were already heavy Notion users. They had databases, templates, editorial calendars. For them, connecting Notion was natural.
But the people who bounced? They wanted to write and publish to WordPress. That's it. They didn't use Notion. They didn't want to learn Notion. They just wanted a clean writing experience that ended with a published WordPress post.
The Wrong Assumption
I'd built Notipo around my own workflow. I write in Notion because I like it — the block editor, the databases, the properties. For me, the Notion-to-WordPress pipeline is the natural way to publish. I assumed everyone else felt the same way.
That assumption filtered into everything: the landing page led with "Notion to WordPress," the onboarding required a Notion connection before you could do anything, and the blog content was entirely about Notion workflows. If you weren't a Notion user, the whole product felt like it wasn't for you.
The real value of Notipo was never the Notion integration. It was everything that happens after you write — the automatic image handling, the SEO metadata, the code syntax highlighting, the one-click WordPress publishing. The Notion connection was just one way to get content in.
Building the Editor
So I built a markdown editor directly into Notipo. The goal was straightforward: give people a clean place to write that feeds into the same publishing pipeline — without requiring any external tools.
You open the editor, write your post in markdown, add a title and category, and hit publish. Notipo converts the markdown to WordPress Gutenberg blocks, uploads any images to your media library, generates a featured image if you have that enabled, sets your Rank Math SEO metadata, and publishes. Same pipeline as the Notion flow, different input.
The editor supports everything you'd expect: headings, lists, bold/italic, links, inline images, and fenced code blocks with language detection. It's not trying to be VS Code or Notion — it's a focused writing tool that gets out of the way.
Notion Didn't Go Away
The Notion integration is still there and it's still great. If you write in Notion, you can still connect your workspace and publish by changing a status. Nothing about that workflow changed.
What changed is the positioning. Notion is now a power-user add-on, not the core experience. The onboarding no longer requires a Notion connection. You can sign up, connect your WordPress site, and publish your first post in under five minutes — all without ever hearing the word "Notion."
What I Learned
The biggest lesson was that your own workflow is a terrible proxy for your users' workflow. I used Notion, so I assumed everyone did. The data said otherwise.
The second lesson was that the core value of a product isn't always where you think it is. I thought the value was "Notion to WordPress." The actual value was "write once, publish to WordPress with everything handled." The input method — Notion, markdown editor, API — was just a detail.
If you're building a product and your onboarding has a step that makes 60% of users leave, don't try to optimize that step. Ask whether it should be required at all.
Try It
The markdown editor is live now for all users, including the free plan. Sign up, connect your WordPress site, and publish your first post. No Notion required.
Kjetil Furås builds automations with AI agents and infrastructure as code. Follow along on X or join the Build & Automate community on Skool.
