I often finish a YouTube video and realize I've already forgotten the key points. My usual fix: grab the transcript (either through a transcript service or directly from YouTube on my laptop), paste it into AI for a structured summary, then copy everything into my Notion knowledge base so I can revisit it later.
After doing this about 50 times, I asked myself a simple question: wouldn't it be great if an app just did all of this for me?
That's how Y2Notion was born: a SaaS tool that turns any YouTube video into a structured Markdown summary, with one click to save it straight to Notion.
My approach to building
I started by planning out the project. I created a Notion page describing the tool, listing its core features, and laying out a step-by-step implementation plan. I identified two core features:
- A YouTube-to-Markdown converter
- The ability to save the summary as a Notion page
Next, I thought about the tech stack. I went with Next.js simply because it's the framework I'm most familiar with. For fetching YouTube transcripts, I asked Claude for a recommendation, and it pointed me to a package called youtube-transcript-plus. For the AI summarizer, I picked Groq mainly because it's free. Those were the only decisions I made upfront — for a full list of the libraries I used, check the "Resources" section.
While building the core features, I kept a TODO.md file open on the right side of VS Code to track progress. It's a simple system, but it makes a real difference — both for staying organized and for avoiding distractions like refactoring code that doesn't need it. The file has four sections, and I drag tasks between them as they move forward:
- Not Started
- In Progress
- Bugs
- Done
Whenever something comes to mind, it goes into "Not Started." Once I'm ready to work on it, I move it to "In Progress." I try to keep no more than three tasks in progress at a time. Here's what the TODO.md file looks like:
# TODO
## Not Started
- Save Notion pages to the location of the user's choice.
- Add Cloudflare Turnstile to verify API usage.
## In Progress
- [ ] Let the user choose where the Notion page summary should be saved before creating it.
- [ ] Add an authentication system.
## Bugs
- Markdown previewer becomes too large on smaller screens.
## Done
- [x] Create YouTube-to-Markdown route
- [x] Create transcript function
- [x] Create Groq summarizer function
- [x] Show summary in frontend
- [x] Add functionality to save summary to Notion
- [x] Redirect user to authorization page to grant page-creation permission
- [x] Create page in user's Notion workspace
- [x] Create a design system with a defined color scheme and typography
What is next, and three things I learned
I've finished the MVP, the summary feature, and the Save to Notion button. Now I'm focused on making the application actually feel like a SaaS product. That means adding an authentication system so users can save their summaries and eventually introducing a premium tier with a higher monthly request limit. I'm also tightening up security by implementing Cloudflare Turnstile, which should make the API far less vulnerable to spam and bots.
Along the way, I've picked up three lessons worth sharing.
First, the perfect plan doesn't exist. Sometimes it's better to just start and figure things out as you go; over-planning often just wastes time.
Second, avoid refactoring code while working on a different task. It pulls you into multitasking, which usually slows you down more than it helps.
Third, AI is genuinely useful for generating a design system. It frees you up to focus on the features that actually matter.
Those are the three lessons so far, and I expect there will be more before this project is done.
Resources
- sonner for showing toast messages.
- youtube-transcript-plus for getting YouTube transcripts.
- react-markdown for displaying markdown and @tailwindcss/typography for improving the spacing & typography.
