Notion · Indie hacking ·

Notion Template for Indie Hackers: What to Look For (and What to Skip)

Search "Notion template for indie hackers" and you'll find hundreds. Many are beautiful dashboards that you stop using after a week. Here's how to pick one you'll actually keep, based on what a solo builder needs to track.

This guide pairs with Solo Founder OS, and if you want the next step, read The Indie Developer's Subscription Audit: Find and Cut Wasted Tool Spend.

What an indie hacker actually needs to track

  1. Products/projects: what exists, its status and what's next
  2. Tasks: this week's work, with due dates
  3. Money in: sales, recurring vs one-off, ideally net of fees and VAT
  4. Money out: one-off costs and, separately, recurring subscriptions
  5. Shipping: releases/changelog, and the bugs you need to fix

The key word is linked. If revenue, costs and tasks aren't related to products, you'll have a lot of data and no answers.

Features worth paying for

  • Per-product rollups. MRR, costs and profit on each product page.
  • Subscription normalisation. Yearly plans shown as a monthly cost, plus a renewal countdown.
  • Fees and VAT fields. Gross revenue isn't your revenue.
  • Board, calendar and timeline views that come pre-configured.
  • Sample data you can delete in one go, so you can see how it works first.
  • A short how-to page. If the creator can't explain it in one page, you won't use it.

Red flags

  • Dozens of databases for a one-person business. Complexity is why templates get abandoned.
  • Screenshots only, with no list of databases and properties.
  • Claims like "automatically tracks your revenue". Notion can't pull Stripe data without third-party automation.
  • Requires Notion Plus or AI features for core functionality, without saying so.

Start free, upgrade when it hurts

A good approach: start with a free template covering projects, tasks and subscriptions. If after a month you're still using it and wish it tracked revenue and profit, upgrade.

A weekly routine beats a perfect template

Whatever you choose, schedule 15 minutes each Friday: log sales and costs, check renewals, move tasks, write down what shipped. The template only works if you update it.

I built Solo Founder OS around this checklist. Lite (free) covers projects, tasks, subscriptions and a weekly review; Pro ($29) adds revenue with MRR/VAT, expenses, profit per product, bugs, releases and a dashboard. Both work on Notion's free plan.

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