From idea to acquisition: How Potion.so shipped 4,000+ sites on Vercel

Potion.so is a Notion-to-website builder powered by Next.js and Vercel. Founder and sole employee Noah Bragg leverages the Platforms Starter Kit and Vercel's Edge Network to serve 4,000 custom domains and over 100,000 pageviews.

In June 2023, Potion was acquired for $300,000.

“With Vercel, I was able to quickly set up wildcard subdomains for my users and upsell them with custom domains.With Vercel, I was able to quickly set up wildcard subdomains for my users and upsell them with custom domains.”

Noah Bragg, Founder

Potion's success story was supercharged by Vercel's Frontend Cloud: a robust toolkit that ensures a seamless developer experience. With Vercel's ability to manage custom domains at scale, Potion has been able to easily support custom domain creation for users—a popular upsell feature for website builders like Potion.

"With Vercel, I was able to quickly set up wildcard subdomains for my users and upsell them with custom domains," says Bragg. "Being able to quickly scaffold this using the Platforms Starter Kit as a starting point was immensely helpful, and it allowed me to focus on building features that delivers value to my customers instead of configuring NGINX proxies."

Features for scalability and speed

Site speed and SEO are also of utmost importance for Potion. By using Vercel, they ensure lightning-fast load times for all its hosted websites, so they rank higher in search results and provide a delightful user experience​. Like mmm.page, another platform that successfully scaled with Vercel, Potion leverages Server-Side Rendering (SSR) for efficient content delivery and optimal SEO performance​.

This scalability has been crucial for Potion's growth. Vercel caches results using a technique called Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), resulting in fewer calls to the database so Potion won’t face a database overload—even as the number of managed sites continues to grow​.

Growth milestones achieved

In the two years following Potion's launch, it achieved several growth milestones:

• $6,300 monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

• 6% month-over-month revenue growth

• 4,000 custom domains

• 100,000 pageviews per month

• Product Hunt Product of the Week

• Product Hunt Maker Grant recipient

• A $300,000 acquisition

Potion's journey to a $300k acquisition is a testament to the power of the right technology. Vercel's Frontend Cloud and Next.js have been integral to Potion's success, enabling them to deliver a high-performing, scalable, and user-friendly platform that has made website building accessible and efficient for thousands of users.

A month after the acquisition, Bragg is back at it with another startup called Trustscore, which is built with Next.js and Vercel as well.