Foxy Labels
Foxy Labels is a Google Docs & Sheets add‑on for designing and mail‑merging Avery‑compatible labels.
Acquisition
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Nov 22
ChartBase is a Notion plugin that turns database into charts. I purchased the app from a developer based in Morocco named Farid who originally launched it as Notion2Charts.
ChartBase was our first acquisition, laying the groundwork for the fund with a lucky start. Immediately after acquiring it, we secured an official partnership with Notion and got listed on their extensions page. Revenue increased almost 10x and it has paid itself back multiple times over.
ChartBase solves a widespread problem experienced by a large number of Notion users. It got to ride the wave of Notion’s lightning-fast growth. Notion’s user base is deeply passionate, and was quick to adopt ChartBase and promote it for free in Reddit communities, YouTube videos, and Tik Toks. Growth felt almost too easy at first.
Finally, Farid also did an excellent job technically, engineering the app in Next.js using best practices with almost no tech debt.
The platform risk here was obvious and it was only a matter of time until Notion started supporting charts natively. I knew it was a possibility from the day I purchased the app, but the growth rate convinced me it was worth going for anyway. Also, the generative AI boom played to our favor and Notion repeatedly delayed shipping charts in favor of AI features.
The Notion team was kind about it and let me know a couple months before the axe dropped. I tried to convince them to acquire ChartBase, knowing their free native charts would probably decimate the user base.
After Notion released charts, the impact was drastic and immediate. We lost around 50% of our subscribers. But even still, the app continues to be pretty profitable, and many still continue to use it since it offers some unique chart types that Notion does not yet support.
Given the fact Notion has released native charts, we aren’t actively investing in large new features for the app, however we continue to fix bugs and make small improvements here and there.
We considered pivoting the platform to more complex chart types and trying to win on other dimensions. But sometimes you have to know when to focus elsewhere and stop trying to outrun a car on a horse. That’s the risk of building on a platform - they that can always do your thing better if they want. For example, while we are limited to a set of public APIs, a platform can go directly do the data source and do something faster and better.