12 ms·

How Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure (2019)

163 points by corentin88 5y ago

furgooswft13 5y ago
aww I was hoping this was gonna be an article about the glorious comeback of Not-ion as the true superior tiling window manager (suck it i3).
- fencepost 5y ago
  And I was thinking "Notion? Didn't the Notion Ink come out then disappear into the Pit of Gone Android Devices?" For those who haven't heard of it, the article is about https://www.notion.so/ https://www.notion.so/ which Wikipedia summarizes with "an application that provides components such as notes, databases, kanban boards, wikis, calendars and reminders. Users can connect these components to create their own systems for knowledge management, note taking, data management, project management, among others"
TenJack 5y ago
I feel like the app wasn’t anything like the Notion that we see today when they moved to Kyoto. Feels almost disingenuous to call it Notion at that point.
- emptyparadise 5y ago
  What was it like?
mandliya 5y ago
I still find notion too slow for some reason although it has improved over the last year for me. Kudos to the guys though. Great story. Notion definitely has growing feature list. Now it has API, backlinking etc.
- virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
  Speed is the number 1 most reported customer feedback (from what I've read), and I share the concern. As a result they made that their no. 1 priority; they did recently make some significant improvements but I still personally find it too slow in many cases, especially since I'm trying to replace Notational Velocity, which was designed very specifically to be as fast as physically possible. Until Notion deploys native apps and further improves caching it's still going to feel slow to me :/
  - askafriend 5y ago
    I recommend having 2 note taking apps. #1 geared towards speed and simplicity - the one you reach for first when you just want to jot something down without thinking too much about it. #2 geared towards organization and power - this is more like a wiki - more structured, organized, and thoughtful. From time to time, you can pull important information out of #1 and put it in #2 in a much more structured/formatted/organized way. This 2-tier system has worked the best for me and I no longer have to keep looking for the one app that will magically do it all (I don't think it's possible). I use Apple Notes for #1 and Notion for #2.
    - virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
      Exactly, I've been thinking about making a hyper-simplified super-fast "input" app that connects to the Notion API for thought-capturing...
      - jitl 5y ago
        One of our engineers made a Siri voice command for this using the built-in iOS Shortcuts a few weeks ago; maybe give Shortcuts a look? Might be less trouble than opening Xcode. https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/4b1fc970b5314a2b93edb50e7cba18e3 https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/4b1fc970b5314a2b93edb50e7cb...
    - manmal 5y ago
      I use the same “stack” as you, but never thought of synchronizing them. Great idea!
_pmf_ 5y ago
> So they sublet their San Francisco office and moved to a cheaper city where they could focus: Kyoto Come on ...
- ironmagma 5y ago
  What’s the exact objection? Kyoto seems to have roughly half the cost per square foot of SF.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    So does Illinois.
    - fastball 5y ago
      And your point is?
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Justifying your move to Kyoto as "being cheaper" is a lie. There is not a human with a pulse who will believe that you dropped everything you were doing to move to Japan because rent costs half as much. I might believe that they "wanted a change of scenery" or "needed to relocate for creative purposes", but price?
        TameAntelope 5y ago
        I think the specific phrasing was a literary device, because it was such an odd choice. Set up the reveal with a mundane/reasonable "explanation" then follow up with the answer to keep the article snappy and interesting. They elaborate on their choice of Kyoto as a way to isolate themselves further from distraction -- the language barrier.
        fastball 5y ago
        Why not all of the above? They didn't say price was the only factor, just said it was a reason. I know I moved out of London last year because I no longer needed to be in London and rent was hard to justify. Sounds like they were in the same boat. You can rebuild your app from anywhere, might as well do it from somewhere cheaper (yet still vibrant).
black_puppydog 5y ago
Since it's not discussed in this article: Is there a write-up of the "suboptimal tech stack" and the hows and whys of the rewrite?
- jitl 5y ago
  I joined Notion two years ago, so this era predates me, but I can shed a little bit of light: 1. The web UI used Polymer/Web Components. Simon (CTO/cofounder) described this as building on shifting sand as browsers and poly fills changed the standards and things never seemed to work well for long. 2. There was a lot of Redis with Lua action, using Redis instances as a distributed system for some purpose I don’t understand. This never worked well. 3. There was experimentation with graph database like Neo4J which turned out to be slow for the kinds of queries Notion needed to do. Not sure if this was part of the first era or if it was tried out for the rewrite. Because of all that, they completely rebuilt the product using the most boring/normal technology possible. Today we run on Postgres/Memcached for data, a Redis for rate limit and queueing, and a Typescript/React front-end.
  - reidjs 5y ago
    As much as I like the idea of webcomponents and graph databases, I'm glad I left a job that was shifting towards using them. As cool as they are, they are a bit too risky to devote serious career time. I really hope webcomponents become a serious choice someday for your average developer, though.
    - mimixco 5y ago
      We make a product in the same collaboration space as Notion but we're a younger company. Our latest stuff is all Lit (what became of LitElement and Polymer). Today, web components in general (and Lit in particular) work really well on all modern browsers. For us, with the current state of web components, we see this as the ideal time to move to all web component UIs going forward. We view it as a strategic advantage.
  - ronyeh 5y ago
notjustanymike 5y ago
While this is obviously an article by Figma about how great Figma is at allowing people to use Figma, there are some interesting tidbits about keeping everything so you can review what didn't work and why.
bendotero 5y ago
Really not feeling the silent approval of working 18+ hour days and not sleeping. It's unhealthy and should be frowned upon.
- nxc18 5y ago
  The reason that doesn’t work is because you can’t sustain it. If you save your startup from the brink of death in under a year, sustainability isn’t needed. Plenty of people do university in similar circumstances. People in China do 996 and it works for them. 18 hour day still leaves 6 hours for sleep, assuming you structure the rest of your life efficiently.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Only do this if you’re being compensated for it properly. Otherwise you’re just wrecking your body for someone else’s profit.
  - KMnO4 5y ago
    > People in China do 996 and it works for them. I’m not sure I’d phrase that so lightly. The 996 work model has been compared to “modern slavery” [0]. I’m not sure it’s comparable to the article either, since 996 isn’t a choice that offers future rewards. Working 18 hours for a short term can be worth it if you’re a (co)founder saving your business. Theoretically he could retire early after making a few million off Notion’s success, and get back those hours lost to work. [0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/acfi.12682 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/acfi.12682
- bla3 5y ago
  At least it was founders who benefit from doing this, instead of salaried folks working to enrich their boss.
  - DeBraid 5y ago
    Agree. They own the company, success or failure is on their name. A 2-person team on brink of failure doing week or two of 18-hour days to rescue the business (and reputation to lesser extent) is reasonable to me. By contrast, salaried folks with no equity should not be cranking out those hours, IMO.
bachmeier 5y ago
I can't comment on the tech stack and all that, since I didn't see the internals, but I think Evernote deserves at least as much credit for saving Notion. Evernote used to have a real free plan and it cost only $3/month or something to go premium. Notion's "1000 free blocks" was confusing and honestly not that helpful, nobody knew who they were, and they were selling a premium plan for more than Evernote (who everyone knew and trusted). Notion's pricing and free plan strategy was a disaster from my perspective. It's understandable that this is an ad for Figma, but there were definitely other issues.
- fastball 5y ago
  Gonna have to disagree, I thought Notion's free-for-a-certain-number-of-blocks pricing was great. It let you try the platform without limits on functionality or limits on time. If you signed up for an account but then forgot about it and came back 3 months later it wouldn't be expired like a one month free trial would be. I think it makes a lot of sense for any platform based around content creation.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > thought Notion's free-for-a-certain-number-of-blocks pricing was great. It let you try the platform without limits on functionality The problem was that it was difficult to know what a block was or how much you could do with 1000 blocks until you had invested enough time in the platform to be able to estimate how many blocks you might need to evaluate it. Then there was additional mental overhead of trying to conserve blocks to extend your free trial. Do you implement something the correct way? Or do you maybe cut some corners to use fewer blocks so you can stay on the free plan a little longer? This extra decision making step added a little bit of fatigue to every interaction, which isn’t what you want when users are trying to evaluate your tools. Typical trials have well-defined and easy to understand limits in units that users already understand: Users, bytes, projects, documents. If users have to learn your project before understanding the terms, it’s mental added overhead.
    - manmal 5y ago
dancemethis 5y ago
Hopefully Anytype will soon push Notion back into oblivion, where all proprietary, data-hoarding things should be.
- Karunamon 5y ago
  They have full exportability.
smoldesu 5y ago
I used Notion for a few months last year, and I honestly don't understand why techbros are fawning over it. You pay $4/month for... not hosting the most light-weight data you have? Maybe I'm just jaded, but Notion seems like an expensive solution to a problem that most people can solve for free.
- jressey 5y ago
  Our team chose it and I was pretty on the fence because wikis have existed for more than a decade and I had always considered the problem solved. However, engineers like using it and that is invaluable. I can't explain it, I guess cause it 'feels' 'new.' It is pretty fun to use on a Mac, and the results are aesthetically pleasing. I understand there are some pretty sophisticated things you can do with the API, and we are already talking about tying it to PRs to make release notes. Pretty promising all-in-all, but I wouldn't have picked it over and established wiki solution.
  - virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
    In my experience, getting engineers to not merely tolerate but like a collaborative tool is absolutely invaluable.
    - Hamuko 5y ago
      Notion is alright for collaboration, but I don't really like it for anything else. The search is so slow that I'd rather just have all of our technical documentation as a Markdown files in a Git repo than in Notion.
      - Matrixik 5y ago
        I moved to Notion from StackEdit (because it's basicaly abandoned and I had bugs editing on mobile) and I really miss storing all data in git repository (private GitHub repo).
- finiteseries 5y ago
sharkjacobs 5y ago
I love Notion's app icon. It's one of those logos that's just the first letter of the name, but it's so nicely executed, it's by far the best in type.
- fierro 5y ago
  this is the real reason I use Notion. Keeps that Dock looking nice and minty.
open-source-ux 5y ago
"He suddenly popped to the top of our most active user list — spending upwards of 18+ hours a day in our design tool" This small, but important detail, immediately stood out to me. The ability in SaaS to track your users with precision is welcomed by many (most?) developers. Knowing your most active users is regarded as an important data insight, and developers are eager to extract that data. For me, I find it unsettling so much user behaviour is recorded through online apps. Not only is this app tracking seen as natural among developers, it's eagerly embraced. SaaS promises customer tracking on a level never before achieved, and many developers seem happy to see it continue.
- hsn915 5y ago
  I came to say the exact same thing. This is absurd. Why should the company that made the product know how much I'm using it?
  - Kiro 5y ago
    Tracking play time has been standard in gaming since online games became a thing. Do you think it's absurd there as well?
    - airpoint 5y ago
      What’s absurd is comparing a recreational b2c entertainment product to a professional b2b tool.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  I guess if it’s a specific company doing it for a very specific use case (e.g. Figma) I don’t mind so much. They’re welcome to anything I do in their app. What I care about is that they cannot correlate what I do in the app with what I do outside of the app.
- SenHeng 5y ago
  Having worked on a product in a similar space, they probably weren't monitoring any one in particular. They were just trying to get a feel of how many 'individual users' are really companies sharing a single account, and a good way to understand that is just looking at how long someone has been online and active.
seumars 5y ago
Coincidentally Notion and Figma suffer from the same technical bottlenecks and therefore miss out on what I think is just as big a market: quick notes and quick prototypes. Take a native alternative to Figma like Adobe XD: it lets you create a document, put some boxes on the screen, hit cmd+enter, and instantly pops up a scrollable view of your prototype. Figma however lags for seconds each time it has to compile the presentation view.
jspash 5y ago
My only pet-peeve about Notion is that I want to default to large blocks of text all the time. Not single lines of some data-type. It's really annoying and I know some people probably love this feature. But I feel like something that is primarily a note-taking app (yes, it a super-customisable database etc.e etc. also) should act like 99% of the note-taking apps that have been written previously. Am I missing a huge paradigm shift in the way notes are taking "these days"? Just give me a blob with free rein. I'll format it later (maybe). Using Notion isn't - for lack of a better word - comfortable to use. Having said that, I use it all day every day. So it must be doing something right!
- leokennis 5y ago
  Not sure if this is fixed now, but as Notion basically treats every line of text as one “row object” that you can drag around etc., you cannot even select multiple lines of text on iOS…
  - Spivak 5y ago
    Technically it’s every paragraph of text but you have to Shift+Enter to not generate a carriage return.
- jeffkeen 5y ago
  This right here. It’s silly that you can’t select multiple lines of text like you would expect. I tweeted at them about this in 2019 with a demo gif illustrating the absurdity but it’s still the way it is. I keep everything in notion and half regret the switch because using it as a notes app still feels clunky due to this. https://twitter.com/realjeffkeen/status/1176483281682018306?s=21 https://twitter.com/realjeffkeen/status/1176483281682018306?...
- whatever_dude 5y ago
  Every time I think I should give Notion another try, I run into this and then remember why I didn't like it the first time around.
- notjustanymike 5y ago
drevil-v2 5y ago
Until Notion starts encrypting my data end-to-end it is just non-viable. The temptation is too great if the data is just sitting there on their infra to start poking around and gain "customer insights" and "add value".
- okprod 5y ago
  For third party cloud-based Evernote/Workflowy/todo type services, I think I've only used OmniFocus that has E2EE.
  - Cycl0ps 5y ago
    Obsidian has E2EE through sync, though it is an additional $4/mo. https://obsidian.md/sync https://obsidian.md/sync
    - Cub3 5y ago
      I started using Obsidian yesterday with just Github sync for now, big fan thus far, would recommend checking it out
    - seized 5y ago
      SyncThing also works very well with Obsidian.
- krrrh 5y ago
  This is a fair request and I would love to see it, but I feel like the vast majority of people who bring it up probably routinely use Google docs (not making a claim about your particular case), and I never see the same criticism levelled at Google. What’s the difference? Is it just that Notion is a plucky startup and that makes them inherently less trustworthy somehow?
  - drevil-v2 5y ago
    Individuals are trustworthy or not. Companies, especially companies in a state of massive flux like a fast growing startup, have no fixed traits like trustworthiness. It depends on the leadership team at the moment, pressures from external stakeholders, how bonuses and other incentive structures are designed. I can tell you from personal experience that you can start out with the best intentions but sooner or later the power dynamics will change and then suddenly "Don't be evil" is just a joke meme.
ibdf 5y ago
Almost paid for Notion twice but I never do it… because of the damn tables… Just let add me add a simple non relational table where I can have row and column headers. Not every tabular data needs to look like a database. And finally… it’s so unclear what they are working on that I just don’t want to invest my time on it if I don’t know where this product is going. So much potential…
- knubie 5y ago
  > Just let add me add a simple non relational table where I can have row and column headers. Could you explain more what you mean by this? Or give an example of some software that behaves like what you're describing?
  - leokennis 5y ago
    I’m guessing it’s the fact that every column needs to “be something” (text, number, checkbox etc.). While in less strict systems (Word, Apple Notes, whatever) I can just create a 10x10 table, and randomly put images in one cell and text in another etc.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    not OP, but the same frustration. Imagine a table you write in markdown, like: | | pro | con | |——-|————-|————-| | A |loud |heavy| | B |light|flimsy| You can’t have it inlined as just a table, it needs to become a database with filterable columns that you can’t lock, you add each lines as a row etc.
  - el_zako 5y ago
    Tables in Confluence are surprisingly good. It just works the way you expect. https://bit.ly/3xtwqXR https://bit.ly/3xtwqXR
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      Except when doing diffs, then changing something in the table blows it up entirely (well, makes it pretty useless).
randomsearch 5y ago
Curious if anyone knows - how much of the actual functionality of Notion can you simulate in Figma? Would you just use it for graphic design or could you realistically simulate some of the actual app behaviour?
krrrh 5y ago
I was fortunate to randomly visit the Notion offices and meet some the team a couple of years ago through a personal connection. At the time I hadn’t used the app and was actually oblivious to what they were working on. Now I spend a few hours in it every day as does everyone on our team. It’s remarkably powerful once you get the hang of it, yet also very easy to onboard people into different workflows. The unfair advantage they have that is hard to articulate and easy to overlook is that Ivan seems to have very very good taste. This article gives some clues in that direction.
dheera 5y ago
"famous for something else — ignoring the door when VCs came knocking" Good for them for shoving it at VCs who didn't want to invest when they needed it the most. If VCs can't take the risk of helping a company during their lows, then they don't deserve the rights to join at their highs.
rahimiali 5y ago
I want to share a story about Ivan Zhao of Notion. I used to see Ivan at a coffee shop occasionally around 2013. I had just launched Keys Duplicated, a service to copy your house keys by taking a photo of it with a phone. Ivan liked the idea, but hated the web site. He rewrote the HTML and CSS for me overnight. I liked his design so much that I re-launched Keys Duplicated the next day with his new UI. It left a mark on me that a coffee shop acquaintance would be willing to spend so much effort to help someone else without expecting anything in return. I've tried to pay the favor forward ever since.
kevinslin 5y ago
notion is slick and is one of the reasons why note taking has come into the spot light as of late (the other being that information is overwhelming and we, as humans, still don't know what the best way of managing it at scale is) shameless plug: i'm the founder of a yc backed open source note taking tool. for notion users, we describe ourselves as basically notion but made for developers - local first, open source and super fast. https://wiki.dendron.so/ https://wiki.dendron.so/

163 points by corentin88 5y ago

aww I was hoping this was gonna be an article about the glorious comeback of Not-ion as the true superior tiling window manager (suck it i3).

fencepost 5y ago
And I was thinking "Notion? Didn't the Notion Ink come out then disappear into the Pit of Gone Android Devices?" For those who haven't heard of it, the article is about https://www.notion.so/ https://www.notion.so/ which Wikipedia summarizes with "an application that provides components such as notes, databases, kanban boards, wikis, calendars and reminders. Users can connect these components to create their own systems for knowledge management, note taking, data management, project management, among others"

TenJack 5y ago

I feel like the app wasn’t anything like the Notion that we see today when they moved to Kyoto. Feels almost disingenuous to call it Notion at that point.

emptyparadise 5y ago
What was it like?

mandliya 5y ago

I still find notion too slow for some reason although it has improved over the last year for me. Kudos to the guys though. Great story. Notion definitely has growing feature list. Now it has API, backlinking etc.

virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
Speed is the number 1 most reported customer feedback (from what I've read), and I share the concern. As a result they made that their no. 1 priority; they did recently make some significant improvements but I still personally find it too slow in many cases, especially since I'm trying to replace Notational Velocity, which was designed very specifically to be as fast as physically possible. Until Notion deploys native apps and further improves caching it's still going to feel slow to me :/
- askafriend 5y ago
  I recommend having 2 note taking apps. #1 geared towards speed and simplicity - the one you reach for first when you just want to jot something down without thinking too much about it. #2 geared towards organization and power - this is more like a wiki - more structured, organized, and thoughtful. From time to time, you can pull important information out of #1 and put it in #2 in a much more structured/formatted/organized way. This 2-tier system has worked the best for me and I no longer have to keep looking for the one app that will magically do it all (I don't think it's possible). I use Apple Notes for #1 and Notion for #2.
  - virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
    Exactly, I've been thinking about making a hyper-simplified super-fast "input" app that connects to the Notion API for thought-capturing...
    - jitl 5y ago
      One of our engineers made a Siri voice command for this using the built-in iOS Shortcuts a few weeks ago; maybe give Shortcuts a look? Might be less trouble than opening Xcode. https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/4b1fc970b5314a2b93edb50e7cba18e3 https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/4b1fc970b5314a2b93edb50e7cb...
  - manmal 5y ago
    I use the same “stack” as you, but never thought of synchronizing them. Great idea!

_pmf_ 5y ago

> So they sublet their San Francisco office and moved to a cheaper city where they could focus: Kyoto Come on ...

ironmagma 5y ago
What’s the exact objection? Kyoto seems to have roughly half the cost per square foot of SF.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  So does Illinois.
  - fastball 5y ago
    And your point is?
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Justifying your move to Kyoto as "being cheaper" is a lie. There is not a human with a pulse who will believe that you dropped everything you were doing to move to Japan because rent costs half as much. I might believe that they "wanted a change of scenery" or "needed to relocate for creative purposes", but price?
      - TameAntelope 5y ago
        I think the specific phrasing was a literary device, because it was such an odd choice. Set up the reveal with a mundane/reasonable "explanation" then follow up with the answer to keep the article snappy and interesting. They elaborate on their choice of Kyoto as a way to isolate themselves further from distraction -- the language barrier.
      - fastball 5y ago
        Why not all of the above? They didn't say price was the only factor, just said it was a reason. I know I moved out of London last year because I no longer needed to be in London and rent was hard to justify. Sounds like they were in the same boat. You can rebuild your app from anywhere, might as well do it from somewhere cheaper (yet still vibrant).

black_puppydog 5y ago

Since it's not discussed in this article: Is there a write-up of the "suboptimal tech stack" and the hows and whys of the rewrite?

jitl 5y ago
I joined Notion two years ago, so this era predates me, but I can shed a little bit of light: 1. The web UI used Polymer/Web Components. Simon (CTO/cofounder) described this as building on shifting sand as browsers and poly fills changed the standards and things never seemed to work well for long. 2. There was a lot of Redis with Lua action, using Redis instances as a distributed system for some purpose I don’t understand. This never worked well. 3. There was experimentation with graph database like Neo4J which turned out to be slow for the kinds of queries Notion needed to do. Not sure if this was part of the first era or if it was tried out for the rewrite. Because of all that, they completely rebuilt the product using the most boring/normal technology possible. Today we run on Postgres/Memcached for data, a Redis for rate limit and queueing, and a Typescript/React front-end.
- reidjs 5y ago
  As much as I like the idea of webcomponents and graph databases, I'm glad I left a job that was shifting towards using them. As cool as they are, they are a bit too risky to devote serious career time. I really hope webcomponents become a serious choice someday for your average developer, though.
  - mimixco 5y ago
    We make a product in the same collaboration space as Notion but we're a younger company. Our latest stuff is all Lit (what became of LitElement and Polymer). Today, web components in general (and Lit in particular) work really well on all modern browsers. For us, with the current state of web components, we see this as the ideal time to move to all web component UIs going forward. We view it as a strategic advantage.
- ronyeh 5y ago

notjustanymike 5y ago

While this is obviously an article by Figma about how great Figma is at allowing people to use Figma, there are some interesting tidbits about keeping everything so you can review what didn't work and why.

bendotero 5y ago

Really not feeling the silent approval of working 18+ hour days and not sleeping. It's unhealthy and should be frowned upon.

nxc18 5y ago
The reason that doesn’t work is because you can’t sustain it. If you save your startup from the brink of death in under a year, sustainability isn’t needed. Plenty of people do university in similar circumstances. People in China do 996 and it works for them. 18 hour day still leaves 6 hours for sleep, assuming you structure the rest of your life efficiently.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Only do this if you’re being compensated for it properly. Otherwise you’re just wrecking your body for someone else’s profit.
- KMnO4 5y ago
  > People in China do 996 and it works for them. I’m not sure I’d phrase that so lightly. The 996 work model has been compared to “modern slavery” [0]. I’m not sure it’s comparable to the article either, since 996 isn’t a choice that offers future rewards. Working 18 hours for a short term can be worth it if you’re a (co)founder saving your business. Theoretically he could retire early after making a few million off Notion’s success, and get back those hours lost to work. [0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/acfi.12682 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/acfi.12682
bla3 5y ago
At least it was founders who benefit from doing this, instead of salaried folks working to enrich their boss.
- DeBraid 5y ago
  Agree. They own the company, success or failure is on their name. A 2-person team on brink of failure doing week or two of 18-hour days to rescue the business (and reputation to lesser extent) is reasonable to me. By contrast, salaried folks with no equity should not be cranking out those hours, IMO.

bachmeier 5y ago

I can't comment on the tech stack and all that, since I didn't see the internals, but I think Evernote deserves at least as much credit for saving Notion. Evernote used to have a real free plan and it cost only $3/month or something to go premium. Notion's "1000 free blocks" was confusing and honestly not that helpful, nobody knew who they were, and they were selling a premium plan for more than Evernote (who everyone knew and trusted). Notion's pricing and free plan strategy was a disaster from my perspective. It's understandable that this is an ad for Figma, but there were definitely other issues.

fastball 5y ago
Gonna have to disagree, I thought Notion's free-for-a-certain-number-of-blocks pricing was great. It let you try the platform without limits on functionality or limits on time. If you signed up for an account but then forgot about it and came back 3 months later it wouldn't be expired like a one month free trial would be. I think it makes a lot of sense for any platform based around content creation.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > thought Notion's free-for-a-certain-number-of-blocks pricing was great. It let you try the platform without limits on functionality The problem was that it was difficult to know what a block was or how much you could do with 1000 blocks until you had invested enough time in the platform to be able to estimate how many blocks you might need to evaluate it. Then there was additional mental overhead of trying to conserve blocks to extend your free trial. Do you implement something the correct way? Or do you maybe cut some corners to use fewer blocks so you can stay on the free plan a little longer? This extra decision making step added a little bit of fatigue to every interaction, which isn’t what you want when users are trying to evaluate your tools. Typical trials have well-defined and easy to understand limits in units that users already understand: Users, bytes, projects, documents. If users have to learn your project before understanding the terms, it’s mental added overhead.
  - manmal 5y ago

dancemethis 5y ago

Hopefully Anytype will soon push Notion back into oblivion, where all proprietary, data-hoarding things should be.

Karunamon 5y ago
They have full exportability.

smoldesu 5y ago

I used Notion for a few months last year, and I honestly don't understand why techbros are fawning over it. You pay $4/month for... not hosting the most light-weight data you have? Maybe I'm just jaded, but Notion seems like an expensive solution to a problem that most people can solve for free.

jressey 5y ago
Our team chose it and I was pretty on the fence because wikis have existed for more than a decade and I had always considered the problem solved. However, engineers like using it and that is invaluable. I can't explain it, I guess cause it 'feels' 'new.' It is pretty fun to use on a Mac, and the results are aesthetically pleasing. I understand there are some pretty sophisticated things you can do with the API, and we are already talking about tying it to PRs to make release notes. Pretty promising all-in-all, but I wouldn't have picked it over and established wiki solution.
- virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
  In my experience, getting engineers to not merely tolerate but like a collaborative tool is absolutely invaluable.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    Notion is alright for collaboration, but I don't really like it for anything else. The search is so slow that I'd rather just have all of our technical documentation as a Markdown files in a Git repo than in Notion.
    - Matrixik 5y ago
      I moved to Notion from StackEdit (because it's basicaly abandoned and I had bugs editing on mobile) and I really miss storing all data in git repository (private GitHub repo).
finiteseries 5y ago

sharkjacobs 5y ago

I love Notion's app icon. It's one of those logos that's just the first letter of the name, but it's so nicely executed, it's by far the best in type.

fierro 5y ago
this is the real reason I use Notion. Keeps that Dock looking nice and minty.

open-source-ux 5y ago

"He suddenly popped to the top of our most active user list — spending upwards of 18+ hours a day in our design tool" This small, but important detail, immediately stood out to me. The ability in SaaS to track your users with precision is welcomed by many (most?) developers. Knowing your most active users is regarded as an important data insight, and developers are eager to extract that data. For me, I find it unsettling so much user behaviour is recorded through online apps. Not only is this app tracking seen as natural among developers, it's eagerly embraced. SaaS promises customer tracking on a level never before achieved, and many developers seem happy to see it continue.

hsn915 5y ago
I came to say the exact same thing. This is absurd. Why should the company that made the product know how much I'm using it?
- Kiro 5y ago
  Tracking play time has been standard in gaming since online games became a thing. Do you think it's absurd there as well?
  - airpoint 5y ago
    What’s absurd is comparing a recreational b2c entertainment product to a professional b2b tool.
Aeolun 5y ago
I guess if it’s a specific company doing it for a very specific use case (e.g. Figma) I don’t mind so much. They’re welcome to anything I do in their app. What I care about is that they cannot correlate what I do in the app with what I do outside of the app.
SenHeng 5y ago
Having worked on a product in a similar space, they probably weren't monitoring any one in particular. They were just trying to get a feel of how many 'individual users' are really companies sharing a single account, and a good way to understand that is just looking at how long someone has been online and active.

seumars 5y ago

Coincidentally Notion and Figma suffer from the same technical bottlenecks and therefore miss out on what I think is just as big a market: quick notes and quick prototypes. Take a native alternative to Figma like Adobe XD: it lets you create a document, put some boxes on the screen, hit cmd+enter, and instantly pops up a scrollable view of your prototype. Figma however lags for seconds each time it has to compile the presentation view.

jspash 5y ago

My only pet-peeve about Notion is that I want to default to large blocks of text all the time. Not single lines of some data-type. It's really annoying and I know some people probably love this feature. But I feel like something that is primarily a note-taking app (yes, it a super-customisable database etc.e etc. also) should act like 99% of the note-taking apps that have been written previously. Am I missing a huge paradigm shift in the way notes are taking "these days"? Just give me a blob with free rein. I'll format it later (maybe). Using Notion isn't - for lack of a better word - comfortable to use. Having said that, I use it all day every day. So it must be doing something right!

leokennis 5y ago
Not sure if this is fixed now, but as Notion basically treats every line of text as one “row object” that you can drag around etc., you cannot even select multiple lines of text on iOS…
- Spivak 5y ago
  Technically it’s every paragraph of text but you have to Shift+Enter to not generate a carriage return.
jeffkeen 5y ago
This right here. It’s silly that you can’t select multiple lines of text like you would expect. I tweeted at them about this in 2019 with a demo gif illustrating the absurdity but it’s still the way it is. I keep everything in notion and half regret the switch because using it as a notes app still feels clunky due to this. https://twitter.com/realjeffkeen/status/1176483281682018306?s=21 https://twitter.com/realjeffkeen/status/1176483281682018306?...
whatever_dude 5y ago
Every time I think I should give Notion another try, I run into this and then remember why I didn't like it the first time around.
notjustanymike 5y ago

drevil-v2 5y ago

Until Notion starts encrypting my data end-to-end it is just non-viable. The temptation is too great if the data is just sitting there on their infra to start poking around and gain "customer insights" and "add value".

okprod 5y ago
For third party cloud-based Evernote/Workflowy/todo type services, I think I've only used OmniFocus that has E2EE.
- Cycl0ps 5y ago
  Obsidian has E2EE through sync, though it is an additional $4/mo. https://obsidian.md/sync https://obsidian.md/sync
  - Cub3 5y ago
    I started using Obsidian yesterday with just Github sync for now, big fan thus far, would recommend checking it out
  - seized 5y ago
    SyncThing also works very well with Obsidian.
krrrh 5y ago
This is a fair request and I would love to see it, but I feel like the vast majority of people who bring it up probably routinely use Google docs (not making a claim about your particular case), and I never see the same criticism levelled at Google. What’s the difference? Is it just that Notion is a plucky startup and that makes them inherently less trustworthy somehow?
- drevil-v2 5y ago
  Individuals are trustworthy or not. Companies, especially companies in a state of massive flux like a fast growing startup, have no fixed traits like trustworthiness. It depends on the leadership team at the moment, pressures from external stakeholders, how bonuses and other incentive structures are designed. I can tell you from personal experience that you can start out with the best intentions but sooner or later the power dynamics will change and then suddenly "Don't be evil" is just a joke meme.

ibdf 5y ago

Almost paid for Notion twice but I never do it… because of the damn tables… Just let add me add a simple non relational table where I can have row and column headers. Not every tabular data needs to look like a database. And finally… it’s so unclear what they are working on that I just don’t want to invest my time on it if I don’t know where this product is going. So much potential…

knubie 5y ago
> Just let add me add a simple non relational table where I can have row and column headers. Could you explain more what you mean by this? Or give an example of some software that behaves like what you're describing?
- leokennis 5y ago
  I’m guessing it’s the fact that every column needs to “be something” (text, number, checkbox etc.). While in less strict systems (Word, Apple Notes, whatever) I can just create a 10x10 table, and randomly put images in one cell and text in another etc.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  not OP, but the same frustration. Imagine a table you write in markdown, like: | | pro | con | |——-|————-|————-| | A |loud |heavy| | B |light|flimsy| You can’t have it inlined as just a table, it needs to become a database with filterable columns that you can’t lock, you add each lines as a row etc.
- el_zako 5y ago
  Tables in Confluence are surprisingly good. It just works the way you expect. https://bit.ly/3xtwqXR https://bit.ly/3xtwqXR
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Except when doing diffs, then changing something in the table blows it up entirely (well, makes it pretty useless).

randomsearch 5y ago

Curious if anyone knows - how much of the actual functionality of Notion can you simulate in Figma? Would you just use it for graphic design or could you realistically simulate some of the actual app behaviour?

krrrh 5y ago

I was fortunate to randomly visit the Notion offices and meet some the team a couple of years ago through a personal connection. At the time I hadn’t used the app and was actually oblivious to what they were working on. Now I spend a few hours in it every day as does everyone on our team. It’s remarkably powerful once you get the hang of it, yet also very easy to onboard people into different workflows. The unfair advantage they have that is hard to articulate and easy to overlook is that Ivan seems to have very very good taste. This article gives some clues in that direction.

dheera 5y ago

"famous for something else — ignoring the door when VCs came knocking" Good for them for shoving it at VCs who didn't want to invest when they needed it the most. If VCs can't take the risk of helping a company during their lows, then they don't deserve the rights to join at their highs.

rahimiali 5y ago

I want to share a story about Ivan Zhao of Notion. I used to see Ivan at a coffee shop occasionally around 2013. I had just launched Keys Duplicated, a service to copy your house keys by taking a photo of it with a phone. Ivan liked the idea, but hated the web site. He rewrote the HTML and CSS for me overnight. I liked his design so much that I re-launched Keys Duplicated the next day with his new UI. It left a mark on me that a coffee shop acquaintance would be willing to spend so much effort to help someone else without expecting anything in return. I've tried to pay the favor forward ever since.

kevinslin 5y ago

notion is slick and is one of the reasons why note taking has come into the spot light as of late (the other being that information is overwhelming and we, as humans, still don't know what the best way of managing it at scale is) shameless plug: i'm the founder of a yc backed open source note taking tool. for notion users, we describe ourselves as basically notion but made for developers - local first, open source and super fast. https://wiki.dendron.so/ https://wiki.dendron.so/