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Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion
- intunderflow 5y agoNice stuff, what sets you apart from your competitors like https://super.so/ https://super.so/ ?
- noahbragg 5y agoThanks for the question. Two main things currently. When you update your Notion page or styles it updates your site immediately so it makes for a nice editing experience where you can see what your site would look like easily. Others don't do this as quickly. Could take a minute or two to see updates. Second Potion has a pricing model that is more friendly towards having multiple sites.
- judge2020 5y agoThere's also this direct comparison page: https://www.potion.so/super-alternative https://www.potion.so/super-alternative
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- replwoacause 5y agoDoes Potion support formulas?
- noahbragg 5y agoThanks for the question. Yes Potion does!
- ljm 5y agoThe beauty of the web is that you can take something and then make something else out of it. I love that. Potion has pricing though. And I'm not gonna pay, because I don't know what the setup is - am I paying for Potion to run a Notion account with my stuff in, and then they layer on top? Or are they reselling part of their own account? Or do I need to pay for a Notion account also?
- zapt02 5y agoIt's built on top of Notion, so you pay for Notion and you pay for Potion as well. :-) Actually it's a bit funny because Potion is 2.5x more expensive than the Personal plan on Notion, even though the utility of Potion is provably smaller.
- abnercoimbre 5y agoIsn't it because of scaling? The bigger a service becomes with a large audience, the cheaper they can sell things for.
- zapt02 5y agoI don't think scaling is much of a factor when it comes to cloud cost. Most clouds (AWS, GCP etc) charge for usage which scales linearly. The bigger you are the more you pay. Additionally there are many free resources for small startups. For example Potion is hosting their site on Vercel which costs $20/mo for <1TB/mo traffic.
- itake 5y agonotion websites are so slow. Google's page speed for your home page has a score of 42. Why does it say "fast page speed" and "great seo"? This [1] demo scores 81 and this[2] has a 68. [0] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.potion.so%2F https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [1] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsleek.potion.so%2F https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [2] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https://onepage.potion.so/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
- tshaddox 5y agoTo be honest, 42 isn't actually that bad. PageSpeed Insights scores are incredibly strict (that's a good thing) and not at all linear with visitor perception of loading speed. news.ycombinator.com has a 100 score, but if you compare the actual "Lab Data" it's not a massive difference. First Contentful Paint: news.ycombinator.com: 1.3s, potion.so: 2.7s The biggest difference is Time to Interactive: news.ycombinator.com: 1.4s, potion.so: 11.2s That 11.2s is pretty bad, but PageSpeed Insights doesn't take into consideration which interactions work before all the JavaScript has loaded. In the case of potion.so, the HTML is rendered on the server (or perhaps statically generated), and the vast majority of important interactions on the homepage are simple HTML links that work even with JavaScript disabled. The 2 big exceptions (and probably the biggest contributors to that terrible Time to Interactive metric) are the third-party embedded video and chat widget.
- tgibb 5y agoThe onboarding flow gives me pause - I'd like to check the speed / perf w/ my content before signing / paying.
- noahbragg 5y agoHey, well you can always cancel before the trial is over. We won't charge your card. Hope that pushes play on your pause. :)
- goforbg 5y agoNice
- damechen 5y agoLove it! I have multiple sites hosted by Potion. This is just one of them: https://support.testimonial.to https://support.testimonial.to
- noahbragg 5y agoYour awesome!
- andygcook 5y agoNoah's a fun person to follow for those of you who are interested in indie businesses and are on Twitter[0] He's been sharing his MRR growth and learnings while building Potion for awhile now. @noahbragg - Given that you're built 100% on top of Notion (or at least I think you are), how are you thinking about platform risk long term? They could cut you off their APIs, end life for some undocumented API you rely on, or just build your features into their own product at any point. [0]- https://twitter.com/noahwbragg https://twitter.com/noahwbragg
- noahbragg 5y agoThanks Andy! Yeah there is definitely some platform risk. I'm trying to build a close relationship with Notion which can help a bit. But at the end of the day there is still risk building on a platform. As soon as I can I'll try to be using the official api which will take away some risk. But it's not quite ready yet.
- okhuman 5y agoKeep going and keep building!! <3
- noahbragg 5y agoThanks!
- shoto_io 5y agoWhat's the thing about notion anyway? Can someone explain what I am missing out on and how it compares to other tools out there like google docs?
- yawnxyz 5y agoI wish in Google Docs you could smash a Google Sheets (with sorting, filters, editing) right into a Docs. Google Docs also don't let you link to other docs by @docname-ing them, and creating tables of linked documents. Google needs to hurry up with their Workspaces and build something closer to Notion or Coda
- shoto_io 5y agoThanks ok, I wasn’t aware of the linking part
- arduinomancer 5y agoIt’s more like markdown that Google docs And it behaves more like a wiki than Google docs
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- katsura 5y agoOff, but is that a sock on the mic? Fun. :D
- noahbragg 5y agoYep, haha. It does the job and doesn't smell!
- zoozla 5y agoPotion is an awesome project and Noah is a great guy. Been paying him for a while with https://softdiscipline.com https://softdiscipline.com, not planning to stop any time soon.
- rikelmens 5y ago... that sock over the mic :)
- IceWreck 5y agoI mean this is cool and all but this is literally double lock in. Notion can't be self hosted and neither can this. Why would you depend on either of these for your website. Not to mention using Notion as a CMS means you're limited in what you can do, zero extensibility, etc.
- steveklabnik 5y agoNotion allows you to export your stuff as Markdown. Couple of scripts later and you're ready to dump it into whatever other thing you want. It's not that bad.
- satvikpendem 5y agoMost people don't care, they just want a site that works. It's useful because Notion itself is WYSIWYG where whatever you type is what shows up, much more flexible than something like WordPress.
- noahtallen 5y ago> much more flexible than something like WordPress WordPress is endlessly extensible and customizable, so I don’t think Notion would be more flexible. Maybe Notion is simpler or easier to use, but at the end of the day, you’d still be very limited in what type of site you could build. WordPress is also getting close to releasing a WYSIWYG editor for the full site, which is also extensible and customizable. But this is already available for content, which is mostly what potion would be handling anyways. Looking over the list of potion benefits: 1. Nothing to install 2. It's simple - focus more on your content 3. Update and it's instantly live! 4. Use Notion (You already know it) 5. No page limits 5. Potion generates pretty URLs and preview images auto-magically from your page titles Only 2 and 4 seem to be things which something like WordPress might not have, and they are very subjective anyways. For number 1, there are lots of hosted WordPress platforms which don’t have you installing anything. For 5, there are probably lots of plugins you supplement the default social image behavior if it doesn’t work for you. I think this is a very cool project, and it’s always nice to see more experiments in the CMS area. But I don’t think flexible is the right word to use to describe it :) Disclaimer: I’ve been a WordPress contributor, so I’m definitely biased. :p
- steveklabnik 5y agoThank you so much for this. I have wanted it for a long time. Not gonna sign up today, but let me just file a todo here...
- noahbragg 5y agoAwesome! Let me know if you have any questions.
- brundolf 5y agoHow does this compare to, for example, Squarespace?
- rchaud 5y agoThese days it comes down to whether you need ecommerce functionality or not. Squarespace and other SaaS website builders offer that. Everyone else can get by with a free CMS and a basic theme.
- yawnxyz 5y agoHmm I built something like this on top of Svelte Cloudflare workers API, and the configs controller for the site itself is using a Notion table. The reason I built this to replace a Wordpress site is because the rest of our ecosystem is a bunch of Svelte apps, and with this we could just drop content from Notion straight into our site. We can even use fancy pants things like synced blocks for site-wide announcements, etc. etc. One caveat with using Notion though is that without a good caching strategy (which we don't have), the site's going to be pretty slow, because Notion's API just fetches block by block. You have to have a "cache mode" for production - something that fetches and caches every X amount of time, and have users hit the cache rather than straight from Notion, since it sometimes can take 10+ seconds, which will time out your worker.
- noahbragg 5y agoyeah, that makes sense. Potion actually recreates all the Notion blocks from scratch and then hosts it statically. Thats how we get around that issue.
- zapt02 5y agoCould you use CF KV for this? https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-kv/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-kv/
- ignoramous 5y agoSee also: https://flareact.com/ https://flareact.com/
- aetherspawn 5y agoI haven't been this excited about a website builder for a long time. I can definitely see myself switching from Squarespace to this! Could you please clarify whether we can use something like AWS CloudFront or Cloudflare in front of this without issues? Edit: Really need hierarchical nav menu's though. That's an immediate killer. I'll switch right now if you say that you can support submenus in the next month or so. Edit 2: Another suggestion, can we have per-page injection? And split the content injection capabilities so we can inject in either the header or the footer? This would be useful, for example, if we want to inject less important scripts or styles at the bottom of the page so that we don't drop lighthouse ranking. This is a low priority feature request.
- skinnymuch 5y agoFor nav menu do you mean something customizable or breadcrumb “menu” following Notion’s/the url sort of thing? What do submenus mean for this? I’m using super.so right now and thinking of switching to this. It appears I’d have to do my own nav menu either way. Not completely sure how that would work. None of the showcase sites have much depth of pages if at all. Only the official site itself seems to have menus. Super provides breadcrumb horizontal “menu”. Not great either.
- aetherspawn 5y agoSomething like the “hover to pop out” menus on the notion.so website. There are navigation menus in potion.so at the moment (they’re great!), but they only support 1 level. For any site bigger than a placeholder site there’s virtually never going to be only a single level menu.
- bhanuteja_p 5y agoAre you talking about Mega Menus, something like the ones you see on https://vidya.so https://vidya.so ? This is also built on top of Notion, but using https://mdx.one https://mdx.one behind the scenes instead of Potion. Full disclosure: I am the founder of MDX.one
- orliesaurus 5y agoDon't take this the wrong way, it must be scary to do a Show HN, so high5 to you, but...what's the appeal of this over a Carrrd, Wix or Squarespace which already has a good UI / drag and drop editor and has all the redundancy, SEO compliance and user access management in-built?
- noahbragg 5y agoHey! Thanks for the question. Potion is really for those that love Notion. Notion is really great for certain kinds of sites. A wiki, help center or those that just want to have their portfolio site through Notion. Pretty powerful to be able to edit your notes and site in the same place. Instead of going back to your website builder where you are rusty and haven't touched for a couple of months.
- jitl 5y ago(I work at Notion, bias etc) Think about how content of any kind ends up published: 1. Ideate - what do you want to make? Brainstorm, keep notes of ideas. Make plans. 2. Draft - put your ideas down in their native media. Write, paint, etc. 3. Revise, collaborate - polish things up, retouch photos, etc. Loop in your editor. 4. Distribute - publish your creation, so others can get it. Transform it into a form that's sharable. Focus on reach. A product like like Squarespace is really only concerned with step (4) of the creative process - publishing to the web. So you'll need to do the rest of the steps with other tools; maybe just pencil and paper or maybe Google Docs, and then bring that content into Squarespace for distribution. But, Notion does (at least a passible job at) all steps in this workflow, especially for text content. People use it for notes, then share privately to collaborate with comments. Publishing is a single switch to make a page public. We're not as fully-featured as a Wix; for example Notion doesn't offer analytics or advertising placement. But since we're pretty good at all the other stuff, it makes sense for people who like Notion to find a way to augment the publishing use-case with something like Potion.
- rbalazsi 5y agoI've been following Noah's journey on Twitter for some time, and I really like his short sneak peek videos on new features. This tool is just awesome!
- noahbragg 5y agoThanks!
- pl0x 5y agoThe author Noah is using this for promotion while making fun of HN commenters https://twitter.com/noahwbragg/status/1451308730994212869 https://twitter.com/noahwbragg/status/1451308730994212869 Maybe Show HN mosts need more guardrails to prevent shameless promotion. Producthunt is better suited for this.
- connordoner 5y agoI’m not sure that you can consider his tweet “making fun”, when it just references comments that others have in fact made.
- jokethrowaway 5y agoThe question about pricing is pretty legit given a free Wix or similar would probably be a better experience than jumping across Notion and Potion. It's not "hackers are going to hack it for free", it's more "your grandma is making a website on Wix for free" and, it won't make you feel like a tech wiz or a startup cool kid, but it works. That's also why I think Potion (and other startups targeting Notion and the incoming Notion marketplce) is pure business genius. I'm sure the target market will appreciate Potion. I had to try Notion for work and it's definitely not for me (slow and clunky) - but somehow they have a lot of evangelist in SF startups and I'm sure they won't care about paying 1 pumpkin spice latte per month just to say they made a website with Notion.
- trkulja 5y agoHey Noah nice to see you here! Glad I could contribute even a small amount (the Savvy Portfolio template) to this awesome project. To the people here wondering how does this compare to Squarespace and Wix: it does not. This is for Notion users who want to publish a website while using Notion.
- noahbragg 5y agoHey,cool to see you here too! I'd love to have you build another template. I'll pay too.
- gavin_gee 5y agoWhilst there will be lots of folks who complain at performance - its not as if notion is designed to be the backend api for a website, but i have to believe that continuing to drop the barrier to entry even below wix and squarespace has to increase the addressable market for this. I for one still get frustrcted at the level of effort for wordpress, wix and squarespace. could this really be used as the main website for a company, perhaps not but there are lots of other uses like documentation sites that could be interesting use cases
- steventey 5y agoHave been following Noah's progress with Potion for a while now, happy to see that it's getting the recognition it deserves here on HN!
- noahbragg 5y agoThanks!
- bverks 5y agoFollowing your journey on twitter, great work guys!