4 ms·

You can use Excel as a CMS and while cool why use it for Prod? Especially because you are locking yourself into a company that may sunset or change pricing on t

You can use Excel as a CMS and while cool why use it for Prod? Especially because you are locking yourself into a company that may sunset or change pricing on the "feature" at anytime.

jitl 4y ago
(I work at Notion) The public API is extremely important to the future of Notion. We maintain date-versioned backwards compatibility similarly to Stripe. When it comes to your content, you can export your entire Notion workspace (or just the part of it that’s your CMS) as Markdown/CSV or semantic HTML, including all your uploaded assets and files. The HTML export is read to host as-is or post-process with BeautifulSoup, etc.
- shadowtree 4y ago
  You have raised 340 million dollars. Huge expectation to grow and make money, which means numbers will become more important. "free" stuff will go away, it always does. Investors will want an exit event, sooner than later. IPO (unlikely in next 2 years, macro issues) or flipping it to ... someone. Just the normal cycle, nothing Notion-specific.
  - jitl 4y ago
    Notion remains founder-controlled and enjoys favorable terms with investors. For example, we closed a tender offer for employees at our peak valuation after the market downturn: https://www.notion.so/blog/sequoia-index-purchase-shares-from-notion-employees https://www.notion.so/blog/sequoia-index-purchase-shares-fro... What is the "free" stuff you think would go away? The public API? But, we need to have a public API for many of our customers to be willing to pay us. It's an essential feature.
replygirl 4y ago
the risks here aren't any different from those with using the wordpress or ghost apis for a blog. or using any third party api for anything
- mbreese 4y ago
  That’s a bit disingenuous. Notion is still a relatively new company without the track record or ecosystem of either Wordpress or Ghost. And both of these are open source, so if the companies behind them go under, you could still self host. I’m happy this use case works, it’s a great showcase for how to get data in/out of Notion with their API. But I wouldn’t use it for anything that I couldn’t migrate to a different CMS quickly. (And yes, I use Notion)
  - replygirl 4y ago
    fair point re: source availability, but i disagree that it's a reasonable concern. notion is profitable and has been cashflow-positive since day one

You can use Excel as a CMS and while cool why use it for Prod? Especially because you are locking yourself into a company that may sunset or change pricing on the "feature" at anytime.

jitl 4y ago

(I work at Notion) The public API is extremely important to the future of Notion. We maintain date-versioned backwards compatibility similarly to Stripe. When it comes to your content, you can export your entire Notion workspace (or just the part of it that’s your CMS) as Markdown/CSV or semantic HTML, including all your uploaded assets and files. The HTML export is read to host as-is or post-process with BeautifulSoup, etc.

shadowtree 4y ago
You have raised 340 million dollars. Huge expectation to grow and make money, which means numbers will become more important. "free" stuff will go away, it always does. Investors will want an exit event, sooner than later. IPO (unlikely in next 2 years, macro issues) or flipping it to ... someone. Just the normal cycle, nothing Notion-specific.
- jitl 4y ago
  Notion remains founder-controlled and enjoys favorable terms with investors. For example, we closed a tender offer for employees at our peak valuation after the market downturn: https://www.notion.so/blog/sequoia-index-purchase-shares-from-notion-employees https://www.notion.so/blog/sequoia-index-purchase-shares-fro... What is the "free" stuff you think would go away? The public API? But, we need to have a public API for many of our customers to be willing to pay us. It's an essential feature.

replygirl 4y ago

the risks here aren't any different from those with using the wordpress or ghost apis for a blog. or using any third party api for anything

mbreese 4y ago
That’s a bit disingenuous. Notion is still a relatively new company without the track record or ecosystem of either Wordpress or Ghost. And both of these are open source, so if the companies behind them go under, you could still self host. I’m happy this use case works, it’s a great showcase for how to get data in/out of Notion with their API. But I wouldn’t use it for anything that I couldn’t migrate to a different CMS quickly. (And yes, I use Notion)
- replygirl 4y ago
  fair point re: source availability, but i disagree that it's a reasonable concern. notion is profitable and has been cashflow-positive since day one