4 ms·

I built an entire product just for doing this. https://usenotioncms.com https://usenotioncms.com I then used this and built a no-code blogging platform to pub

by pbteja1998 4y ago

I built an entire product just for doing this. https://usenotioncms.com https://usenotioncms.com I then used this and built a no-code blogging platform to publish content from Notion https://feather.so https://feather.so There is also an open source version for using Notion as CMS. That can be found at https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x

pbteja1998 4y ago
What I’m doing with Feather is this: I give the users a Notion template to duplicate. https://bhanuteja.notion.site/Feather-Blog-Template-3fea271567c145e1ba4da20956ab0d3c https://bhanuteja.notion.site/Feather-Blog-Template-3fea2715... I will then ask them to pick a domain, add the cname. That’s it. I will then get all the content from their Notion page and build a complete blog from it, with tags, authors, search, site map, rss feed etc.
- pbteja1998 4y ago
  For useNotionCMS.com, it’s a little different. It’s an api product. I give the users an api. People send their Notion page link in the api, they will then get all the data related to that page, including the html version of that Notion page. People can either use that html and render it themselves or I can do it, and give it to them as an iframe. Depends on their use case, people go with either Iframe or manual rendering with code.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    Why reply to yourself? You can edit your comment on HN.
    - pbteja1998 4y ago
      Got it. It was a habit. Will edit instead, from next time. Thank you.
antcas 4y ago
I use Feather and I love it. Makes for such a convenient writing experience.
orliesaurus 4y ago
I commend you for building a beautiful tool, and your landing page is great. I personally find the pricing quite expensive. It's a blog. How can it be that expensive to host a blog, especially if you're just getting started? Looking at other options - first one come to mind is Card - that's much more affordable. I am glad you're giving a free trial - that's not a bad deal, at least people can try it before committing. $15 a month to host a blog vs spending your own time figuring things out and being proud of having built something from an open-source repo (and perhaps contribute some knowledge back like this blogpost OP posted) could be also interesting. Feel free to change my mind. Btw, dont wanna sound like an asshole - if I was a business (not an individual) I would purchase from you for sure!
- pbteja1998 4y ago
  Thanks. I get this feedback about pricing sometimes. It's $15/month, but you can create any number of blogs with it. Not just a single blog. There are people paying for it, so yeah, I think it is appealing enough for some people. I especially get no coders as my customers. They can just whip up a page on Notion, and then instantly publish it to their blog. They get all the analytics, seo optimization, search and many other things out of the box. It's no different than how Ghost blog is charged at. Also, ghost cost is per blog. My customers are mostly no coders, who don't code, but use Notion in their daily life to write content.
  - ryanisnan 4y ago
    There's only so many people who have a valid use-case for having multiple blogs. The limiting factor to getting good content out to lots of people isn't how many blogs they have, it's how many good articles they can write and in how long of a timespan.
    - pbteja1998 4y ago
      Yeah, I agree with you. In fact, 95% of my customers have only one blog. Ability to create multiple blogs is a feature, not the whole value prop of Feather.
shanecleveland 4y ago
I use usenotioncms.com to fetch Notion pages for https://notion2embed.com https://notion2embed.com. I personally use it to embed Notion blocks/pages on static sites. They are already nicely styled and simple to update. Just and MVP at the moment, but it works for me, and I plan on improving it over time. Will be great for roadmaps, FAQs, "meet the team" galleries, etc.
- joelrosen27 4y ago
  [dead]
  - shanecleveland 4y ago
    Absolutely! I would hope that any popular offering would have competitors. And I would expect that the creator of the linked service would at least notice that you offer only an iframe embed, as opposed to my SEO friendly JS embed. And I guess you would have to know if one was released before the other. I am sorry if we had similar ideas.
  - shanecleveland 4y ago
    I’ve got a few Notion products. Would love to connect. Feel free to reach out at the domain linked in my profile.
Vvector 4y ago
"Hobby projects can make up to 3000 API calls per month for free." How many API calls on a page view? One? Many?
- pbteja1998 4y ago
  In useNotionCMS.com, there is no concept of a page view, you just call the api, you get back the html. So it’s per api call, not per page view. If you are talking about feather.so, it’s a completely different product. In that, the number of page views will be determined based on your Feather plan.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
tediousdemise 4y ago
How is this different from Super? (https://super.so https://super.so) Super is a tool to turn Notion pages into websites. Your tool seems extremely similar, but more expensive, so where's the value proposition?
- pbteja1998 4y ago
  Super is a great product, but I am still getting customers for feather.so. Here are a couple of differences: Super is for any kind of websites, you can build blogs with it. But it is not made especially for blogs. Feather on the other hand, is a blogging platform. You can build other websites with it, but it is made especially for creating the blogs. This positioning helps me with some advantages. Since my product focus is on blogs, I can build features that are especially useful for blogs. --- For example, to create a blog on Feather, you have to duplicate the below template. https://bhanuteja.notion.site/Feather-Blog-Template-3fea271567c145e1ba4da20956ab0d3c https://bhanuteja.notion.site/Feather-Blog-Template-3fea2715... That's all you have to do. This template already has 4 databases – Content, Pages, Tags and Authors. So, everything you need in a blog are already available in these 4 database. I fetch content from these 4 databases and build a fresh UI. Here Notion is being used just as a CMS. In Super, it's one-to-one rendering of Notion page. --- In Feather, Notion is just a data source. Feather generates a lot of things on top of regular Notion pages. --- Take https://wizenguides.com/ https://wizenguides.com/ for example. This is built with Feather. In this website, a lot of pages are generated by Feather, they are not there in Notion. 1. https://wizenguides.com/ https://wizenguides.com/ – Home page showing list of articles 2. https://wizenguides.com/collaborators https://wizenguides.com/collaborators - Authors list page showing list of all authors and number of posts they have written. 3. https://wizenguides.com/thomas-jacquesson https://wizenguides.com/thomas-jacquesson – Individual Author page (there is one for each author) showing posts written by that author 4. https://wizenguides.com/topics https://wizenguides.com/topics - Tags list page showing list of all tags 5. https://wizenguides.com/marketing https://wizenguides.com/marketing – Individual Tag page (there is one for each tag) showing posts tagged with that tag. Also, if you open any of the page (like https://wizenguides.com/customer-surveys-for-market-research https://wizenguides.com/customer-surveys-for-market-research for example), you can see that it already has table of contents auto-generated on the left side. This toc is not there in Notion page, but I generated it and insert it in that place. Because, it's an article page, and it's expected to have table of contents in an article page, I was able to do this. Also, if you open any article page, you can see that it has related posts at the bottom. Those related posts are automatically rendered there, based on "Related Posts" property in my Notion template. --- You also get RSS Feed for your posts, Sitemap for your blog, you can do programmatic SEO with Feather, you can do so many other things in Feather. I was able to include all of these features, because I positioned Feather as a blogging platform. You also get in-built analytics for each of your blog. You don't have to setup or configure anything. I did it because a blog needs analytics and it only makes sense for me to offer it. I also have an inbuilt form to collect emails from users. Again, because it's a blogging platform. Once you try out Feather, you will know exactly why it is perfect for blogging. --- Also, in Feather, the pricing is not based on number of sites you create. You can create as many sites as you want with it with a single subscription. So, with $15/month, you can create unlimited blogs, as long as their page views is under 10k. My pricing is based on total page views rather than number of sites. I think it's reasonable to assume that people are getting more value out of the platform if they are getting more pageviews. So, my pricing model is based on pageviews rather than number of sites. These are some of the reason why I am still getting customers who are creating blogs every month, inspite of Super already existing. Hope it's clear now. Please let me know if you have any more questions.
stavros 4y ago
How does this work? AFAIK Notion's API only lets you fetch pages that have been explicitly shared with it.

pbteja1998 4y ago

What I’m doing with Feather is this: I give the users a Notion template to duplicate. https://bhanuteja.notion.site/Feather-Blog-Template-3fea271567c145e1ba4da20956ab0d3c https://bhanuteja.notion.site/Feather-Blog-Template-3fea2715... I will then ask them to pick a domain, add the cname. That’s it. I will then get all the content from their Notion page and build a complete blog from it, with tags, authors, search, site map, rss feed etc.

pbteja1998 4y ago
For useNotionCMS.com, it’s a little different. It’s an api product. I give the users an api. People send their Notion page link in the api, they will then get all the data related to that page, including the html version of that Notion page. People can either use that html and render it themselves or I can do it, and give it to them as an iframe. Depends on their use case, people go with either Iframe or manual rendering with code.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  Why reply to yourself? You can edit your comment on HN.
  - pbteja1998 4y ago
    Got it. It was a habit. Will edit instead, from next time. Thank you.

antcas 4y ago

I use Feather and I love it. Makes for such a convenient writing experience.

orliesaurus 4y ago

I commend you for building a beautiful tool, and your landing page is great. I personally find the pricing quite expensive. It's a blog. How can it be that expensive to host a blog, especially if you're just getting started? Looking at other options - first one come to mind is Card - that's much more affordable. I am glad you're giving a free trial - that's not a bad deal, at least people can try it before committing. $15 a month to host a blog vs spending your own time figuring things out and being proud of having built something from an open-source repo (and perhaps contribute some knowledge back like this blogpost OP posted) could be also interesting. Feel free to change my mind. Btw, dont wanna sound like an asshole - if I was a business (not an individual) I would purchase from you for sure!

pbteja1998 4y ago
Thanks. I get this feedback about pricing sometimes. It's $15/month, but you can create any number of blogs with it. Not just a single blog. There are people paying for it, so yeah, I think it is appealing enough for some people. I especially get no coders as my customers. They can just whip up a page on Notion, and then instantly publish it to their blog. They get all the analytics, seo optimization, search and many other things out of the box. It's no different than how Ghost blog is charged at. Also, ghost cost is per blog. My customers are mostly no coders, who don't code, but use Notion in their daily life to write content.
- ryanisnan 4y ago
  There's only so many people who have a valid use-case for having multiple blogs. The limiting factor to getting good content out to lots of people isn't how many blogs they have, it's how many good articles they can write and in how long of a timespan.
  - pbteja1998 4y ago
    Yeah, I agree with you. In fact, 95% of my customers have only one blog. Ability to create multiple blogs is a feature, not the whole value prop of Feather.

shanecleveland 4y ago

I use usenotioncms.com to fetch Notion pages for https://notion2embed.com https://notion2embed.com. I personally use it to embed Notion blocks/pages on static sites. They are already nicely styled and simple to update. Just and MVP at the moment, but it works for me, and I plan on improving it over time. Will be great for roadmaps, FAQs, "meet the team" galleries, etc.

joelrosen27 4y ago
[dead]
- shanecleveland 4y ago
  Absolutely! I would hope that any popular offering would have competitors. And I would expect that the creator of the linked service would at least notice that you offer only an iframe embed, as opposed to my SEO friendly JS embed. And I guess you would have to know if one was released before the other. I am sorry if we had similar ideas.
- shanecleveland 4y ago
  I’ve got a few Notion products. Would love to connect. Feel free to reach out at the domain linked in my profile.

Vvector 4y ago

"Hobby projects can make up to 3000 API calls per month for free." How many API calls on a page view? One? Many?

pbteja1998 4y ago
In useNotionCMS.com, there is no concept of a page view, you just call the api, you get back the html. So it’s per api call, not per page view. If you are talking about feather.so, it’s a completely different product. In that, the number of page views will be determined based on your Feather plan.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

tediousdemise 4y ago

How is this different from Super? (https://super.so https://super.so) Super is a tool to turn Notion pages into websites. Your tool seems extremely similar, but more expensive, so where's the value proposition?

pbteja1998 4y ago
Super is a great product, but I am still getting customers for feather.so. Here are a couple of differences: Super is for any kind of websites, you can build blogs with it. But it is not made especially for blogs. Feather on the other hand, is a blogging platform. You can build other websites with it, but it is made especially for creating the blogs. This positioning helps me with some advantages. Since my product focus is on blogs, I can build features that are especially useful for blogs. --- For example, to create a blog on Feather, you have to duplicate the below template. https://bhanuteja.notion.site/Feather-Blog-Template-3fea271567c145e1ba4da20956ab0d3c https://bhanuteja.notion.site/Feather-Blog-Template-3fea2715... That's all you have to do. This template already has 4 databases – Content, Pages, Tags and Authors. So, everything you need in a blog are already available in these 4 database. I fetch content from these 4 databases and build a fresh UI. Here Notion is being used just as a CMS. In Super, it's one-to-one rendering of Notion page. --- In Feather, Notion is just a data source. Feather generates a lot of things on top of regular Notion pages. --- Take https://wizenguides.com/ https://wizenguides.com/ for example. This is built with Feather. In this website, a lot of pages are generated by Feather, they are not there in Notion. 1. https://wizenguides.com/ https://wizenguides.com/ – Home page showing list of articles 2. https://wizenguides.com/collaborators https://wizenguides.com/collaborators - Authors list page showing list of all authors and number of posts they have written. 3. https://wizenguides.com/thomas-jacquesson https://wizenguides.com/thomas-jacquesson – Individual Author page (there is one for each author) showing posts written by that author 4. https://wizenguides.com/topics https://wizenguides.com/topics - Tags list page showing list of all tags 5. https://wizenguides.com/marketing https://wizenguides.com/marketing – Individual Tag page (there is one for each tag) showing posts tagged with that tag. Also, if you open any of the page (like https://wizenguides.com/customer-surveys-for-market-research https://wizenguides.com/customer-surveys-for-market-research for example), you can see that it already has table of contents auto-generated on the left side. This toc is not there in Notion page, but I generated it and insert it in that place. Because, it's an article page, and it's expected to have table of contents in an article page, I was able to do this. Also, if you open any article page, you can see that it has related posts at the bottom. Those related posts are automatically rendered there, based on "Related Posts" property in my Notion template. --- You also get RSS Feed for your posts, Sitemap for your blog, you can do programmatic SEO with Feather, you can do so many other things in Feather. I was able to include all of these features, because I positioned Feather as a blogging platform. You also get in-built analytics for each of your blog. You don't have to setup or configure anything. I did it because a blog needs analytics and it only makes sense for me to offer it. I also have an inbuilt form to collect emails from users. Again, because it's a blogging platform. Once you try out Feather, you will know exactly why it is perfect for blogging. --- Also, in Feather, the pricing is not based on number of sites you create. You can create as many sites as you want with it with a single subscription. So, with $15/month, you can create unlimited blogs, as long as their page views is under 10k. My pricing is based on total page views rather than number of sites. I think it's reasonable to assume that people are getting more value out of the platform if they are getting more pageviews. So, my pricing model is based on pageviews rather than number of sites. These are some of the reason why I am still getting customers who are creating blogs every month, inspite of Super already existing. Hope it's clear now. Please let me know if you have any more questions.

stavros 4y ago

How does this work? AFAIK Notion's API only lets you fetch pages that have been explicitly shared with it.