Is notion underrated?

The knowledge worker’s productivity stack is increasingly fragmented. The familiar story of all data infrastructure companies, “Your data is everywhere, get easy access to it all in one place with our tool” holds additional weight for Notion. Notion is essentially a highly abstracted no-code tool. It has created a series of highly artistic, unusual... See more

While it’s impressive that Notion can handle all of these different use cases, it’s not particularly good at any of them. It doesn’t invite discussion because its comments are tiny and hidden. You also can’t call attention to certain properties of a card/page because all meta-data becomes one long list of properties.

Notion is a philosophical descendent of HyperCard (turns out you can even buy a third-party HyperCard-themed Notion template) that offers extremely adaptable information structures built from an alphabet of ‘content blocks’. It’s also worth $10 billion and has 30 million users. I used it to create the first bidirectionally linked note-taking system... See more

With Notion building the tool often becomes the end in itself. Notion doesn’t get out of the way, it’s malleability always invites you to tweak your boards further, to add another property, to connect another relation, to add another view, to go through your board and complete data on all cards.

When I talk to people who have been building software since the 90s their biggest surprise about the B2B software market is just how big it has become. This is the difference in the Netscape versus Notion story. The internet was so much smaller in the 90s that there was just only so much room to run. Notion will not face that problem. In my opinion... See more

After many years of building and tens of millions of users, Notion now describes itself this way: “Every department’s work. In one tool.”  You can almost feel their internal struggle with language—the search for the right words. How can you describe something that is genuinely novel? What happens when something is so fundamentally different th... See more

Notion’s challenge is that they have to simultaneously convince people to spend money on something that is “free” from Microsoft and isn’t as deeply integrated into many businesses' existing workflows and documents. And they have to do it in comparison with the essentially $0 CAC that Microsoft will enjoy—not easy.

After many years of building and tens of millions of users, Notion now describes itself this way: “Every department’s work. In one tool.”  You can almost feel their internal struggle with language—the search for the right words. How can you describe something that is genuinely novel? What happens when something is so fundamentally different th... See more