In a world where notion does everything, are micro saas ideas even worth realizing?
I mean don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things notion can't do, but back in the days project management tools, to-do lists, mini job listing apps etc. pp. have been able to make a dime for a good amount of founders. Today I have the feeling, that many ideas can be easily realized with notion in a couple of minutes. Are micro saas dead?
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Go for niche markets. A tiny market in the macro sense might be a huge market for an indie hacker.
Also, I have never once used Notion and there are millions of others who have also not used Notion.
thats so interesting. i mean one is always biased when getting too deep into software and startup stuff, but i have never considered, that people just don't use notion...
I've never heard of it either, and my first impression of it is that it looks quite clunky. Not even something I'd even try on first glance.
and how to find that niche market , Experience is the only way to get that micro niche in my opinion
Notion is nice but, like all things in this community, we greatly, greatly overestimate its impact outside of our little bubble. It's the same thing with concepts like No Code which, again, are nice but maybe not as culturally revolutionary as people would like you to believe.
absolutely right. That gives me a lot of motivation actually. I am way too deep in my bubble.
What's cool now won't be cool tomorrow, repeat ad infinitum.
Notion was founded 10 years ago. The notion of 10 years from now is being founded now. 🚀
Really??? I never thought that they are so old already. Unbelievable. That is a perfect example of duration is key.
Yeah, it took them like 5 years to really find product-market fit too, they've written about it a few times I think.
The other thing with Notion that I notice, as a long time user, is that it's definitely becoming less cool - that sounds meaningless but I think it's a signal of something. There was a time where you felt like it was a 'best kept secret'/secret-weapon and it made your life awesome - now it's a.) quite bloated and b.) everyone knows about it. You also see it reflected in their social media a bit too...like their posts are now about things like 'OKRs' but in the past they would just be nice stories with intellectuals and creatives etc. They are no longer the young hip company and there is a new startup waiting around the corner whilst Notion slips inexorably towards becoming the next Atlassian 🤮 haha
IMO: Notion tries to be everything but is nothing particularly good.
Whenever you try to be an all-in-one solution, you have to make huge compromises in terms of UX, performance, and usability.
Look for niche markets and try to develop something there.
My company used Notion as a note-taking tool. Everyone on our team hated it. It's not made for developers and their needs and that's why we started era.sh - a markdown note-taking tool for developers.
Notion is just like me 😢
Then you know how to be better: take a certain part of it and make it perfect.
💪
You can make the same argument for excel. People build almost anything in excel and it kind of works. Especially in finance. Yet new saas come in there because they do it better than excel (maybe more reliable, maybe more scaleable, maybe just better ui).
In addition to what others have said:
I know people that know Notion does everything but that's what confuses them.
The flexibility comes with extra overhead in figuring out how it works.
If you have a focused solution, it doesn't!
I'm one of the people that fits into that category.
Notion does so much, and I hate it because I don't understand it.
Is it for taking notes?
Why can you make a database on it?
How did it suddenly become a landing page website creator?
Why are people talking about it?
All these questions above could be wrong because I don't understand it.
I personally don't use Notion (I've tried in the past many times) and won't be using it. There are many, many people like me. It's seems like its just twitter hype that's got people using it.
I would use a micro SaaS.
Something clear. "It does X, it can save you from Y and Z". Simple, to the point.
I like having everything in one place, but to get the structure right took a while.
It's definitely not perfect, I agree with you, for example navigating can be quite a pain and the search is not the best.
Sometimes going from one page to the other can take forever.
You can't really have two pages open at the same time without another app instance (it should work like a browser with tabs, IMO)
More...
What are you looking for when you talk about 'niche solution'?
I like products that are really really good at one thing rather than kinda good at a bunch of different areas
Yeah got it :)
If you look for a note-taking tool built for developers then give era.sh a try ☺️
Thanks for sharing that link!
But Im a paper guy :)
Whenever I wonder if the generic tools make the specific solutions obsolete, I look at my favorite professionals: chefs.
A chef uses a chef knife. They don't fillet their halibut with a Swiss Army Knife —even though they probably could. But no, they look for hyper-specific tools for their hyper-specific tasks.
And there are many chefs around, cooking all kinds of cuisine in all kinds of restaurants.
Micro SaaS are the different varieties: tomato knives, salmon knives, peeling knives, and nakiri knives. People seek them out for specific use cases.
I used to see things in a similar way, but I learned something.
It’s extremely difficult to do everything right. Not only do you need a lot of people, but you also need all of them to work perfectly together, which I’ve never seen happen in a large organization.
On the flip side, if you do just one of the things that the big company does, but you do it 10x better you will easily attract customers who are serious about that specific thing.
Once you have a solid foundation you can expand to do more and more things.
Then, the cycle repeats.
I liked the last line
Technical people like us with great knowledge of tools are oft way to optimistic, what the tools we use can do for other people. The best example I always mention was the first Hacker News launch of dropbox. The HN crowd was rather discouraging and one of the top comments was something like: "There is nothing new about what you do with dropbox. Anybody can build what your service does with simply putting up an FTP server and a bash script to sync the data". In hindsight, this sounds ridiculous, right?
Microsoft Excel can do just about anything, but it didn’t kill the software industry. In fact, it allowed people at companies to build things in ways they probably shouldn’t have. Those things are eventually replaced with systems that are more fit for purpose.
Not sure everything will be replaced.
It should, but a lot of people are very stubborn haha
I think there is always space for focused, well-designed tools. I personally dislike Notion and similar tools because they try to do everything.
I'm new to the software development space. Recent graduate with depth in writing and broad knowledge in UX Research, SCRUM, Web Design, and Sales. I'm looking for opportunities in QA testing or Tech writing. I never heard of Notion but your comment stuck out to me as I Googled it . Applications that "try to do everything." As a non-programmer seeking to enter the space, I get lost in the sauce of knowledge bases often largely because an application is trying to do everything.
For sure! Depending on the specifics, a good single-purpose tool is often the easier/more convenient choice IMO.
i thought everything can be done with emacs org mode except for online collaboration yet notion became a billion dollar company :-) . Its not about idea or execution its about customer. If you have a way to reach customer before notion can reach them you have a business.
i am really not into marketing and often struggle with exactly that. I am a good story teller, understand the concept of buying users via ads and the need to have a positive ROI and stuff, but I am way too stiffened in the performance ads thing i guess.
have affiliate program let others do the marketing for you or partner with marketer.
To be honest, I'm not sure about the hype around notion. Every time I tried to actually use it I spend some time creating a table of list etc. of what I'll do and then I actually forget to back to check it.
For a few client work I use asana, and then slack mostly. For my own project, I started using a good old fashinon notepad again. It seems easier to write down what you want to do and what you've done and it also feels a bit "more real" when written on actual paper.
There's probably many others like this, and this could also mean that we just haven't found the right tool for us yet.
Notion probably isn’t marketing to the market you want to build in. If you look outside of tech workers and consider potential customers like lawyers, financial advisors, mechanics - the list goes on - none of them have even heard of Notion.
And if they have heard of Notion, they’re confused. It takes a lot of mental work to go from “Notion is a note taking app?” -> “Notion has so many components” -> “I can fit these components together to solve my own problem”.
Hot take: Notion can be used for any purpose, but it definitely shouldn’t.
Their stated mission is to make toolmaking ubiquitous, which is a fancy way of saying, “you are burdened with adopting and enforcing a system to solve your problem”.
IMO That’s fine for a minute, but this begins to burst at the seams rather quickly.
Here’s an article I wrote on this topic to shatter the “Notion all the things” mentality at my startup.
https://shadowsmith.com/dont-notion-your-entire-organization
Please continue to build micro saases. 🙏
In a world where Excel does everything...
In a world where Hubspot does everything...
In a world where Slack does everything...
In a world where Google does everything...
And yet, a lot of startups keep launching and making good money for their founders.
I agree with the comments about trying to be everything to everyone. You end up missing the mark on niche issues/usability.
I use Notion myself and love it, but there absolutely are some limitations.
I mean, right there, there are SaaS ideas to fill those gaps! Some are already out there. I use widgets offered by 3rd parties to enhance my Notion.
Everything has its place. Notion is great, and I'm using it to manage projects for clients of the design service I'm launching (design-friend.com).
However, there's definitely still a ton of reasons to choose building a custom micro-SaaS. It's all about having the right tool for the job.
I guess people(including me) are now even building Notion based microsass
See you here Micro SaaS Ideas ☺️☺️
already signed up but havent received anything yet :P
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