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22 Comments

Why is everyone so obsessed with Notion lately?

Maybe it's just a case of seeing it once but lately I've been seeing Notion and notion templates literally everywhere. From product hunt to indie hackers to blog articles to reddit posts!

What's the obsession? Has it been featured on tiktok or something?

I've tried it out and it looks clever and highly adaptable I suppose but trying to understand the hype behind it.

  1. 8

    For me Notion has the feel of Google Drive apps meets Airtable meets Confluence, and that is very powerful. I have not encountered a note-taking or collaborative work medium that is as adaptive.
    In a pre-Notion world, as my digital ‘work’ grows I’d almost inevitably run into the ‘where should this live’ problem. It’s quite awkward to mash up slides, tables, and text/media, and that’s why you had different apps for it. But then it’s annoying to have docs, spreadsheets, slides fragmented in different places. And it just felt like to keep things cohesive required work. Notion manages to bring it all together in a friendly way. It feels effortless.
    With such power and flexibility, I’m sure many users may find it hard to work with a clean slate. So templates solve that problem. I’d imagine that if templates work well and solve user problems, it may then bring about more users with more use cases to create templates for. So maybe we’re witnessing a flywheel effect.

  2. 6

    They just released their public API in May. So a lot of people are building apps to integrate with Notion and extend the ecosystem. That’s my guess as to why it’s more prevalent recently.

  3. 5

    People are more obsessed with 'Notion style' than the 'Notion' product.

    We are going to see more 'Notion styled' products. For example, Tally is built on Notion style.

    Having said that, Notion as a product also is getting extremely popular because of recent release of public API access. I wrote a lengthly post in my newsletter some weeks ago on how to build products around Notion.

    Now, I am building a Notion Website builder at Staple

    1. 2

      whats your newsletter link?

      1. 1

        It's popular newsletter around Micro SaaS with 4K subscribers (free & paid)

        I took one of my ideas from my newsletter and built it to $10K ARR and now took another idea from my newsletter to build Staple

  4. 3

    I do not like it.

    But an answer to that...money.

    1. 1

      He said it. Notion is where most people are spending their time & storing their data so people are building tools around it. See my related tweets on Notion that I posted a few weeks back -> https://twitter.com/deadcoder0904/status/1410588484641853440 & https://twitter.com/deadcoder0904/status/1412039091361701891

    2. 1

      Haha I have a love hate relationship with it.

      I like it because it's flexible but it's this kind of tool that's for everyone and no one at the same time, incredibly easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it and performance + how it works sometimes, is not that great imo.

      1. 1

        The UX and the UI are awfully awful...

        It's not great by any means... true.I used once to help @janel with her Newsleter OS, but to be honest... Notion it's meh.

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          awfully awful

          that's a new one lel.

          1. 1

            I wanted to exaggerate.

            lel

            is new too

            😅

  5. 2

    The power of Notion is that you can focus on your topic and content without worrying about choosing a format first. For example, you can say "I want to write about widgets" and have text, images, spreadsheet, kanban board and more in your widgets document (or link to sub-pages). You don't need to say "I want a text doc about widgets" and "I need a spreadsheet about widgets" then figure out how to link those together.

    And lastly, the point I haven't heard others make, is speed. It's just so easy to create content that I don't have writers block any more. This as a double-edged sword, because if you are not well-organized, you can become unfocused and create duplicate content, for example. But the upside is well worth this small amount of overhead.

  6. 2

    the visuals are outstanding and the format help us tremendously with our async communication style

  7. 2

    I've been trying to get used to it with my co-founder for about 6 months but it ended up being ditched entirely. Both their Mac and web apps felt way too slow and in general it felt like a painful overkill for managing ops of our indie project.

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      What do you use instead?

      1. 1

        I wish I had a better answer, but it’s google docs, slack and trello for us.

  8. 1

    I don't where this hype came but notion is so useful for sure!

  9. 1

    Because it is minimal and customisable upto your need!

  10. 1

    Notion is loved by users because it gives them power. People that don't know how to code or how to design find themselves creating page layouts, designing their tasks system, moving things around, embedding third party content on their pages, having databases with different views and much more with great flexibility.

    Notion is victim of its own success, they have a tone of work to do in their architecture to improve performance, seeing some decisions they have made in the public API makes me wonder how good their architecture and stack really is.

    With the public API and as it improves in functionality we will see a much more powerful Notion. As an example I created Notion2Sheets, in Sheets you have formulas like =GOOGLEFINANCE, =IMPORTXML and a tone of add ons to connect to third party APIs or even run your own code with apps scripts that it is not possible in Notion. We released a feature called synced columns that allow users to sync values from a specific column in Sheets to Notion, and now they can have real time data updating automatically that was not possible before.

    Notion will continue to grow, the community is extremely powerful and committed.

  11. 1

    I ditched it after using 1 month. UI Sucks. But their data structure is very flexible and strong + API makes it to various use cases.

  12. 1

    Notion as the platform is like @Lukkyjoe said, is a combination of Airtable, Google Drive, Confluence combined. It's highly customizable and you can adapt it to any kind of workflow, basically replacing several tools in one. And with the release of the API, that will only grow. I think the recent hype is similar to what Airtable had in the previous period. I've been using it for a whole lot of different purposes, from time and task management, creating my swipe files, journaling, idea management, you name it.
    Still, there are some drawbacks in terms of performance like @tamas stated, where web app is still my go-to choice. The desktop app is painful to use. And their API is still in the early phase so it's quite a bit limited. I felt it personally while building integration with Twitter so once they launch the full-blown API I think we'll see a lot more integrations, not just templates.

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