Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

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.

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For example, to create a blog on Feather, you have to duplicate the below template.

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.

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In Feather, Notion is just a data source. Feather generates a lot of things on top of regular Notion pages.

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Take 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/ – Home page showing list of articles

2. 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 – Individual Author page (there is one for each author) showing posts written by that author

4. https://wizenguides.com/topics - Tags list page showing list of all tags

5. 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 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.

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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.

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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.

(I work at Notion)

We're very aware of the legacy of Lotus Notes. There are similar concepts between Notion and Lotus Notes - especially v1-v3 of Notes that were focused on end-user programmability, before the "design" menu was removed and Notes pivoted towards a "Rapid Application Development". However, there's numerous substantial differences in our strategy and execution.

For example, we host the Notion backend, avoiding a lot of the agility issues Notes had. We also aren't an email service.

I’m sure I’m just getting old and this is really neat and useful - but it’s such a shame that everything is now just several SaaSs tapped together. Notion, Retool, Zapier, Google workspaces… I understand the productivity gains, but it points to me at a fundamental failure of technology. We’re all drowning in tech debt and it’s not getting better and most startups spend half their efforts avoiding paying enterprise licensing for basic security features.

One day I’ll come full circle and be a staff engineer / devops whatever who is just as grumpy as all those sysadmins who mentored me a decade and a half ago.

I use Notion as our site/blog/content CMS as well, and we use it to coordinate data in our microbiology lab.

We use Notion bc they have a great text writing interface, most of the people we work with are researchers and don't know how to write Markdown, etc. So they either write in Notion or I just paste their Word doc into Notion and it works great.

Whenever there's a new content, I pull all the content from the Notion API and build it into a static Sveltekit site served on Vercel. Everything is super fast. For those saying if Notion goes down or shuts off API access one day, we'll just fall back to the "normal" ways of writing content, all of which are worse UX for both me and the other people writing content.

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.