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Notion's mid-life crisis

jjinux.com

11–20 of 163 posts

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#11
I like Notion but I share the sense that it's not really targeted at my use case anymore. I think I could essentially move everything into Obsidian and lose almost nothing in the process.

I just use it for taking notes and writing stuff down. I like how easy it is to drop an image, video, or document into a notion page, but I've only barely used features like databases which seem to be the big selling point, and none of my usage of those is really anything that couldn't just be a plaintext table in a markdown doc.

One of these days I'll get up the gumption to crawl through, excise what's worth keeping into Obsidian , and cancel my subscription. But not today, lol.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#12

https://www.notion.so/templates/category/crm > Streamline your customer relationships with Notion's CRM Templates It's a joke, but it's also not a joke. I mean, come on . Is notion really pitching itself as a CRM? It's not a CRM. Anyone who uses it as a CRM is an idiot, bluntly. ... https://www.notion.so/use-case/crm Oh, wait. I guess it's a supported use case. I uh... take it back... I guess... > If you don’t want t…

This is definitely a thing.

Saw it happen first hand for project management: Notion started promoting the Task Board/GANTT like view of the databases as a fully supported use-case, and the bean counters came straight away to ask if we really needed a dedicated ticket management system.

As our use case was relatively simple it was borderline doable, and our dedicated system went away, even as we knew there will be rough edges. It's not great, but not bad enough to justify paying a full license price for a more polished product.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#13
post #3

Funny, but how wrong are they? I haven’t had the misfortune of using Salesforce, but isn’t it a glorified relational DB in the same way that Jira is? I know a few people at Notion, and one thing I can say is that they have taste , in the way Apple has taste. I think this shows in their product.

[dead]

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#14

This is a fun piece of creative writing, but I’m not quite sure of the point it’s trying to make about Notion. Is it that Notion is no longer cool? That might be true but isn’t the most insightful comment. Is it about Notion the company languishing in some way?

I imported a friend of mine's Notion into Fraxinus, some software I wrote that is a bookmark manager and a webcrawler and an image sorter and a search engine and annotation system and a visualization tool and is likely to get merged with my YOShInOn RSS reader and model trainer (might eat all my side projects that aren't about images and VR.) It's a tool for understanding, organizing and harvesting a collection of documents (so I got some insight into how he uses Notion.)

In his case, he uses it as a CRM for prospecting and it really isn't that bad at the business development end where you don't have a lot of people doing a structured process. But if you could somehow add some structure to notion, in the UI or with some AI interpretation of the text, or both, I could see Notion becoming a CRM or something else, think of something like a spreadsheet for notes.

Of course it might not be Notion that does it, it might be a startup that does it, it might be an established company. Saleforce is a good comparable because you can customize Salesforce to build many kinds of application but you still need programmers to do it. Is somebody in 2024 going to build a system which is as flexible, maybe even more flexible, but doesn't need the programmer?

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#16
post #3

Funny, but how wrong are they? I haven’t had the misfortune of using Salesforce, but isn’t it a glorified relational DB in the same way that Jira is? I know a few people at Notion, and one thing I can say is that they have taste , in the way Apple has taste. I think this shows in their product.

> I think this shows in their product.

I really don't. Notion is one of those tools that entrepreneurs gravitate towards for it's simplicity, and then engineers rip out for being a parasite. At the end of the day it's an overpriced CMS that can very easily be replaced by any number of different alternatives. Their "taste" is just as overrated and overpriced as Apple's is.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#17
I've often thought that, looking historically, Notion only exists because product innovation in Google Docs is decoupled from revenue growth for Google Workspace. Putting a draggable handle, at the user's election, alongside every paragraph in Docs, and adding a customizable shortcut for search across docs, would go a long way towards Docs being 90% of what Notion's value proposition was as of a few years ago. But most startups using Notion already had Google Workspace for email anyways, so there was no growth story there for Google to invest in this mandate.

Now, Notion's done a lot since then. If you want a knowledge base that can also have semi-structured tabular data, and portability in that data, it's hard to beat. Notion AI, pulling from disparate sources with the context of the current planning document, is really neat, too! But not every company will want to pay the per-head cost for this, unless it can replace other existing tools.

And when it comes to spaces like CRM in that context, looking at https://www.google.com/search?q=notion+crm&udm=14 ... there's a lot that could be said about Notion's (lack of) SEO/advertising there, but more concretely, a CRM solution nowadays has to bring a wealth of integrations as a near-prerequisite, and Notion doesn't have a mature story there - nor can they easily, because different customers will have different data models that make it hard to have a standardized notion of "what fields can I count on to be present for an Account."

Notion is a really powerful system. If it didn't already have a $10B valuation, it would be in tremendously good shape. But it has a long way to go to find the areas of growth it needs to grow beyond $10B.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#18
post #9

This is a fun piece of creative writing, but I’m not quite sure of the point it’s trying to make about Notion. Is it that Notion is no longer cool? That might be true but isn’t the most insightful comment. Is it about Notion the company languishing in some way?

I used to use Notion daily. I switched to Anytype when Notion launched an AI tool that trains on your data. A bit more of a learning curve but that's an absolute no-go when a tool contains the inner workings of my brain. Plenty of comparable private options. Intellectual capital is rapidly being migrated from workers to shareholders under the guise of "AI". Imagine a world where C-suites no longer rely on or support…

Thanks for the Anytype rec. I have similarly been looking for a good alternative since they turned on AI features you can’t easily opt out of. And I’m not some anti-LLM zealot — I use them every day.

I’m not even worried about them training on user data. The more immediate problem is that if you accidentally type something in the Ask AI box (which is very easy to do because it looks like search), the page you’re on and god know what else is sent to god knows where. When I use LLMs, I like to know which one I’m using and exactly what I’m sending them.

I felt their AI integration was very cavalier and it completely changed my opinion of them as a company. On top of that, the YouTube and Tik Tok productivity grifters thrive on the ecosystem of template BS that Notion seems very happy to encourage. I guess they can’t help it but it is not my vibe. I also want something more stripped down and programmable. Obviously a programmer is not a typical consumer.

Re: Notion's mid-life crisis

#20
Notion was clearly made by people who do not use or understand keyboard shortcuts; you can't even properly select text without using the mouse.

It's been somewhat maddening switching from Confluence.

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