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Notion Acquires Automate.io

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Re: Notion Acquires Automate.io

#81

Post by feketegy »

satvikpendem wrote: post #59
falnatsheh wrote: post #19

You could always tell when a company switch their priority from B2C to B2B. Notion felt different when it was first released but in the last few years new competitors were able to replicate what they've done and make it better and faster (e.g. Craft) while notion focused their energy on teams/enterprise features.

Speaking from personal experience, people don't pay* for software, especially productivity software, while businesses do. *yes, some people do pay of course, but the dichotomy between B2C and B2B revenue is vast

Regular users are always penny-pinching, especially when it comes to software.

B2B is much more profitable and you can set much higher prices for your products.

Re: Notion Acquires Automate.io

#82

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

Kappa90 wrote: post #58
sergiotapia wrote: post #43

Been using Notion for over 2 years now, and unfortunately I must say I am not going to be using them moving forward. You end up with a soup of documents each with their own structure, search is terrible, creating is easy sure - but finding the right content sucks. I'm not sure what the solution is, but after putting Notion through its paces I know this isn't it.

Checkout Saga [0], we've been building this for over a year exactly to fix the "I can't find anything" problem. Any feedback appreciated! [0] https://saga.so

Saga’s auto linking looks very useful. The buzzy “tools for thought” (Roam, mem.ai) seem to be missing this. Am I understanding this right?

Re: Notion Acquires Automate.io

#83

Post by Otek »

fattybob wrote: post #79

I’ve happily shifted to FSNotes after tasting all flavors of alternatives- FSNotes has hit a sweet spot for me, Apple systems only maybe it’s only limit, if fully cross, I can slip back to Joplin, which is good but for some reason or other never hooked me strongly (am always looking for notational velocity replacement- thinking I’ve finally got it)

Never heard of FSNotes. Looks like it could replace Bear for me. While Bear is quite cheap, I'd like to have as little subscription services as possible.

Re: Notion Acquires Automate.io

#84

Post by conscion »

arcosdev wrote: post #21

Please someone help me get Notion. It's slow, it's missing big features like offline mode and localization. What is the attraction to this app? I've tired it 3 times now and I just don't get it.

For me, it's two things.

The first is the keyboard shortcuts. The forward-slash shortcut for adding blocks is both simple and powerful. Along with AutoHotKey, I'm able to format and navigate around without ever leaving the keyboard.

The second is the block based system. With the block system, it's really easy to reformat a page or move items to new pages. For example, if there's a bulleted list that needs to be moved, I can just grab the top node and move the whole thing at once (because the other nodes are nested blocks)

Re: Notion Acquires Automate.io

#85

Post by Existenceblinks »

I start to believe that all-in-one tools is eventually wrong for your work process. It's not specialized, limited, not modular, for particular workflow; you bend your whole organization's teams into it.

But too many services also introduce data integration problems (usually via APIs, 4 services may need 3 pipes). I wish there were "Managed Database Table as a Service" that provides authorization and authentication for apps/services to connect to. SaaS products connect to available db tables that user provides (assume B2B here), now business can choose a bunch of SaaS integrated together via database, get rid of all apis work.

Imagine Design tool, Issue Tracker, Git host, CMS read and write to your managed DTaaS. Painless automation extension. All teams use tools made for them specially.

Re: Notion Acquires Automate.io

#86

Post by 7sidedmarble »

falnatsheh wrote: post #19

You could always tell when a company switch their priority from B2C to B2B. Notion felt different when it was first released but in the last few years new competitors were able to replicate what they've done and make it better and faster (e.g. Craft) while notion focused their energy on teams/enterprise features.

I've never heard of Craft, but it seems to be a Mac thing?

One of the best parts of Notion is it a actually works pretty well on every platform. So that's not very helpful.

Re: Notion Acquires Automate.io

#87

Post by Kappa90 »

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #82
Kappa90 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checkout Saga [0], we've been building this for over a year exactly to fix the "I can't find anything" problem. Any feedback appreciated! [0] https://saga.so

Saga’s auto linking looks very useful. The buzzy “tools for thought” (Roam, mem.ai) seem to be missing this. Am I understanding this right?

Indeed, there is no other tool out there automatically linking documents for you, as far as we know.

The idea is that Saga helps you resurface connections and ideas without having to do the manual work yourself.

This allows for a more serendipitous discovery of knowledge while you're crafting content or researching a topic.

Areas where we see great promise are: - analyzing interviews and notes for product and user research - automatically generate company or support wikis from docs - discover insights while writing meeting/team notes and documentation

Currently beta testing realtime collaborative editing and we'll start pushing towards integrating with other tools after that.

Re: Notion Acquires Automate.io

#88

Post by steve_adams_86 »

lming wrote: post #77
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point about performance seems relevant in my experience. This is a problem Slite seems to be facing as well. We used both for a while and actually gave their teams a lot of feedback. They were very grateful and communicated well, but moved very slowly and performance decreased quite a bit over time. We ended up focusing most of our planning/note taking/scheduling efforts in Linear instead. Much, much diff…

You are absolutely right that building a performant rich-text-editor for large document is indeed a very difficult problem. Mixing real-time collaboration put further challenges on api design and server processing. It's a whole different level of engineering challenges compare to building a performant CRUD web app... I am wondering how your team does note taking in Linear - are you guys create one issue for each docu…

I should have been clearer. We essentially abandoned note taking and began storing all of our tasks in linear in a more granular way. We also all began participating in our issue management more, as it became sort of like the core of project management for us.

Looking at linear can give you a very clear picture of where the team is right now, what we’ve been doing, and even what we will be doing. Our issues are a place where we discuss implementation decisions, relate issues together in various ways to provide more clarity, link to external resources relevant to issues, and we organize them into projects and cycles as well.

The goal was to convert a process we already used into a more robust and useful process which might make note taking redundant. It has mostly worked.

Since we work in software and we’re a small team that’s intimately familiar with most of our code (or at least what the code does), tooling and practices like version control, idiomatic naming conventions, and supplemental commenting in code can helpfully serve as sufficient documentation for the team right now.

It’s a much different thing from real-time collaborative documents though and I do worry that as we grow, it won’t benefit less technical roles we’ll need to support the team. That’s where something like Notion becomes very compelling to me.

Re: Notion Acquires Automate.io

#89

Post by bradknowles »

Spivak wrote: post #53
sanedigital wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After fighting the move to Jira/Confluence for years, my company finally migrated away from Notion & Clubhouse. I couldn't be happier. Notion was great when we were <5 people, but it feels like a toy compared to Confluence.

What am I missing out on? I get Confluence has lots of enterprisey features for sysadmins but as an author it has always been a terrible experience, especially for code. There's so much friction to actually creating documentation that nobody actually does it or if they do never bother to update it.

With JIRA and Confluence, there is never just one JIRA or Confluence. It really comes down to the configuration. And there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different configuration options that could be built into your particular implementation which may make it sing, or make it like a bad CAFO.

I’ve been part of a team doing JIRA and Confluence configuration. We saw on,y the tiniest bit about the configuration process required to make it work, and we slammed that hood right back down and decided we were never going to look under there again. Well, not ourselves. But we did hire a JIRA and Confluence expert to come in and help us make it as optimized as we could get.

I’ve also been a customer of bad JIRA and Confluence configurations. And when they’re bad, they can be really bad. But, as a customer, you don’t have any control over those system configuration options.

It’s like saying that a hammer is bad. Well, which hammer did you use? There are dozens or hundreds of different types of hammers out there. How did you use this hammer? What did you use this hammer on? Where did you use this hammer? Were you trained in how to use it properly? Did you actually use it properly, or were you using it in a way that was not consistent with its design?

There is no one JIRA or Confluence.

Re: Notion Acquires Automate.io

#90

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

Kappa90 wrote: post #87
d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saga’s auto linking looks very useful. The buzzy “tools for thought” (Roam, mem.ai) seem to be missing this. Am I understanding this right?

Indeed, there is no other tool out there automatically linking documents for you, as far as we know. The idea is that Saga helps you resurface connections and ideas without having to do the manual work yourself. This allows for a more serendipitous discovery of knowledge while you're crafting content or researching a topic. Areas where we see great promise are: - analyzing interviews and notes for product and user re…

Auto linking is great. Keep pushing on this!
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