I want to share a story about Ivan Zhao of Notion. I used to see Ivan at a coffee shop occasionally around 2013. I had just launched Keys Duplicated, a service to copy your house keys by taking a photo of it with a phone. Ivan liked the idea, but hated the web site. He rewrote the HTML and CSS for me overnight. I liked his design so much that I re-launched Keys Duplicated the next day with his new UI. It left a mark on me that a coffee shop acquaintance would be willing to spend so much effort to help someone else without expecting anything in return. I've tried to pay the favor forward ever since.
I can't comment on the tech stack and all that, since I didn't see the internals, but I think Evernote deserves at least as much credit for saving Notion. Evernote used to have a real free plan and it cost only $3/month or something to go premium. Notion's "1000 free blocks" was confusing and honestly not that helpful, nobody knew who they were, and they were selling a premium plan for more than Evernote (who everyone knew and trusted). Notion's pricing and free plan strategy was a disaster from my perspective. It's understandable that this is an ad for Figma, but there were definitely other issues.
Gonna have to disagree, I thought Notion's free-for-a-certain-number-of-blocks pricing was great. It let you try the platform without limits on functionality or limits on time. If you signed up for an account but then forgot about it and came back 3 months later it wouldn't be expired like a one month free trial would be. I think it makes a lot of sense for any platform based around content creation.
> thought Notion's free-for-a-certain-number-of-blocks pricing was great. It let you try the platform without limits on functionality
The problem was that it was difficult to know what a block was or how much you could do with 1000 blocks until you had invested enough time in the platform to be able to estimate how many blocks you might need to evaluate it.
Then there was additional mental overhead of trying to conserve blocks to extend your free trial. Do you implement something the correct way? Or do you maybe cut some corners to use fewer blocks so you can stay on the free plan a little longer? This extra decision making step added a little bit of fatigue to every interaction, which isn’t what you want when users are trying to evaluate your tools.
Typical trials have well-defined and easy to understand limits in units that users already understand: Users, bytes, projects, documents. If users have to learn your project before understanding the terms, it’s mental added overhead.
I don't think the kind of people that are overly worried about not using up their free trial generally make good paying customers.
Here was my experience: my team signed up, started using it, tried out all the different features (none of which were behind a paywall), didn't hit the 1000 block limit, and started paying within a week of signing up because it was exactly what we were looking for at the time.
You could always create another free workspace, and move pages between them. Once you got tired of that, you bought an account. Happened for us, and I think it was a great way of pulling us in.
Something related: more than a decade again, I was working as a sales engineer selling an enterprise search engine. A common pricing model we publish is charging $X per gigabyte of search index [1]. This sounds like similar rationale, because it feels like an honest pay as you use scheme. But it's hard for customers to understand how much they would be using. And of course since it's an enterprise solution, there is heavy switching costs playing into the equation — both into our product and if they adopt it, away from it.
[1] The size of search index depended on the amount of content indexed as well as heavily on the features that were turned on. E.g. pre-index search-term expansion would increase the size by a factor, and so on.
Evernote has been really stupid recently. They created a new version of their desktop app which does not include all the functions of the previous app. I can't even set default font and size now. I had to use their legacy version. This totally breaks the trust and I am moving my stuff out and will no longer renew my subscription.
Evernote also refuses to create multiple level of notebooks and manual order of notes. They also have strange user accounts on their user forum proactively denounce feature requests. Every time I search for a new feature request supported from many users will end up see a few familiar accounts claiming you don't need the new feature. I was like, who the heck are those people?
I don't participate in the Evernote forums, but I have been a heavy user of Evernote since 2014, and I've seen other simple apps that I liked and depended on go into an obnoxious feature spiral as they desperately tried to unlock a higher level of market share, leading to degradation of usability and reliability. I'm happy for Evernote to let the product "stagnate" in a form that is useful and reliable for me, so I can understand why some people are vocal about Evernote not expanding their scope.
However, if they take away my ability to set the default font size, or create multiple notebooks, I will probably leave as well. Taking away multiple notebooks would break a lot of my use cases. Maybe I am already using the legacy version?
Evernote has been really stupid recently. They created a new version of their desktop app which does not include all the functions of the previous app.
Sounds like what Microsoft did with OneNote the Windows 10/Microsoft Store app vs the desktop application with significantly more capability though I believe the Win10/Store version is expected to catch up at some point.
The new Evernote desktop app is terrible. It’s slow as molasses (Electron?), search is not reliable, and without connectivity it doesn’t work (you don’t see your local notes). Adding notes via the dedicated email address doesn’t work anymore. They are adding new features of little or no value while letting the essentials rot.
I’m a long time paying customer, and I have been recommending it to many people, but now I’m preparing to leave too.
> Evernote also refuses to create multiple level of notebooks
I remember asking for this over 10 years ago in their user forums, only to get some volunteer evangelist (who wasn't an employee and didn't have an official title but spent hours a day on the forum) claiming it "wasn't needed".
I gave up on Evernote when I realized they were spending more time on branding instead of features and reliability. And the constant in-app advertising nagging me to upgrade from Plus to Premium didn't help. I was already paying them money, I shouldn't have been treated like a free user.
> I remember asking for this over 10 years ago in their user forums, only to get some volunteer evangelist (who wasn't an employee and didn't have an official title but spent hours a day on the forum) claiming it "wasn't needed".
This is exactly what I found a couple years ago. These people were under many threads with new feature suggestions. Not sure whether they are still there. They do find a purpose of their life. Lol.
As someone using Evernote for ~10 years, it has been terrible for me recently too. I have been getting a "Sorry, we’re having some trouble loading Evernote Web." error about 80% of the time I open their web app for the past 1-2 weeks.
This thread is the first time I even heard about notion, but since they are getting so much praise here and since they made it so easy to import my notes, I just switched over.
They have been stupid for a long time now.
I pretty much stopped adding new notes to Evernote back when they changed the web app.
It’s looking like I will have to write my own note app if I want something that does what I want and is going to last so I don’t loose my notes every decade.
Not OP, but it's definitely the incredible flexibility of the system, especially the databases.
I basically track everything, from sideproject progress, CRM, personal challenges, workouts, books read, personal expenses, whishlists and todo with Notion in an unique way. While I'll be the first one to admit that the flexibility can be overwhelming sometimes, for basically every common usecase there are templates or YouTube tutorials
I agree with all of this, and I want to add that it's truly cross platform. Their web app is the same experience as their native app (this suggests electron but I'm not an electron hater and the native app is not a resource hog). It also has native builds across platforms, including mobile which is also well done.
There are other good note taking apps out there and there, and there are other note taking apps out there that solve the device problem I struggle so much with. But notion is the best note taking app with the best cross device/platform support I've come across.
I first encountered Notion in May 2020 and immediately fell in love with it's flexibility. I can organize and connect my thoughts/notes without the application getting in the way.
Linux, Windows, Android, Web... the service performs excellent across all platforms.
"He suddenly popped to the top of our most active user list — spending upwards of 18+ hours a day in our design tool"
This small, but important detail, immediately stood out to me. The ability in SaaS to track your users with precision is welcomed by many (most?) developers. Knowing your most active users is regarded as an important data insight, and developers are eager to extract that data.
For me, I find it unsettling so much user behaviour is recorded through online apps. Not only is this app tracking seen as natural among developers, it's eagerly embraced.
SaaS promises customer tracking on a level never before achieved, and many developers seem happy to see it continue.
Having worked on a product in a similar space, they probably weren't monitoring any one in particular. They were just trying to get a feel of how many 'individual users' are really companies sharing a single account, and a good way to understand that is just looking at how long someone has been online and active.
I guess if it’s a specific company doing it for a very specific use case (e.g. Figma) I don’t mind so much. They’re welcome to anything I do in their app.
What I care about is that they cannot correlate what I do in the app with what I do outside of the app.
My only pet-peeve about Notion is that I want to default to large blocks of text all the time. Not single lines of some data-type.
It's really annoying and I know some people probably love this feature. But I feel like something that is primarily a note-taking app (yes, it a super-customisable database etc.e etc. also) should act like 99% of the note-taking apps that have been written previously.
Am I missing a huge paradigm shift in the way notes are taking "these days"? Just give me a blob with free rein. I'll format it later (maybe).
Using Notion isn't - for lack of a better word - comfortable to use.
Having said that, I use it all day every day. So it must be doing something right!
This right here. It’s silly that you can’t select multiple lines of text like you would expect. I tweeted at them about this in 2019 with a demo gif illustrating the absurdity but it’s still the way it is. I keep everything in notion and half regret the switch because using it as a notes app still feels clunky due to this.
Not sure if this is fixed now, but as Notion basically treats every line of text as one “row object” that you can drag around etc., you cannot even select multiple lines of text on iOS…
It's annoying, but foundationional to how Notion works. It's a giant tree, and there's not a lot of difference between a page and a block. This modularity is what makes Notion great - you can dump a whole bunch of text of page and not worry about having to reorganize and break formatting later.
I still find notion too slow for some reason although it has improved over the last year for me. Kudos to the guys though. Great story. Notion definitely has growing feature list. Now it has API, backlinking etc.
Speed is the number 1 most reported customer feedback (from what I've read), and I share the concern. As a result they made that their no. 1 priority; they did recently make some significant improvements but I still personally find it too slow in many cases, especially since I'm trying to replace Notational Velocity, which was designed very specifically to be as fast as physically possible. Until Notion deploys native apps and further improves caching it's still going to feel slow to me :/
#1 geared towards speed and simplicity - the one you reach for first when you just want to jot something down without thinking too much about it.
#2 geared towards organization and power - this is more like a wiki - more structured, organized, and thoughtful.
From time to time, you can pull important information out of #1 and put it in #2 in a much more structured/formatted/organized way.
This 2-tier system has worked the best for me and I no longer have to keep looking for the one app that will magically do it all (I don't think it's possible). I use Apple Notes for #1 and Notion for #2.
One of our engineers made a Siri voice command for this using the built-in iOS Shortcuts a few weeks ago; maybe give Shortcuts a look? Might be less trouble than opening Xcode.
Almost paid for Notion twice but I never do it… because of the damn tables… Just let add me add a simple non relational table where I can have row and column headers.
Not every tabular data needs to look like a database. And finally… it’s so unclear what they are working on that I just don’t want to invest my time on it if I don’t know where this product is going. So much potential…
I’m guessing it’s the fact that every column needs to “be something” (text, number, checkbox etc.).
While in less strict systems (Word, Apple Notes, whatever) I can just create a 10x10 table, and randomly put images in one cell and text in another etc.
I joined Notion two years ago, so this era predates me, but I can shed a little bit of light:
1. The web UI used Polymer/Web Components. Simon (CTO/cofounder) described this as building on shifting sand as browsers and poly fills changed the standards and things never seemed to work well for long.
2. There was a lot of Redis with Lua action, using Redis instances as a distributed system for some purpose I don’t understand. This never worked well.
3. There was experimentation with graph database like Neo4J which turned out to be slow for the kinds of queries Notion needed to do. Not sure if this was part of the first era or if it was tried out for the rewrite.
Because of all that, they completely rebuilt the product using the most boring/normal technology possible. Today we run on Postgres/Memcached for data, a Redis for rate limit and queueing, and a Typescript/React front-end.
As much as I like the idea of webcomponents and graph databases, I'm glad I left a job that was shifting towards using them. As cool as they are, they are a bit too risky to devote serious career time. I really hope webcomponents become a serious choice someday for your average developer, though.
We make a product in the same collaboration space as Notion but we're a younger company. Our latest stuff is all Lit (what became of LitElement and Polymer). Today, web components in general (and Lit in particular) work really well on all modern browsers.
For us, with the current state of web components, we see this as the ideal time to move to all web component UIs going forward. We view it as a strategic advantage.
From the look of the code of their website and the fact that they have 'isReactNative' variable declared, I believe they're using react-native even for their website. Which would make it single frontend codebase for all of their platforms.
I'm an engineer at Notion. We don't use React Native (I worked on the rewrite of our apps to remove it). There's still a bunch of code that refers to our mobile app platform as reactNative, which is what you're seeing.
Thanks. Interesting to hear what goes on behind the scenes!
Random bug report. On Android while making checkbox lists, I always have to hit enter twice to get to the next line. If I hit enter once, the cursor visually moves down to the next line, but once I start typing the new line gets joined back onto the previous line. I notice this happens when I don't add an extra space at the end of the first todo/checkbox item. Sorry to jump on your comment with a bug report!!
Interesting, we fixed a bug like this on iOS when iOS 13 came out. I wonder if your keyboard is doing something similar to the iOS 13 keyboard. What phone, OS version, and keyboard software do you use? Does this happen with all keyboards, or just your favorite one?
(I tried on my Pixel 2 / Android 11 with Swiftkey and Gboard in English and Korean, couldn't repro)
I can send this bug report into your regular notion support email.
But I'm on Android 11 on a Motorola hyper one with the default Gboard in English. I just downloaded notion today and my OS has no pending updates.
I can repro 100% of the time.
- [ ] my to-do item$
- [ ] my to-do item $
In the above two examples, if I press enter when my cursor is at the end of the line (indicated by the dollar sign), the top example does the wrong thing. The bottom example works fine.
Not OP, but I have this same issue on a OnePlus 7 Pro with Android 11, using Gboard in English. Interestingly enough, it doesn't happen when using Gboard in Korean or Chinese.
Also, if I tap on the end of a line and press newline, I get another block. If I type something and then press newline, then it happens exactly as ronyeh described (again, only with Gboard in English)
While this is obviously an article by Figma about how great Figma is at allowing people to use Figma, there are some interesting tidbits about keeping everything so you can review what didn't work and why.
Until Notion starts encrypting my data end-to-end it is just non-viable. The temptation is too great if the data is just sitting there on their infra to start poking around and gain "customer insights" and "add value".
This is a fair request and I would love to see it, but I feel like the vast majority of people who bring it up probably routinely use Google docs (not making a claim about your particular case), and I never see the same criticism levelled at Google.
What’s the difference? Is it just that Notion is a plucky startup and that makes them inherently less trustworthy somehow?
Companies, especially companies in a state of massive flux like a fast growing startup, have no fixed traits like trustworthiness. It depends on the leadership team at the moment, pressures from external stakeholders, how bonuses and other incentive structures are designed.
I can tell you from personal experience that you can start out with the best intentions but sooner or later the power dynamics will change and then suddenly "Don't be evil" is just a joke meme.
Justifying your move to Kyoto as "being cheaper" is a lie. There is not a human with a pulse who will believe that you dropped everything you were doing to move to Japan because rent costs half as much. I might believe that they "wanted a change of scenery" or "needed to relocate for creative purposes", but price?
I think the specific phrasing was a literary device, because it was such an odd choice. Set up the reveal with a mundane/reasonable "explanation" then follow up with the answer to keep the article snappy and interesting.
They elaborate on their choice of Kyoto as a way to isolate themselves further from distraction -- the language barrier.
"famous for something else — ignoring the door when VCs came knocking"
Good for them for shoving it at VCs who didn't want to invest when they needed it the most. If VCs can't take the risk of helping a company during their lows, then they don't deserve the rights to join at their highs.
I was fortunate to randomly visit the Notion offices and meet some the team a couple of years ago through a personal connection. At the time I hadn’t used the app and was actually oblivious to what they were working on. Now I spend a few hours in it every day as does everyone on our team. It’s remarkably powerful once you get the hang of it, yet also very easy to onboard people into different workflows.
The unfair advantage they have that is hard to articulate and easy to overlook is that Ivan seems to have very very good taste. This article gives some clues in that direction.
Curious if anyone knows - how much of the actual functionality of Notion can you simulate in Figma? Would you just use it for graphic design or could you realistically simulate some of the actual app behaviour?
Coincidentally Notion and Figma suffer from the same technical bottlenecks and therefore miss out on what I think is just as big a market: quick notes and quick prototypes. Take a native alternative to Figma like Adobe XD: it lets you create a document, put some boxes on the screen, hit cmd+enter, and instantly pops up a scrollable view of your prototype. Figma however lags for seconds each time it has to compile the presentation view.
I feel like the app wasn’t anything like the Notion that we see today when they moved to Kyoto. Feels almost disingenuous to call it Notion at that point.
notion is slick and is one of the reasons why note taking has come into the spot light as of late (the other being that information is overwhelming and we, as humans, still don't know what the best way of managing it at scale is)
shameless plug: i'm the founder of a yc backed open source note taking tool. for notion users, we describe ourselves as basically notion but made for developers - local first, open source and super fast.
It seems a bit different when the two founders are the only ones doing it. Nobody coerced them, it's a decision they made for themselves. It's also different when it's crunch on a very finite timeline (the end of the runway) versus an open-ended expectation that you'll work until you die.
I have no idea what the work culture and expectations at Notion are today, I'm just going off the subject of this article.
As much as some may dislike this, putting in extra effort that pays off will always be looked upon positively by American society.
And I am glad for it. Honestly, I like the push/pull nature of effort as it is currently. I like that there's tension, that we have to constantly assess, "Am I doing enough?" to figure out where our personal lines are (and everyone is different). If anything, I'd suggest that we all get more assertive and confident where we draw that line, and comfortable with the consequences.
I think applying a standard "this is an appropriate amount of effort" across the board is a great way to hurt the explosive growth that we've all benefitted from these past 30 years.
> As much as some may dislike this, putting in extra effort that pays off will always be looked upon positively by American society.
Goes all the way back to the Puritans who founded the first colonies in early America. They were known for valuing work ethic, discipline, and frugality - the values espoused by their Protestant faith.
Unsurprising that those same values have become deeply ingrained in American society over the years.
If I owned a double digit percentage of voting stocks in a company, I'd work 18+ hour days too. I'm the one giving myself the permission to do that and I'm the one directly benefiting from the work financially.
Agree. They own the company, success or failure is on their name. A 2-person team on brink of failure doing week or two of 18-hour days to rescue the business (and reputation to lesser extent) is reasonable to me.
By contrast, salaried folks with no equity should not be cranking out those hours, IMO.
It's definitely unhealthy and unsustainable, I agree with you. Doing it for a longer period of time must have some long-term negative effects on one's body.
There's something on the other side, though - when I was in my early 20s I could be obsessed about building things, even if it was just a project for university. When I woke up in the morning I was thinking about the next thing I was going to implement, and I could stay up till late night because I didn't want to stop coding. It wasn't healthy, thankfully it never lasterd very long, but I sometimes miss that feeling of being so passionate about building something, because for whatever reason I don't get that feeling anymore.
All employees should be grateful, when their companies have incredible founders, executives, or owners who do what needs to be done for the survivability and outlook of the business.
In the same way excellent, productive employees should be compensated by their employers.
The way i read this comment is that you are unhappy that people put in extra effort into their passion and dreams and instead people should just strive to be mediocre.
The reason that doesn’t work is because you can’t sustain it. If you save your startup from the brink of death in under a year, sustainability isn’t needed. Plenty of people do university in similar circumstances. People in China do 996 and it works for them.
18 hour day still leaves 6 hours for sleep, assuming you structure the rest of your life efficiently.
I’m not sure I’d phrase that so lightly. The 996 work model has been compared to “modern slavery” [0]. I’m not sure it’s comparable to the article either, since 996 isn’t a choice that offers future rewards. Working 18 hours for a short term can be worth it if you’re a (co)founder saving your business. Theoretically he could retire early after making a few million off Notion’s success, and get back those hours lost to work.
And I was thinking "Notion? Didn't the Notion Ink come out then disappear into the Pit of Gone Android Devices?"
For those who haven't heard of it, the article is about https://www.notion.so/ which Wikipedia summarizes with "an application that provides components such as notes, databases, kanban boards, wikis, calendars and reminders. Users can connect these components to create their own systems for knowledge management, note taking, data management, project management, among others"
I used Notion for a few months last year, and I honestly don't understand why techbros are fawning over it. You pay $4/month for... not hosting the most light-weight data you have? Maybe I'm just jaded, but Notion seems like an expensive solution to a problem that most people can solve for free.
Our team chose it and I was pretty on the fence because wikis have existed for more than a decade and I had always considered the problem solved.
However, engineers like using it and that is invaluable. I can't explain it, I guess cause it 'feels' 'new.' It is pretty fun to use on a Mac, and the results are aesthetically pleasing. I understand there are some pretty sophisticated things you can do with the API, and we are already talking about tying it to PRs to make release notes.
Pretty promising all-in-all, but I wouldn't have picked it over and established wiki solution.
I moved to Notion from StackEdit (because it's basicaly abandoned and I had bugs editing on mobile) and I really miss storing all data in git repository (private GitHub repo).
It’s nothing to do with hosting light weight data, it’s everything to do with collaboration, UI, and not having to do it yourself.
Our usage of it could probably be replaced with text files, ascii art and a git repo or some wiki solution built out in the early 2000s but masochism isn’t in the values.
The problem was that it was difficult to know what a block was or how much you could do with 1000 blocks until you had invested enough time in the platform to be able to estimate how many blocks you might need to evaluate it.
Then there was additional mental overhead of trying to conserve blocks to extend your free trial. Do you implement something the correct way? Or do you maybe cut some corners to use fewer blocks so you can stay on the free plan a little longer? This extra decision making step added a little bit of fatigue to every interaction, which isn’t what you want when users are trying to evaluate your tools.
Typical trials have well-defined and easy to understand limits in units that users already understand: Users, bytes, projects, documents. If users have to learn your project before understanding the terms, it’s mental added overhead.
Here was my experience: my team signed up, started using it, tried out all the different features (none of which were behind a paywall), didn't hit the 1000 block limit, and started paying within a week of signing up because it was exactly what we were looking for at the time.
I am currently happy on the free-tier and would cheer-lead internally at my job if there was interest to migrating to Notion.
I wonder how the total numbers of people that did each of these things compare.
[1] The size of search index depended on the amount of content indexed as well as heavily on the features that were turned on. E.g. pre-index search-term expansion would increase the size by a factor, and so on.
Evernote also refuses to create multiple level of notebooks and manual order of notes. They also have strange user accounts on their user forum proactively denounce feature requests. Every time I search for a new feature request supported from many users will end up see a few familiar accounts claiming you don't need the new feature. I was like, who the heck are those people?
However, if they take away my ability to set the default font size, or create multiple notebooks, I will probably leave as well. Taking away multiple notebooks would break a lot of my use cases. Maybe I am already using the legacy version?
But if you didn't notice the change of default font and font size, may be you are using the legacy version.
Sounds like what Microsoft did with OneNote the Windows 10/Microsoft Store app vs the desktop application with significantly more capability though I believe the Win10/Store version is expected to catch up at some point.
I remember asking for this over 10 years ago in their user forums, only to get some volunteer evangelist (who wasn't an employee and didn't have an official title but spent hours a day on the forum) claiming it "wasn't needed".
I gave up on Evernote when I realized they were spending more time on branding instead of features and reliability. And the constant in-app advertising nagging me to upgrade from Plus to Premium didn't help. I was already paying them money, I shouldn't have been treated like a free user.
This is exactly what I found a couple years ago. These people were under many threads with new feature suggestions. Not sure whether they are still there. They do find a purpose of their life. Lol.
This thread is the first time I even heard about notion, but since they are getting so much praise here and since they made it so easy to import my notes, I just switched over.
It’s looking like I will have to write my own note app if I want something that does what I want and is going to last so I don’t loose my notes every decade.
Ive since deleted the account and moved to an internal note taking system. Anytime someone asks me about Notion I actively recommend against using it.
I basically track everything, from sideproject progress, CRM, personal challenges, workouts, books read, personal expenses, whishlists and todo with Notion in an unique way. While I'll be the first one to admit that the flexibility can be overwhelming sometimes, for basically every common usecase there are templates or YouTube tutorials
There are other good note taking apps out there and there, and there are other note taking apps out there that solve the device problem I struggle so much with. But notion is the best note taking app with the best cross device/platform support I've come across.
Linux, Windows, Android, Web... the service performs excellent across all platforms.
This small, but important detail, immediately stood out to me. The ability in SaaS to track your users with precision is welcomed by many (most?) developers. Knowing your most active users is regarded as an important data insight, and developers are eager to extract that data.
For me, I find it unsettling so much user behaviour is recorded through online apps. Not only is this app tracking seen as natural among developers, it's eagerly embraced.
SaaS promises customer tracking on a level never before achieved, and many developers seem happy to see it continue.
This is absurd. Why should the company that made the product know how much I'm using it?
What I care about is that they cannot correlate what I do in the app with what I do outside of the app.
It's really annoying and I know some people probably love this feature. But I feel like something that is primarily a note-taking app (yes, it a super-customisable database etc.e etc. also) should act like 99% of the note-taking apps that have been written previously.
Am I missing a huge paradigm shift in the way notes are taking "these days"? Just give me a blob with free rein. I'll format it later (maybe).
Using Notion isn't - for lack of a better word - comfortable to use.
Having said that, I use it all day every day. So it must be doing something right!
https://twitter.com/realjeffkeen/status/1176483281682018306?...
#1 geared towards speed and simplicity - the one you reach for first when you just want to jot something down without thinking too much about it.
#2 geared towards organization and power - this is more like a wiki - more structured, organized, and thoughtful.
From time to time, you can pull important information out of #1 and put it in #2 in a much more structured/formatted/organized way.
This 2-tier system has worked the best for me and I no longer have to keep looking for the one app that will magically do it all (I don't think it's possible). I use Apple Notes for #1 and Notion for #2.
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/4b1fc970b5314a2b93edb50e7cb...
Could you explain more what you mean by this? Or give an example of some software that behaves like what you're describing?
While in less strict systems (Word, Apple Notes, whatever) I can just create a 10x10 table, and randomly put images in one cell and text in another etc.
Imagine a table you write in markdown, like:
| | pro | con |
|——-|————-|————-|
| A |loud |heavy|
| B |light|flimsy|
You can’t have it inlined as just a table, it needs to become a database with filterable columns that you can’t lock, you add each lines as a row etc.
1. The web UI used Polymer/Web Components. Simon (CTO/cofounder) described this as building on shifting sand as browsers and poly fills changed the standards and things never seemed to work well for long.
2. There was a lot of Redis with Lua action, using Redis instances as a distributed system for some purpose I don’t understand. This never worked well.
3. There was experimentation with graph database like Neo4J which turned out to be slow for the kinds of queries Notion needed to do. Not sure if this was part of the first era or if it was tried out for the rewrite.
Because of all that, they completely rebuilt the product using the most boring/normal technology possible. Today we run on Postgres/Memcached for data, a Redis for rate limit and queueing, and a Typescript/React front-end.
For us, with the current state of web components, we see this as the ideal time to move to all web component UIs going forward. We view it as a strategic advantage.
Random bug report. On Android while making checkbox lists, I always have to hit enter twice to get to the next line. If I hit enter once, the cursor visually moves down to the next line, but once I start typing the new line gets joined back onto the previous line. I notice this happens when I don't add an extra space at the end of the first todo/checkbox item. Sorry to jump on your comment with a bug report!!
(I tried on my Pixel 2 / Android 11 with Swiftkey and Gboard in English and Korean, couldn't repro)
But I'm on Android 11 on a Motorola hyper one with the default Gboard in English. I just downloaded notion today and my OS has no pending updates.
I can repro 100% of the time.
- [ ] my to-do item$
- [ ] my to-do item $
In the above two examples, if I press enter when my cursor is at the end of the line (indicated by the dollar sign), the top example does the wrong thing. The bottom example works fine.
Also, if I tap on the end of a line and press newline, I get another block. If I type something and then press newline, then it happens exactly as ronyeh described (again, only with Gboard in English)
What’s the difference? Is it just that Notion is a plucky startup and that makes them inherently less trustworthy somehow?
Companies, especially companies in a state of massive flux like a fast growing startup, have no fixed traits like trustworthiness. It depends on the leadership team at the moment, pressures from external stakeholders, how bonuses and other incentive structures are designed.
I can tell you from personal experience that you can start out with the best intentions but sooner or later the power dynamics will change and then suddenly "Don't be evil" is just a joke meme.
https://obsidian.md/sync
https://joplinapp.org/
Come on ...
They elaborate on their choice of Kyoto as a way to isolate themselves further from distraction -- the language barrier.
I know I moved out of London last year because I no longer needed to be in London and rent was hard to justify.
Sounds like they were in the same boat. You can rebuild your app from anywhere, might as well do it from somewhere cheaper (yet still vibrant).
But that was certainly not the only reason for moving to Kyoto.
Good for them for shoving it at VCs who didn't want to invest when they needed it the most. If VCs can't take the risk of helping a company during their lows, then they don't deserve the rights to join at their highs.
The unfair advantage they have that is hard to articulate and easy to overlook is that Ivan seems to have very very good taste. This article gives some clues in that direction.
shameless plug: i'm the founder of a yc backed open source note taking tool. for notion users, we describe ourselves as basically notion but made for developers - local first, open source and super fast.
https://wiki.dendron.so/
I have no idea what the work culture and expectations at Notion are today, I'm just going off the subject of this article.
And I am glad for it. Honestly, I like the push/pull nature of effort as it is currently. I like that there's tension, that we have to constantly assess, "Am I doing enough?" to figure out where our personal lines are (and everyone is different). If anything, I'd suggest that we all get more assertive and confident where we draw that line, and comfortable with the consequences.
I think applying a standard "this is an appropriate amount of effort" across the board is a great way to hurt the explosive growth that we've all benefitted from these past 30 years.
Goes all the way back to the Puritans who founded the first colonies in early America. They were known for valuing work ethic, discipline, and frugality - the values espoused by their Protestant faith.
Unsurprising that those same values have become deeply ingrained in American society over the years.
But just for salary? Hard pass, thank you.
By contrast, salaried folks with no equity should not be cranking out those hours, IMO.
There's something on the other side, though - when I was in my early 20s I could be obsessed about building things, even if it was just a project for university. When I woke up in the morning I was thinking about the next thing I was going to implement, and I could stay up till late night because I didn't want to stop coding. It wasn't healthy, thankfully it never lasterd very long, but I sometimes miss that feeling of being so passionate about building something, because for whatever reason I don't get that feeling anymore.
In the same way excellent, productive employees should be compensated by their employers.
You can frown upon it but this is reality.
18 hour day still leaves 6 hours for sleep, assuming you structure the rest of your life efficiently.
I’m not sure I’d phrase that so lightly. The 996 work model has been compared to “modern slavery” [0]. I’m not sure it’s comparable to the article either, since 996 isn’t a choice that offers future rewards. Working 18 hours for a short term can be worth it if you’re a (co)founder saving your business. Theoretically he could retire early after making a few million off Notion’s success, and get back those hours lost to work.
[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/acfi.12682
For those who haven't heard of it, the article is about https://www.notion.so/ which Wikipedia summarizes with "an application that provides components such as notes, databases, kanban boards, wikis, calendars and reminders. Users can connect these components to create their own systems for knowledge management, note taking, data management, project management, among others"
However, engineers like using it and that is invaluable. I can't explain it, I guess cause it 'feels' 'new.' It is pretty fun to use on a Mac, and the results are aesthetically pleasing. I understand there are some pretty sophisticated things you can do with the API, and we are already talking about tying it to PRs to make release notes.
Pretty promising all-in-all, but I wouldn't have picked it over and established wiki solution.
The search is so slow that I'd rather just have all of our technical documentation as a Markdown files in a Git repo than in Notion.
Our usage of it could probably be replaced with text files, ascii art and a git repo or some wiki solution built out in the early 2000s but masochism isn’t in the values.