Notion Acquires Automate.io
notion.so
notion.so
*yes, some people do pay of course, but the dichotomy between B2C and B2B revenue is vast
B2B is much more profitable and you can set much higher prices for your products.
One of the best parts of Notion is it a actually works pretty well on every platform. So that's not very helpful.
I can see remote-based companies becoming more of the norm, especially post-pandemic, rather than multiple-location startups/corporations.
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 different but it works well enough while remaining extremely speedy and productive. I do miss a lot of what documents had to offer our team. I don't miss fiddling around with slow documents which didn't offer all of what we needed (and might never offer it).
I'm not sure why but most document-based apps like this seem to develop terrible performance. I suspect it's genuinely a difficult problem; I don't think I can 'make Notion in a weekend' by any means, or Slite for that matter. I trust they're doing their best.
I also know these tools suit some teams incredibly well, too.
I agree that you can't do Notion in a weekend, I have been working on something similar and it took me 8 months full time to have something that starts to look ok.
But that's also why I'm not bearish on having good performance in that kind of app. Notion made very dubious choices regarding their data model which explains why it is slow. Slite did not, but I thought that Slite had better performance though
I am wondering how your team does note taking in Linear - are you guys create one issue for each document? It doesn't support collaborative editing, right?
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.
But the advice to invest more in engineering is spot-on. It’s clear that Notion went through a period of hypergrowth and likely generated a lot of tech debt, but I’m hoping they’ll pay it off over time.
In particular, as the parent comment mentions, anything involving search or autocomplete has horrible performance. There are also some questionable UX decisions that I personally find annoying, like defaulting to opening a page in a modal rather than the current window.
A good starting point for a roadmap would be the Notion subreddit. Most of the time I Google for a specific feature, the top result is a post in that subreddit requesting the feature in 2019.
Using Apple notes until I find a good alternative.
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.
<100 employess : Notion clear winner
> 150 employees : Confluence clear winner
Notion is more for sharing a set of documents that are often used. And thus create some hierarchy of content without right management or structure. Works well if you are business owner or a team, or a small company. Or if you want to onboard noob users into documenting their work. And Notion is very good at that
Confluence works better to manage a lot of documents, give rights, structure content, organize. Confluence is not very good at it, but this is a difficult task and competitors don't do better
So depending on where you are at, you can pick the one which suits you best. They are others less popular tools than Confluence and Notion but still are in the two categories described above
What parts of notion are you claiming are fast and responsive?
In my experience using the web app is very slow, and search is monstrously slow. We still use it but slowness is our chief complaint for the platform.
When loading it absolutely takes 4-6 seconds to complete rendering.
If you’re talking about intra-page actions like adding a complex ui element after load you’re right it is better then Jira in that regard.
I hang on in the hopes they will address the problem.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but after putting Notion through its paces I know this isn't it.
[0] https://saga.so
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.
Surely, buy 25% shares and seat on the board. Make a contract that Notion integrations are advertised first and everything else is encouraged to work with it.
That way automate still has a larger target market and provides a channel into Notion sales.
This kills automate's growth. I wonder what the price tag was.
I guess time will tell, but I imagine it's safer financially for Notion to let Automate continue operating as it has been while working more closely to bring first-class integrations into Notion and improving Notion's API.
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.
Lean automation is asking to grow a little fat at the middle so that it’s easier to view and control data flows.
If this is true, it is a great success for the Automate founders.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/automate-io/company_...
Any insight into why this particular company?
Also, it's just generally a good note taking app IMO.
Like say I make myself a todo list using a List database. Need to set a reminder for myself about some part of it? Just add it in the list item with @. Have some documents or code output that you want to remember? Just throw it in there! Crap, have a billion tabs open from researching and have to stop for the day? Just create a list inside the page and throw all the links in there. Need to take notes on some of those links because the SO answer wasn't quite right, just add it right that list item. All the context for the card is right there in the card. It's a project management board that actually bings value to me as a dev. It's not the thing I have to use to track time, it's a thing I want to use because it's where I can store all my thoughts instead of having to have two systems and keep them in sync which is always a chore.
- a Kanban Board (abandoned Trello)
- a Confluence replacement
Now I love it for task- and project management.
I use it in combo with Roam Research. Roam for writing, Notion for task- and project management.
I've used Obsidian and Dendron for a lot of this previously, but the real killer feature of Notion, IMO, is the databases. I'd kill for a local/offline-first alternative that also has mobile support, but I have yet to find anything as easy (other than Craft, but it's Apple only and the web version is still in beta).
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)
I love Obsidian, and it's exactly what I was looking for. Notion has a slightly different usage for people, so it's not always an easy switch.