Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

potion.so

180 pointsnoahbragg99 comments

notion websites are so slow. Google's page speed for your home page has a score of 42. Why does it say "fast page speed" and "great seo"?

This [1] demo scores 81 and this[2] has a 68.

[0] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

[1] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

[2] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

(I work at Notion)

It looks like most of the guidance on Pagespeed for large images, and layout shift due to images. The guidance to fix is to set fixed images sizes for these elements, and to re-encode images into more efficient image formats, at their displayed size instead of their maximum source size. Potion probably doesn't currently know the correct width for an image because they give their users kind of unlimited style control to choose the image's size and layout, so they request the image at maximum size to make sure it's as sharp as possible. The images are still coming straight from Notion.so, and aren't served, transformed, or cached by Potion.

The rest of the page is fast - it's static HTML pre-generated or incrementally generated using Next.js, with a bit of JS on top, which is faster than Notion's fully dynamic thick client Javascript app. The example sites look good!

On the subject of Pagespeed's image guidance, Notion gets one out of two correct - when viewing these images from a Notion doc, we request & serve images at their displayed size using a query parameter, but we don't currently transcode the image to a more efficient format based on the browser's image support.

Where does adding the ability for Notion to transcode images sit in y'all's backlog? As much as it's not Notion's fault here and an underlying issue of image (re)sizing, it still gives the impression that Notion is slow.

Sorry, but as a rule I try not to make forward looking statements about our plans. We are hiring, though! https://notion.so/jobs

Thanks for this! Really interesting.

To be honest, 42 isn't actually that bad. PageSpeed Insights scores are incredibly strict (that's a good thing) and not at all linear with visitor perception of loading speed.

news.ycombinator.com has a 100 score, but if you compare the actual "Lab Data" it's not a massive difference.

First Contentful Paint: news.ycombinator.com: 1.3s, potion.so: 2.7s

The biggest difference is Time to Interactive: news.ycombinator.com: 1.4s, potion.so: 11.2s

That 11.2s is pretty bad, but PageSpeed Insights doesn't take into consideration which interactions work before all the JavaScript has loaded. In the case of potion.so, the HTML is rendered on the server (or perhaps statically generated), and the vast majority of important interactions on the homepage are simple HTML links that work even with JavaScript disabled. The 2 big exceptions (and probably the biggest contributors to that terrible Time to Interactive metric) are the third-party embedded video and chat widget.

42 is actually awful... My WordPress sites with large amount of images and content are all above 90, easily

I just did a test on my production WordPress site with a dozen plugins and dozens of images on the home page. I got 97 performance, oh and I'm 9000 miles away from the server and tethered to my phone

To be fair I'm using Cloudflare and the static assets were all probably cached at the edge but the initial HTML page itself is always fetched from the server (I'd have to pay for their APO product to do that which I tested out and it works well but introduces the usual cache issues)

42 is pretty bad and I'm getting a 33 on potion.so, 60-70 on the demos (it could be that the server load from HN is contributing to it).

I just spent some significant effort fighting against Next.js and its bundles just to go from a 68 -> 90 for my own project

The difference was day and night on a real phone on 3g

The hit to your SEO rankings matters a lot more than the actual load time.

I doubt that’s an issue if people seek out your website and use it. Unless your primary growth strategy is Google SEO, I doubt that tweaking your PageSpeed Insights score is going to do much in cases like this where the site actually does load quickly in practice.

I actively don’t use notion because of how slow it feels. It looks beautiful, but feels bad.

Why isn't it that bad? It's in the lowest category of scores.

Noah's a fun person to follow for those of you who are interested in indie businesses and are on Twitter[0] He's been sharing his MRR growth and learnings while building Potion for awhile now.

@noahbragg - Given that you're built 100% on top of Notion (or at least I think you are), how are you thinking about platform risk long term? They could cut you off their APIs, end life for some undocumented API you rely on, or just build your features into their own product at any point.

[0]- https://twitter.com/noahwbragg

Thanks Andy! Yeah there is definitely some platform risk. I'm trying to build a close relationship with Notion which can help a bit. But at the end of the day there is still risk building on a platform. As soon as I can I'll try to be using the official api which will take away some risk. But it's not quite ready yet.

I haven't been this excited about a website builder for a long time. I can definitely see myself switching from Squarespace to this!

Could you please clarify whether we can use something like AWS CloudFront or Cloudflare in front of this without issues?

Edit: Really need hierarchical nav menu's though. That's an immediate killer. I'll switch right now if you say that you can support submenus in the next month or so.

Edit 2: Another suggestion, can we have per-page injection? And split the content injection capabilities so we can inject in either the header or the footer? This would be useful, for example, if we want to inject less important scripts or styles at the bottom of the page so that we don't drop lighthouse ranking. This is a low priority feature request.

If anybody wants to know what it's like running a SaaS, here you have it. A wonderful comment, a perfect potential customer, a ton of work to make it work! The only good part is that once you do it once it works for other customers, too.

I mean this in just the warmest way to the author of the comment, it's just as a SaaS founder, what an emotional roller coaster it took me on.

I still intend to switch my site over. I think this is a great SaaS. I was literally looking for a Confluence <-> static site plug-in the other day, and they all suck or didn’t support SEO.

This product is awesome. And notion is better than Confluence as a CMS.

Sweet!You can always reach out in the live chat if you need anything.

For nav menu do you mean something customizable or breadcrumb “menu” following Notion’s/the url sort of thing?

What do submenus mean for this?

I’m using super.so right now and thinking of switching to this. It appears I’d have to do my own nav menu either way. Not completely sure how that would work. None of the showcase sites have much depth of pages if at all. Only the official site itself seems to have menus. Super provides breadcrumb horizontal “menu”. Not great either.

Something like the “hover to pop out” menus on the notion.so website.

There are navigation menus in potion.so at the moment (they’re great!), but they only support 1 level.

For any site bigger than a placeholder site there’s virtually never going to be only a single level menu.

Are you talking about Mega Menus, something like the ones you see on https://vidya.so ? This is also built on top of Notion, but using https://mdx.one behind the scenes instead of Potion.

Full disclosure: I am the founder of MDX.one

Mdx seems great. Love how actively developed/updated blog too.

I might try switching.

Something like this, yes.

Hey! I'm glad your excited. And glad your trying it out. Edit 1 is probably not something I will get to in the next couple of months. Sorry about that! Edit 2 is on the roadmap. I agree, this would definitely be useful.

Hmm I built something like this on top of Svelte Cloudflare workers API, and the configs controller for the site itself is using a Notion table.

The reason I built this to replace a Wordpress site is because the rest of our ecosystem is a bunch of Svelte apps, and with this we could just drop content from Notion straight into our site.

We can even use fancy pants things like synced blocks for site-wide announcements, etc. etc.

One caveat with using Notion though is that without a good caching strategy (which we don't have), the site's going to be pretty slow, because Notion's API just fetches block by block. You have to have a "cache mode" for production - something that fetches and caches every X amount of time, and have users hit the cache rather than straight from Notion, since it sometimes can take 10+ seconds, which will time out your worker.

Could you use CF KV for this?

https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-kv/

See also: https://flareact.com/

yeah, that makes sense. Potion actually recreates all the Notion blocks from scratch and then hosts it statically. Thats how we get around that issue.

The author Noah is using this for promotion while making fun of HN commenters https://twitter.com/noahwbragg/status/1451308730994212869

Maybe Show HN mosts need more guardrails to prevent shameless promotion. Producthunt is better suited for this.

I’m not sure that you can consider his tweet “making fun”, when it just references comments that others have in fact made.

The question about pricing is pretty legit given a free Wix or similar would probably be a better experience than jumping across Notion and Potion.

It's not "hackers are going to hack it for free", it's more "your grandma is making a website on Wix for free" and, it won't make you feel like a tech wiz or a startup cool kid, but it works.

That's also why I think Potion (and other startups targeting Notion and the incoming Notion marketplce) is pure business genius. I'm sure the target market will appreciate Potion. I had to try Notion for work and it's definitely not for me (slow and clunky) - but somehow they have a lot of evangelist in SF startups and I'm sure they won't care about paying 1 pumpkin spice latte per month just to say they made a website with Notion.

I mean this is cool and all but this is literally double lock in. Notion can't be self hosted and neither can this. Why would you depend on either of these for your website.

Not to mention using Notion as a CMS means you're limited in what you can do, zero extensibility, etc.

Well there are lots of people out there that don't know how to or don't want to host a site on their own. and maybe they don't know how to code. So this would be a good option for them. Seeing lots of people like this for my current customers.

There are dedicated no code website building services. Like Wix, square space and tens of other great services. This is a bad solution for a solved problem.

I think it's more for existing Notion users that may wish to have a tiny microsite about something. Someone already invested in Notion isn't going to care about self-hosting.

A tiny microsite for $120/year tho.

This. $10 a month isn’t unheard of but when commodity VPS hosting is $5 a month (if not less) and stuff like WordPress.com is $8 a month and Netlify and GitHub Pages exist, I don’t know how broad this market is. Especially when you’re talking about the lock-in imposed by using this sort of thing.

A microsite with a cms that is neatly integrated with a produce that charges that much per user - sign me up!

I prefer to use Github Pages

As opposed to what? Hosting your own server for $120/yr in electricity, but with hardware costs on top?

What microsite costs $120/yr in electricity to run?

Mine, almost :)

https://danuker.go.ro/

Actually around $60, and I have more services on it, not just the site.

You know a site like this can be entirely static and hosted for free with github pages, gitlab pages, netlify, vercel, or any other free static site host.

Likely a digital ocean droplet, or other vps for $5-10 per month. Except neither of those Integrate with notion.

10$/month is 120$/year. Plus you have to do more work on top of that to actually build the site and integrate with a CMS.

Notion users will be in for a nasty surprise when they realize that DO is closer to a Raspberry Pi than a OEM PC.

All you get is a barebones OS without a GUI. You have to set up everything yourself: server (e.g. Apache), language (e.g. PHP), database and SSL. This is a non-starter for people that have never seen a command line interface before.

Ever heard of Wix?Square space? Netlify?

Two nice coffees per month, not so bad. Can fund it by canceling a rarely-used streaming service.

Notion allows you to export your stuff as Markdown. Couple of scripts later and you're ready to dump it into whatever other thing you want. It's not that bad.

Most people don't care, they just want a site that works. It's useful because Notion itself is WYSIWYG where whatever you type is what shows up, much more flexible than something like WordPress.

> much more flexible than something like WordPress

WordPress is endlessly extensible and customizable, so I don’t think Notion would be more flexible. Maybe Notion is simpler or easier to use, but at the end of the day, you’d still be very limited in what type of site you could build.

WordPress is also getting close to releasing a WYSIWYG editor for the full site, which is also extensible and customizable. But this is already available for content, which is mostly what potion would be handling anyways.

Looking over the list of potion benefits:

1. Nothing to install

2. It's simple - focus more on your content

3. Update and it's instantly live!

4. Use Notion (You already know it)

5. No page limits

5. Potion generates pretty URLs and preview images auto-magically from your page titles

Only 2 and 4 seem to be things which something like WordPress might not have, and they are very subjective anyways. For number 1, there are lots of hosted WordPress platforms which don’t have you installing anything. For 5, there are probably lots of plugins you supplement the default social image behavior if it doesn’t work for you.

I think this is a very cool project, and it’s always nice to see more experiments in the CMS area. But I don’t think flexible is the right word to use to describe it :)

Disclaimer: I’ve been a WordPress contributor, so I’m definitely biased. :p

The biggest benefit is you get to use Notion for the backend content creation. It is prett different from more traditional WYSIWYG editors like Wordpress’. I think for smaller sites including in some collaborative instances, Notion makes more sense than Wordpress. Of course Wordpress makes a ton of sense in so many ways. Including for most collaborative scenarios.

Mine is a hippie ish free organic growing virtual coworking community. So it is easier to get active members to add to Notion than Wordpress. I think this is an edge case though.

WordPress uses a WYSIWYG editor called Gutenberg for quite some time now: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/

Love it! I have multiple sites hosted by Potion. This is just one of them: https://support.testimonial.to

Your awesome!

The beauty of the web is that you can take something and then make something else out of it. I love that.

Potion has pricing though. And I'm not gonna pay, because I don't know what the setup is - am I paying for Potion to run a Notion account with my stuff in, and then they layer on top?

Or are they reselling part of their own account?

Or do I need to pay for a Notion account also?

It's built on top of Notion, so you pay for Notion and you pay for Potion as well. :-)

Actually it's a bit funny because Potion is 2.5x more expensive than the Personal plan on Notion, even though the utility of Potion is provably smaller.

Isn't it because of scaling? The bigger a service becomes with a large audience, the cheaper they can sell things for.

I don't think scaling is much of a factor when it comes to cloud cost. Most clouds (AWS, GCP etc) charge for usage which scales linearly. The bigger you are the more you pay. Additionally there are many free resources for small startups. For example Potion is hosting their site on Vercel which costs $20/mo for <1TB/mo traffic.

Hey Noah nice to see you here! Glad I could contribute even a small amount (the Savvy Portfolio template) to this awesome project.

To the people here wondering how does this compare to Squarespace and Wix: it does not. This is for Notion users who want to publish a website while using Notion.

Hey,cool to see you here too! I'd love to have you build another template. I'll pay too.

Nice stuff, what sets you apart from your competitors like https://super.so/ ?

There's also this direct comparison page: https://www.potion.so/super-alternative

Thanks for the question. Two main things currently. When you update your Notion page or styles it updates your site immediately so it makes for a nice editing experience where you can see what your site would look like easily. Others don't do this as quickly. Could take a minute or two to see updates. Second Potion has a pricing model that is more friendly towards having multiple sites.

Do you poll the notion page to get the notion data so quickly? Is there any rate limit on requests?

I switched from super.so and I absolute love the instant update. Used to smash the refresh button quite a bit to get things to update!

Glad to hear it!

Potion is an awesome project and Noah is a great guy. Been paying him for a while with https://softdiscipline.com, not planning to stop any time soon.

Very off topic but you live in Nelson!!?? Whitewater is such an awesome hill and Baldface is all time! What a great playground you have!

I do and it is!

Ping me on Twitter @finereli, let's connect!

Awesome! Glad to hear it.

Whilst there will be lots of folks who complain at performance - its not as if notion is designed to be the backend api for a website, but i have to believe that continuing to drop the barrier to entry even below wix and squarespace has to increase the addressable market for this. I for one still get frustrcted at the level of effort for wordpress, wix and squarespace. could this really be used as the main website for a company, perhaps not but there are lots of other uses like documentation sites that could be interesting use cases

What's the thing about notion anyway? Can someone explain what I am missing out on and how it compares to other tools out there like google docs?

I wish in Google Docs you could smash a Google Sheets (with sorting, filters, editing) right into a Docs. Google Docs also don't let you link to other docs by @docname-ing them, and creating tables of linked documents.

Google needs to hurry up with their Workspaces and build something closer to Notion or Coda

Thanks ok, I wasn’t aware of the linking part

It’s more like markdown that Google docs

And it behaves more like a wiki than Google docs

Don't take this the wrong way, it must be scary to do a Show HN, so high5 to you, but...what's the appeal of this over a Carrrd, Wix or Squarespace which already has a good UI / drag and drop editor and has all the redundancy, SEO compliance and user access management in-built?

Hey! Thanks for the question. Potion is really for those that love Notion. Notion is really great for certain kinds of sites. A wiki, help center or those that just want to have their portfolio site through Notion. Pretty powerful to be able to edit your notes and site in the same place. Instead of going back to your website builder where you are rusty and haven't touched for a couple of months.

(I work at Notion, bias etc)

Think about how content of any kind ends up published:

1. Ideate - what do you want to make? Brainstorm, keep notes of ideas. Make plans.

2. Draft - put your ideas down in their native media. Write, paint, etc.

3. Revise, collaborate - polish things up, retouch photos, etc. Loop in your editor.

4. Distribute - publish your creation, so others can get it. Transform it into a form that's sharable. Focus on reach.

A product like like Squarespace is really only concerned with step (4) of the creative process - publishing to the web. So you'll need to do the rest of the steps with other tools; maybe just pencil and paper or maybe Google Docs, and then bring that content into Squarespace for distribution.

But, Notion does (at least a passible job at) all steps in this workflow, especially for text content. People use it for notes, then share privately to collaborate with comments. Publishing is a single switch to make a page public. We're not as fully-featured as a Wix; for example Notion doesn't offer analytics or advertising placement. But since we're pretty good at all the other stuff, it makes sense for people who like Notion to find a way to augment the publishing use-case with something like Potion.

I've been following Noah's journey on Twitter for some time, and I really like his short sneak peek videos on new features. This tool is just awesome!

Thanks!

Have been following Noah's progress with Potion for a while now, happy to see that it's getting the recognition it deserves here on HN!

Thanks!

The onboarding flow gives me pause - I'd like to check the speed / perf w/ my content before signing / paying.

Hey, well you can always cancel before the trial is over. We won't charge your card. Hope that pushes play on your pause. :)

Keep going and keep building!! <3

Thanks!

... that sock over the mic :)

Thank you so much for this. I have wanted it for a long time. Not gonna sign up today, but let me just file a todo here...

Awesome! Let me know if you have any questions.

Off, but is that a sock on the mic? Fun. :D

Yep, haha. It does the job and doesn't smell!

Does Potion support formulas?

Thanks for the question. Yes Potion does!

Following your journey on twitter, great work guys!

How does this compare to, for example, Squarespace?

These days it comes down to whether you need ecommerce functionality or not. Squarespace and other SaaS website builders offer that. Everyone else can get by with a free CMS and a basic theme.

Nice

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