How we use Notion as a startup | Hacker News Reader

How we use Notion as a startup

kopa.co

130 pointsrayshan78 comments

I would like to know how many people donated to the writer and copied the Notion template.

I have worked in companies of various sizes, from (currently) running my own startup, to leading teams in rapidly growing startups, to a cog in the engineering wheel at Google. From (currently) fully remote, to having some team mates working remotely and others on-site, to fully on-site.

I have never found the particular wiki/document tool we were using to be even close to a critical factor in the onboarding process. Onboarding works well when experienced teammates are given the time to show their newer colleagues the ropes. It works poorly when there is no personal attention given and people are just asked to go and read docs and left to their own devices.

My sincere recommendation to anyone starting their own business is to stop wasting time, money, and energy on decisions like these which do not materially impact anything about your business. If you're using GSuite, just use their stuff. If you're using Microsoft's equivalent, use their stuff. Otherwise, JIRA + Confluence are free for small teams. Otherwise, if you're already paying for GitHub, Gitlab, whatever, just use their tools.

Last thing you need to do is spend an additional $8/team member/month for functionality you are already getting for free in other services you are using. Believe me, it will not make a difference to your likelihood of success. These decisions are just procrastination traps which distract you from the important stuff - talking to users, talking to customers, and building things they need.

I support this statement

This is the assessment I have, EVERY way to manage documents or knowledge or whatever is about as ~80% as good as the ideal solution at worst. This is a problem you can spend a lot of time bikeshedding and where it's questionable to not just use the path of least resistance tools that you already have at hand.

The #1 actual problem and differentiator all these tools has is search. The #1 thing you can do in my experience to make your documentation higher quality is to template it and make it consistent as this makes it far easier to quickly grok.

Structured documentation is such a benefit toward this, and also such a controversy within teams.

Aside from the many standards for structure and the challenges of info architecture, there are a surprising number of technical writers who are hard to convince, or cannot be convinced, to write within any sort of structure or template. Either they have to be sold on it constantly, or cut loose or moved away from product docs and toward blogs or training materials.

A writer who can not only work within a structure but also can appreciate and leverage it is incredibly valuable to a docs team, and I believe the pipeline that develops candidates for technical writing doesn't prepare folks for how much weight this carries.

Use what you've got. My experience matches this, but with one exception: Confluence. It's where documents go to die.

Confluence, like Jira needs at least one person whose full time job is administering and organizing it it if the organisation is over a dozen people.

Otherwise it'll turn out to be like any wiki anywhere, a graveyard of documents.

Therein lies the business benefit, if you use SharePoint you need two or three people instead of one business analyst.

My company has 60 staff and SharePoint with the Teams Wiki integration is so _demonstrably_ worse.

I didn't think I would become an advocate of Atlassian and there might be some disruptors out there in that space, but of all the big providers there, Oracle, Microsoft. Atlassian are still hear and shoulders above the rest.

JIRA is slow, but I don't hate it. Once setup, there isn't much else to do. Confluence is terrible b/c the search is so bad. I hate when I know a document is in Confluence and I have to come up with some magic search query to surface it.

My last team used Google Docs exclusively, and writing a doc was where it went to die.

Is this the equivalent to the “pre-mature scaling” phenomenon in tech?

In the early days of a startup, I agree with your statement. Once the company gets significantly bigger, these things start to matter a lot.

Yes I’d like to echo this.

Our SaaS is 16 years old now. In the early days it was all about product market fit, generating cash, basic survival. We were too busy focusing on the latter to worry about things like documentation systems at scale.

But there was definitely a threshold that we crossed where we knew things would likely work out - at this point we started paying attention to systems at scale.

And boy am I glad we did that! Had we not taken that crucial step, we’d be suffering today.

Point is, one can’t afford to skip over these things in the early days. But it’s a tricky balance, because doing it too early is also counter productive.

I agree with you, but don't think the issue is one of documentation. Rather, it is an issue of communication.

To borrow a concept from Starcraft, what has worked well in my experience is for every member of a team/company to clearly understand their "macro loop". This involves being aware of the set of chat channels, email threads, code repositories, and documents that are most relevant to their work in the near term and in the medium term. Everyone on the team should be:

1. Checking these sources at a regular rate (once a day, once a week, once every two weeks).

2. Reflecting their work in these sources to the extent that it's relevant to their team mates.

Macro loops cannot be forced onto someone, but they can be reinforced by the rest of the team. For example, if you lead a weekly meeting and always have the meeting doc up on a shared screen, people will naturally start refer to it themselves when they need the context it contains. Or if a particular document is always linked in answers to a certain question, it will make its way onto indexes and bookmarks.

The particular systems you use to represent these things -- Slack vs. Discord vs. IRC vs. Google Hangouts for chat, GMail vs. custom servers for email, GitHub vs. GitLab vs. Bitbucket vs. self-hosted git for code, Docs vs. Quip vs. Dropbox Paper vs. Office 365 vs. Notion for docs -- really don't have a significant effect on how well a team runs its macro loops.

It doesn't matter what you use, the important thing is to foster a culture of writing stuff down and keeping it updated.

For onboarding docs the first task of the person being onboarded should be to update and improve on the onboarding documentation.

And everyone in the organisation should follow the Scout Rule of documentation, whenever you read a doc, leave it better than it was when you started reading it.

agreed, but confluence leaves much to be desired.

> If you're using GSuite, just use their stuff.

I am building a small business with 5 employees currently. We rely on quite a bit of tech but are not a tech thing (med industry). We use Google Workspace as our internal center piece.

We have also decided to pass on Notion to stay in the suite and not complicate things for a semi-technical staff – but I can definitely feel that the lack of a solid wiki substitute in GW is an issue and does complicate things.

It's easy enough to just open a blank page in either Google Docs or Notion and start typing. The power of Notion is in the incredibly low amount of effort you have to pour into knowledge upkeep. Tying it all together. Cleaning it up. Keeping it accessible and inviting to explore and expand.

Not being able to adhoc create and link documents, not having easy templates and powerful inline tables, working with images without having to manually resize them to make sense and people starting to fuck with colours and fonts (just to name a few things) is really cumbersome and makes the task of maintenance really heavy.

Google Sites exists. It just isn't good enough (reasons outside the scope of this post). For Docs or GW in general hope is on the horizon with smart canvas, web view for Docs and more coming.

Lastly, money of this magnitude is really, really not a concern at our little shop. We generate income. Employees costs thousands of $ per month. Keeping people motivated, using the tools and making both collection, access and maintenance of knowledge simple is.

If I could pay another $10/month/user for a Google Notion I would.

Interesting. Having used various tools, I'm leaning the other way back towards Google docs for simplicity and search. The key is that search works really well along with collaboration. Linking docs in gdocs has also improved.

Yup Google doesn’t have a good alternative for a wiki and they are invaluable in companies. Notion is the best wiki I’ve seen, not trying it because it isn’t Google is bad advice

The reason we decided against it, is that tech fatigue is a super real thing and it gets sobering fest when you deal with non-technical folks who actually just want to get a completely unrelated job done.

They are just not enthusiastic about new organisational tools. They just want something simple and familiar.

We had a Notion test run. It would have taken additional energy to convince people to get accustomed and actually use it, more than we were willing to expend on this matter at the time.

Each new tool adds a burden. While the exact opposite is true for a lot of tech folks (to an unhealthy degree), just the idea of "yet another tool" is draining to a lot of normies and something I have come to strongly consider.

I absolutely adore notion, but completely agree with this assessment.

In terms of multi user usage, I use it for home projects with my partner and family, and at work I use it for specific projects across teams where the number of users is usually less than ten.

The beauty in it is being able to rapidly build up documentation in a collaborative way without having to use separate tools, a la a traditional office suite.

The idea of maintaining hundreds of documents across as many users though is absurd. Once we've gotten past the point of onboarding and scaling up our project, we transfer to slower but more reliable tools like _shudder_ Confluence, which may be a messy nightmare for individuals when compared with notion, but which has absolutely no trouble with scaling across dozens of teams.

I recently worked at a company that adopted Notion when it was a startup but has now grown to 800'ish people. I can say for certain that Notion does not scale.

The primary issue is very straightforward, but one that plagues so many companies: search.

Searching in Notion doesn't actually exist. It will perform some string matching based on some text you provide, but it is unable to provide any of the needed context in order to decide which result is the right one. It is also aloof of whatever structure you might be trying to impose, so when you are searching you truly are looking for a needle in the haystacks.

Every project management software grows until it has its own query language then promptly collapses under its own weight paving the way for a competitor.

Search is also obscenely slow. I type a few characters, and then have to wait several seconds to see the note I need. Compared to its competitors that frontload the entire graph, it’s unusable.

We've cut server-side search latency p50/p75/p95 in half compared to January, but still have a long way to go. On-device caching/indexing/searching is something we want to do more of, but currently we're focusing on server-side speed/reliability/relevance. We have a lot of work to do!

The fact that Notion’s search was so slow and not at all useful is part of what pushed me to Obsidian for knowledge management.

Obsidian's search is also bad: it doesn't prioritize file names or headings over content.

When you get past a certain number of notes, this becomes an issue. You might be trying to search for a concept you have a dedicated note of, but your search results are drowned out by normal usage of the word in other notes' contents.

Agreed, the irrelevancy of results has been pointed out several times. It just uses simple string matching, but the issue is that most of the tools do that :/

One nice thing about the Obsidian model is that it's pretty easy to build external interior with it. I previously wrote a search engine similar to fzf but for full-text search in a directory of Markdown files, and you can hook it up to open Obsidian: https://github.com/cgamesplay/pilikino/tree/v1

It’s not great but at least it’s fast and shows me more context in its results. It’s a more effective search for me than Notion.

I use a quick switcher alternative to ameliorate this exact issue: https://github.com/tadashi-aikawa/obsidian-another-quick-swi...

Makes obsidian so much better.

In what point it doesn't scale? When you get to 800 people?

Search in Notion is problem even without a lot of people.

This. This is the only reason why I don't use notion as my primary note taking platform.

The search is just not native and doesn't work in its current format as well as easier transition into various pages through it.

My old job had a google search appliance that searched their internal documentation. It actually worked. I miss it.

I stopped using Notion as much when I discovered the magical solution that is Google Cloudsearch.

Any member of a Google Workspace team can navigate to cloudsearch.google.com and it will search across all personal + shared Drive documents, videos, slides, Gmail, etc. It has saved me countless hours trying to find documents.

This is a great list of reasons to use Notion as your company's information hub. It's basically a wiki, but with some great templating and database and access control and usability features that make it especially wonderful for teams. Google used a wiki internally for all company information for a decade or so until it was finally replaced with who-knows-what.

The one thing holding me back from declaring that all new companies should use Notion for everything is the text editing. Doing any kind of long-form content, such as blog posts or design docs or technical documentation, is arduous and painful. The editor is usable but clunky. Editing links, selecting text, and using formatting shortcuts is wonky. Joining paragraphs is hard. If they can make editing more fluid, it might just be the perfect information organization tool.

Agree, I really like Notion but even after a bunch of great updates the text editing and a few other parts still feel off, e.g. the UI is really jumpy and makes the whole thing feel physically unstable, there's huge margins at smaller window sizes, etc. It's getting there, and worlds better than a few years ago, but it still isn't an extension of myself the way other tools are.

Can you tell me more about the “jumpy UI”? Are you referring to text styling toolbar, or something else?

If you open a page as an overlay of the main page and start typing your blog post - a simple mistype or misclick will close it which is really annoying.

Any easy fix arguably to always open it as a standalone window, however the UX still shouldn't be this way.

Hey Jake, great job on the text selection fix! As far as the jumpiness, its the gestalt of the experience, from a ton of papercuts big and small:

1. I often have the sidebar closed, and whenever the mouse passes over anywhere on the left side of the window it pops open, or will jump open and closed if you're in a particular area. It'll also remain open while the window isn't focus, such as when you pass by it on the way to the window next to Notion. When resizing the window from the left it always pops up and stays up. Rather than just use the app it's constantly making me conscious of it, even if to just avoid accidentally popping it open.

2. The canvas doesn't immediately repaint on resize, it waits until the mouse stops moving. This lack of instant feedback feels like it's perpetually catching up to what I'm doing [1]. I use Notion alongside other apps, so I'm resizing to get the maximum information on the screen with the minimum of UI space taken, but to do this means I have to move, wait and see how it repaints, move again, etc etc. This is exacerbated by the massive left/right %-width window margins, which make it hard to reason about what content will look like until the resize is complete.

3. Hover states everywhere, everything lights up when my mouse goes over stuff. With all corners and most of the canvas containing hover states there's no 'safe' place to move or put my mouse without chrome getting in my face. In small doses this is fine, and hover states are generally helpful to reveal present location, but at some point it's all too much.

4. Related, block grab handles and +'s are distracting and when I'm not paying close attention and clicking somewhere down the page where text is, there's a chance I hit one of those and a menu appears. I never want the menus, nor do I want to carefully move my mouse to avoid hitting these in the margins, I just want to write.

5. When using '/', the menu pops up, same thing. Wish that only did that at the beginning of a block. I don't even know the mental model for what is supposed to happen when I invoke and use it mid-paragraph. Does it affect this para or the next? And if its this para, why would I suddenly convert this para into something else midway through typing?

6. Tooltips. On left menu actions like search, updates, etc. On block grab handles. On formatting menus. Everywhere tooltips, for even the most self-evident of features (bolds[2] italics underlines links etc). These also persist when you no longer focus on the app (move the mouse away or cmd-tab). These are probably only useful for new users, not every time we use every small feature in the app in perpetuity.

7. In dark mode, resizing the window quickly will reveal the edges to have a coat of white underneath (the app's default background-color). Makes for a very non-native, 'barely held together' feeling to the app. Resize sublime, obsidian, vscode, etc and things just reflow and the window is the same color and nothing hits conscious awareness.

8. Making page icons changeable from the sidebar lessens the feeling of solidness, because it's a punishment if you click to go to a page and happen to hit the icon. I feel the same way about rendering the arrows for pages that do not have subpages - they have negative utility because I think there's something there that isn't.

9. If I select text, a formatter menu appears. If I then right click text, a different search/cut/copy/paste menu appears in addition to the formatting menu. Two separate menus in separate places open at the same time.[3]

10. If you click anywhere in a table, it automatically opens pickers / menus. For some % of the time this is a punishment because these menus cover up content, and it gets back to the idea that you can't rest a cursor anywhere without some sort of thing pop up. Airtable on the other hand feels a lot better because when I click on a select field, it doesn't automatically open the picker, it simply makes that box selected, and if I want to edit I click the dropdown or press enter.

I guess the best way to summarize it is using Notion feels like I'm always avoiding the punishment of UI jumping in my face for clicking somewhere wrong (see fitts' law), typing the wrong character, or even moving the mouse in the wrong place.

---

[1]: feels a little like this https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/6ctl73/high_ping_in_...

[2]: the bold 'B' icon isn't bold btw

[3]: There are five distinct context menus in Notion: formatter, Search Google / c/c/p (word selected), Search Google (no selection; why this exists is beyond me), link, and block right click. Just right click around and you can get more than one to open simultaneously.

Great an comprehensive writeup. I use Notion (am a paying customer). And would only add that the mobile experience on Android is for roughly a month now abysmal.

First the app got stuck on the last page opened before the update. I (and judging from comments on the net many others) could switch to other pages, could create new unnamed pages, but not edit them. The app was basically unusable for weeks. I even wrote to Notion but never received a reply.

Then after weeks it got better for about a week. Now, with the latest update regarding the better text editing experience my app seems to be constantly on the verge of or actually regularly crashing. So again unusable to me.

When I am not at my desk I use Notion to quickly add to existing documents. Write down ideas for my clients and just use it as a brain dump to later structure when at my desk with a big screen.

Currently this part of managing my idea flow in my business just broke.

So while I still use them because I get value out of their incline tables and such niceties I am already looking for a suitable replacement. They need to get their quality in order. I expect my tools to work. I need to trust in my tools. Else I have no use for them in the long term.

I follow the philosophy of buying cheap the first time I need/try a new tool. And when that breaks on me after some use I know better what I really need and can buy quality items according to my needs.

I'm so sorry we broke your trust – both in the product, and your support experience. I'd appreciate it if you'd email me (jake@makenotion.com) or DM me on Twitter @jitl with your Notion account information so I can look into the breakdown here.

Can you tell me more about the app being "on the verge of or actually regularly crashing"? Is it crashing to the OS home screen, showing an "Oops" screen inside the app, or something else? Information about your Android device could also help.

Thanks for reaching out here as well as via email. I really appreciate it.

I will answer via email as I can provide my account details there.

Kudos and thanks in advance and looking forward to the email conversation.

Can you share more about what makes “selecting text” and “using formatting shortcuts” wonky? We shipped normal text selection a few weeks ago, so it’d be great to know if we made things better/worse/uglier/slower for you recently.

The link editor… we got that one so wrong. You basically have to arrow key into a link to edit it?? We way over-optimized for minimalism and visiting links at the expense of good, understandable UX.

Don't have much to add to the existing comments but this:

If your company uses a Notion page for a job listing, I'm already concerned. Doubly so if it requires a Notion account to view, which is becoming WAY, WAY too common.

This might be something Notion CAN do, but nothing gives me the impression that a company is either under-resourced or lacking in sufficient self-awareness like a Careers page that requires me to log in to a third-party service to even view the req.

While it’s definitely an incremental step forward, it doesn’t seem drastically better than the Confluence wiki I’ve used in prior companies. Are there killer features I’m missing beyond database row views?

Also, is Kopa.co an active company or still in prototype phase? All I see when I browse the city lists are 404s and no listings[1]. I mean no disrespect and don’t have all the details, but it seems counterproductive to spend so much time on business organization before the product.

1. https://www.kopa.co/c/california/san-francisco

It’s night and day compared to confluence for me. I think the biggest value prop is that the editing experience is actually fun which makes people want to use it. Compared to every single Confluence wiki I’ve watched languish supported only by that one guy who snorts it to feel alive.

I could see that, our users loved Confluence because it was such an improvement over Gdocs or a shared network drive. Once the wysiwig editor came out our departments organically began to use it for everything. That was years ago though, user expectations continually rise so I can see your point.

i have a theory the problems with confluence are (no longer) related to confluence itself but the data organization. too many people. too many reorgs. not enough incentive to update. once they added real-time collaborative editing it changed the game. i think notion/clickup will be considered just as difficult to organize and make sense of once they gain enough adoption

You're right. I can't get it to come up with any listings by search either.

This company should spend less time LARPing on notion and more time on its product.

Yeah search, editor…I use notion but don’t enjoy it (just dread the idea of changing).

Ever read a web page that was actually a notion doc? You can’t even scroll to the next page with the space bar. Someone had to go to extra work to break something that’s been a reading convention since the 1960s.

Is it just me or Notion is indeed too slow on Web?

It’s not just you. The painful slowness is what stopped me from using it after initial enthusiasm.

The app is _significantly_ faster than the website. It's still slow, but it _works_.

We've been adopting Coda and liking it. Search is a weak point in it as well. But the main issue for us is the permissions hell and total lack of flexibility :-(

Other than that, a much more manageable product, has external integrations, automations etc. built in that even a non-technical or non-power-user can enjoy and use.

Damn. We use Notion too, but this seems like a lot of setup and maintenance for such a small org.

I’ve found that the less process and overhead for internal documentation the better. No one at my company has time to groom and upkeep something like Notion to the degree described. That’s not to say it isn’t valuable, it’s just not something that brings value to us.

Personally speaking, not for company use, Notion requires too much unnecessary structure. It’s very difficult to just start writing. I first have to figure out where the thing goes, and how the thing is connected to these things, and how I won’t lose it if I move it, etc.

> Personally speaking, not for company use, Notion requires too much unnecessary structure. It’s very difficult to just start writing. I first have to figure out where the thing goes, and how the thing is connected to these things, and how I won’t lose it if I move it, etc.

The problem is if you don't do this then nobody else will be able to find it once you've written it. You might as well just write markdown in a loose git repo at that point.

I haven’t found this to be the case with tools like Roam. I have a Roam graph with 10,000+ pages, and it’s easier to find random thoughts and notes there than it is in a highly structured Notion workspace.

Has anyone else noticed how much of a 'meme' Notion has become?

It seems I'm constantly seeing templates for this, that and other all built in Notion!

Are the Notion team doing an incredible astroturf marketing job?

Is it people just cashing in on Notion's popularity for internet points?

A search for 'Notion' on Product Hunt returns a couple of thousand results!

Being a paying customer myself I think Notion also appeals a lot to an audience that likes to feel productive and self optimizing while just procrastinating the s*t out of their day (and I am sometimes guilty of that more often than I would like).

This audience has a tendency to jump towards productivity and optimization hscks/shortcuts. And a lot of these products/templates promise exactly that.

So Notion in regard to this specific target audience is a great signal for others to identify an audience ripe for milking. It makes for good marketing and audience self selection.

I've been a fan of Notion for a long time, but I'm no Notion guru. It's a bit pricey, but I bought the Notion Bulletproof Workspace template and it's been working great, plus plenty of room to grow into: https://www.notion.vip/bulletproof/ I'd recommend checking it out if you're willing to set it up for your company.

It also offer a subscription for updates, but I wouldn't recommend it. I canceled mine last year since 1) updates aren't frequent and 2) after initial setup I don't plan on changing much since the initial template purchase serves us perfectly well, which is why I highly recommend it.

Are there any good self-hosted alternatives to notion? Ideally something that multiple people can access, I just want to have a network accessible place to store and edit recipes and other household stuff.

Currently I still haven't found an alternative that covers my use cases. Esp. creating documents from templates within inline tables with easy linking to other documents.

I would love to have an alternative for that.

git? it's a bit heavy handed to ask your spouse and kids to clone into the family recipes, but it's basically what you're looking for.

there are git-based markdown cms's like forestry or pug that provide a framework to do this.

Definitely not as fancy as Notion, but you can point Obsidian at a network drive of markdown files.

Obsidian seems the closest so far. I have a network drive already so maybe this would be easiest.

Successful documentation is not based on tools but company culture.

If your company is a culture of reviewing and updating documentation it will have good documentation, if it doesn’t, it won’t.

One add-on to Notion I can recommend: Engine.so (https://engine.so) (full disclosure I run this).

But many of the drawbacks I've seen mentioned in this thread are solved by my addon tool. It adds full-text searching to Notion pages, discoverability, and the ability to use Notion docs externally as-well as internally.

I agree, it won't solve all problems for all teams but it's an option if you haven't heard of it.

Unrelated to the article but relevant to the company's website, all of their 'browse rentals' pages end up in what appears to be a 404 page.

For those using Notion as an info hub - last year I added a feature to FastComments which allows you to add live comment threads to Notion docs, which I hope some find useful!

https://blog.fastcomments.com/(10-05-2021)-adding-commenting...

I’ve been using microsoft onenote forever. I guess it basically meets all my needs modulo some annoying quirks when copying or pasting text, and there are occasional sync conflict errors. Are these alternatives like notion and obsidian worth checking out? How about org-mode in emacs? How do they all handle synchronization?

Massive red flags:

> I've spent over 500 hours creating an entire Notion org, including all wikis, databases, and templates, for you to copy.

This guy spent quarter of a working year building a second version of his fancy wiki, rather than work on his startup.

> We were one week away from onboarding our first employees, and we had started creating onboarding docs in Google Docs when it started to seem messy.

It doesn't sound like they've ever really used anything else.

This article (and knowledge/data stores in general) has all the hallmarks of the tribalistic fad that plagues note taking. In particular there is no hard data, no specific problem exploration, no notion of tradeoffs. Its all fanbasing and salesmanship of their wonderful concepts.

I've never worked at a truly huge company like many of you have, my biggest was around the 150 people mark. I've rarely been without access to information that wasnt being politically kept from me, and maintaining the relevance of documented data has been a significant challenge everywhere. Notion doesn't solve the first, and it doesn't seem to make maintaining easier either (in fact all the cross linking seems to make it harder). I expect it'll perform about the same as the other systems - that is to say the benefit comes from the disciplined use over time, without this they are all messes in a year.

Regardless of my dismissiveness, my current company has just embraced notion. When the co-founders are on the hype train there is no going back, so I'm hoping to harness the momentum for some general improvements in comms skills across the team.

This. And "Database for Glossary" makes me smile. A single page would be enough.

Obsidian.md

Reflect.app is better IMO, but paid

Daylight robbery if you ask me with so many alternatives...

How in the world is trying to monetize an application you're building daylight robbery just because free alternatives exist?

Its not just because, but if you offer a limited functionality that you need to pay $1000 dollar for.

Its like offering to sell a car with engine, but without the wheels.

I can start using Obsidian today.

Reflect's page says "Add me to the waiting-list". Yeaah, I'm not gonna do that. I need a note tracker today, not when you decide to get to it.

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