sooooo. this is a classic business strategy sort of thing. you, an AI startup, have to build Notion, faster than Notion can build AI features.
your work is cut out for you. i dont have any suggestions but would love to hear your thoughts on how to outcompete massive incumbents.
As individuals, a lot of us have moved to Obsidian, but we aren't using it collaboratively. Personally I just use it as a simple note taking space; I keep a note for everything I've googled multiple times, and I can pull it up quickly with a simple cmd+p or cmd+shift+f. Notion provides basicallly the opposite experience (open a website, wait for it to load, use their shoddy search, wait for that to load, then maybe find what you're looking for).
As a team, we don't feel like we're missing anything without Notion. We collaborate in markdown using GitLab pull requests and Mattermost chat messages. Some of us write that content in Obsidian and then paste it into the GitLab text input (have you ever tried pasting markdown into Notion? Good luck with that!)
I think some non-devs might prefer Notion, but as a dev, the idea of using some proprietary React frontend as a note taking tool is the opposite of what I want. Obsidian is great.
IMO Notion got distracted with this "database" idea, where everything is a "block," because the reality of it is that the experience of everyday text editing becomes infuriating. Nothing will make me resent a product like unintuitive shortcuts that hijack my return key and closing backticks (also see: ClickUp).
I don't really produce documents with it. That does seem annoying with all of the blocks. I just use Google Docs for that use case. I find Notion to be something like Evernote with Airtable dropped right in. I don't think I would use it to replace Confluence or whatever. But as a way to share my Org-mode oriented brain with other folks, it works nicely.
At the end of the day though that thinking obviously needs to translate into a set of features that sets us apart. When comparing to Notion specifically we already have a few of those that make us stick out and that our customers appreciate such as offline first support, instant search, writing suggestions, and most recently our chat integration.
Btw huge fan of your new podcast! :)
We have a subtle but important difference in focus compared to a product like Notion. We're not aiming to build the best knowledge or workplace management product. We're really focused on building something that helps you author high-quality content (usually, that will be shared publicly).
Secondly, IMO the end-state of many of these products won't look like Microsoft Word/Notion + AI. I think entirely new interfaces and workflows will be discovered over the next 2-3 years that wouldn't have been possible without today's LLMs. The one advantage we have is no priors – we can take big swings on "risky" ideas.
Like Stefan said, I know both of those probably still sound a little hand-wavey but it's part of what keeps us motivated to keep building.