Switching the product and marketing sites would take a lot of work for unclear/low benefit since at this point we’ve learned the .so lessons and have a good reputation.
Given the choice of projects like “scale infra so we stay online and fast-ish”, “improve search”, or “notion dot com”, Notion dot com ends up below the cut line.
Maybe it's a generational thing. Do younger internet users not pause at the domain name if it looks sus at all? Then again, how many users are actually using domain names to get to websites? With everyone obfuscating the basic link with some cute button, or shortening within the address bar, or any other modern things to hide the grotesque string of text, do people even see the actual links in the day to day adventures on the web?
Maybe this is an everyone needs to get off my lawn moment, and I should just go find a cocktail?
Why not just do the reverse, and have .so redirect to .com (since .so predated you owning .com)
Also ccTLD pose the risk of being "retired".
Why take the risk when .com will never be retired.
They'd probably prefer to focus on continuing to do what makes them money.
When it's truly time to make a change, they'll have all of the resources in the world to ensure it goes as smoothly as is possible.
There's an ocean of effort in the word "just" to do this without it being hugely disruptive to our users. If was "just" so easy, we would have done it! If I went into Cloudflare and fiddled a quick 302 redirect:
- Every Notion user in the world gets logged out, since their cookie is HTTP-only for origin `notion.so`
- Nobody using OAuth login like Google can log in on notion.com since we didn't add the new origin to various allow lists. Cross-origin embeds that allow-listed us break too.
- All our mobile and desktop app users apps will behave in some unpredictable way. Maybe they follow the redirect, maybe they treat any notion.com URL as an external web page and open it in the user's default browser or SFSafariViewController. App store ratings plunge from 4.5 stars to 1 star.
- Customers who added URL-based rules have their rules broken. Maybe this means our app doesn't load for a bunch of large enterprises with stringent security/firewall policies.
It would be the worst incident in Notion's history, it would cost us tens of millions of dollars of lost revenue, and our reputation might never recover.
I think I could fix all those issues and start testing in 1-2 months if it's all I worked on. But, right now I'm working on making Notion databases (the product feature [1]) faster. If I asked our customers to choose between .com and a faster Notion, I think 90% will choose faster Notion. If I think about our product roadmap, 0% of it depends on .com.
[1]: https://www.notion.so/help/intro-to-databases
> Also ccTLD pose the risk of being "retired".
> Why take the risk when .com will never be retired.
Well, ccTLD retirement has a 5-year notice period, so if you gave me and SoNIC the notice that .so is retiring today, I still don't think I'd change Notion's roadmap for the next year at least, maybe we'd start working on it in 2025.
That said, I don't know everything going on at the company, and it'd be comparably easy to migrate just the "marketing" routes of our site like https://notion.so/product. Someone might already be working on it!
My point was, you clearly see value having .com otherwise - why go through the effort to acquire it … to then effectively not use it.
The reasons above sound far, but it also sounds like tech debt that is being punted and will only get harder to fix everyday you delay not addressing it.