When I initially signed up for Notion, I did so thinking the API was already usable. It was used as a selling point for their premium service even though it wasn't implemented. This was a year and a half ago or so.
I felt pretty burned by it and killed my subscription. Hopefully this turns out well for the people who've been waiting for it, but that experience left a terrible taste in my mouth.
For those like myself ignorant about the company, Notion appears to be a project management tool with integrated wiki and docs support. With at least a claimed strong user focus.
Yup, that’s how they present it, though in reality it’s pretty clunky as a project management tool, and you’d almost always be better off using a purpose-built solution.
Notion makes a decent tool for a personal/organizational wiki but it’s too slow/unresponsive/janky to use for many other purposes IMO.
I’ve been using it for a couple years and I used to hold out hope that the performance could be optimized, but at this point I think it must be some fundamental issue with their tech stack (or some other organizational issue). It just feels bad to use. The pages take forever to load, the search is slow, and the actual page editing feels sluggish.
It’s a shame because otherwise I really like the core ideas of how Notion works. If someone released a tool that was “Notion but fast”, I’d switch in an instant.
Your comments reflect my almost two-year experience with the paid version of Notion.
I found it very difficult to figure out how to use the tools beyond very narrow use-cases they provided in examples.
And I found the docs were almost useless in explaining the overarching design. As a result, despite a lot of time spent, I kept bumping into unexpected limitations or design corners with no way out other than to scrap the document type I was trying to construct.
I went back to Trello for project management, Todoist for to-do's, and my Dropbox-backed markdown files for notes.
It's a shame because with more attention to the user experience and better docs, I think they'd have a killer product.
I had a similar experience. The slowness of Notion to me. I now use Obsidian which has tons of nice shortcuts and is snappy, even as it's what I believe is an Electron app.
I just recently deep-dived into using Notion for our boutique management consulting firm.
It has been great so far as a lightweight CRM, and a collaborative meeting note—taking tool with backlinks into CRM. Also documenting our internal processes.
When it first launched we talked to the guy who made it (pretty sure it started as a side project) and IIRC it was backed by a relational database with every block being a row and a lot of joins that make up a page. Hopefully they've optimised it since then, but if that's still the architecture it's going to be hard to get performant.
I set up Notion as an intranet for my wife's company and it has been enormously useful for posting company documents, policies, handbooks, announcements, etc. Employees are invited as "guests" at no additional charge.
We also use a Notion database with various views for tracking customers, sales pipeline, rewards, and a lot more.
When we bring on a new customer, we quickly create (from a template) a personalized welcome page for them with an embedded copy of their service agreement and a few other things. Notion can generate a public link so we send this right away and it makes a nice impression.
Performance isn't great but it is so useful for us that I don't mind. I do hope they provide an offline version soon as that is my biggest wish right for it right now.
* I'm not affiliated with the company, just a pleased customer.
The opposite is true, its a WYSIWYG wiki which you can abuse for project management. The project management capabilities are similar to Github Project boards which means that it is very basic.
It’s weird that that’s (still) how they market Notion. I use it as sort of a combination of google docs and google sheets — I can write long-form documents and include attachments, link to other pages, etc, and also create databases (and every row is its own page).
You’d have to shoehorn project management into their database paradigm, which definitely seems subpar compared to a purpose-built task/project manager. But the “personal wiki” aspect of it is fantastic.
I didn't quite have the impression you had, but I did sign up for a "early access beta", that mostly resulted in me receiving a bunch of spam from the company telling me how almost ready the api was.
Happy the thing is released finally, it is a big improvement on Google docs.
Isn't that the whole point of Agile MVP development? Sell something that doesn't exist and hope someone buys it? Personally, I don't expect much from it, after working with Airtable's API and hating every second of it.
Theres a lot of reasons why it makes sense to sell something before building it. You want to be up front about this fact but getting commitments to buy something is a good idea before actually spending money and time to build it.
There's some validity to the criticism, but that's more the intersection of short-cycle methods and American "hustle" culture than anything to do with an MVP approach itself. People with more integrity can take an MVP-centered approach and just be honest with customers about where they are.
Indeed, I think that honesty works better; underpromising and overdelivering is a great way to build trust among your initial customer base. Trust that you need to carry people through the inevitable bumps and anticipations of an early-adopter experience.
I felt pretty burned by it and killed my subscription. Hopefully this turns out well for the people who've been waiting for it, but that experience left a terrible taste in my mouth.