I love trying new products. I enjoy the process of trying new products like a kid opening a birthday present. Perhaps it’s the product manager in me that gets a kick out of figuring out how do they do onboarding? what features are available? How does the design make me feel?
But open ProductHunt once a day and it gets overwhelming pretty quickly. On one hand – kudos to the millions of creators and developers inventing new stuff every day. It’s so inspiring. On the other hand, it’s really hard for a product to stand out in the crowd. Every now and then though, one does.
Notion Labs (not to be confused with Notion the venture capital fund), is one of those products. It stands out in its simplicity, and to be honest, perhaps I’m a bit late to the party here, but I thought I’d share my two cents on the product.
Notion started in 2012 as Canopy Technologies. It was started by Ivan Zhao, and is headquartered in San Francisco. In its own words, Notion was built to bring together many of the tools/functionality we use at work to one place, reducing the number of tabs/separate tools needed to get work done.
It describes itself as an ‘all in one workspace’, but it’s not only ‘work’ in the way of business. You may have heard people talk about ‘moving their lives’ to Notion. For many, Notion has become a personal productivity dashboard.
At the core of the product is content creation. But unlike Medium or WordPress, Notion feels more like a scratchpad, a way to document things and organise information, without the formality of a blog post or final document. It feels like the place you’d share a draft to get feedback before publishing.
Notion is first and foremost a writing tool. It works as simply as any word processor, only you can add many different types of content to a page, and move it around and modify it in new ways.
Writing and Editing guide, Notion
To deliver on its vision of ‘all in one workspace’, the product itself is an amalgamation of several collaborative tools you may have used personally or at work:
- Wiki (You may have used Atlassian’s Confluence, we all know them, but not many of us maintain a personal wiki)
- Cloud storage (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox…)
- Cloud docs (Google docs, Microsoft 365, Evernote…)
- Database (think Google Spreadsheets or Airtable)
- Blogging/journaling/Website editor (Feels less formal than WordPress or Medium, more like a scratch pad or a public Evernote. A bit like Wix with its templates)
- To do list/Task list/ List making (think Trello, Todoist or Monday.com)
The template library is the best way to get started. A quick look at what’s available shows they are targeting enterprise users (design, product, sales, human resources, engineering…) but the Personal and Education template libraries are also fairly developed. Much like Google Docs, Notion works best online, but there’s some offline support.
I’m going to continue playing around with Notion. Here are my early impressions:
What I liked:
- Clean product with powerful functionality
- Free for personal use, additional pro features available for paying customers (but free for students which is a clever way of growing usage and eventually they’ll graduate)
- You got to love the ‘testimonials’ page, which embeds tweets from fans of the product. It’s clear that power users of Notion love the tool.
Could use more love:
- Not very intuitive to get started (but good help section and template list)
- Potential concerns about privacy (especially for cloud document management and sensitive information). How secure is it? who can see my info, etc.
- An open question remains: can a ‘one shop stop’ really replace the dedicated products it brings together?
According to Pitchbook, Notion Labs raised $18.7 million in seed funding in July 2019. That is the first documented round for the company. The riynd was led by First Round Capital, joined by several other star investors including Josh Kopelman, Shana Fisher, Naval Ravikant, Aydin Senkut, Elad Gil and Mike Vernal. Pitchbook shows that Notion has a post money valuation of $800M, making Notion a fast unicorn from the time of funding. First Round was
It feels to me like Notion is still a bit under the radar, but I have a feeling you’ll be hearing much more about it. For a deeper dive on Notion, check out their three part documentary video:
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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