If any Notion manager is reading this: Please stop spending endless dollars on youtube stars and affiliate marketing. Almost every Youtube star that has a channel on productivity (Thomas Frank, Ali Abdaal and a dozen others) makes paid videos about Notion. By doing that you don't get organic growth, and obviously your platform cannot handle all the new users. Whenever I try to link a page to another by hitting `@` sign, I wait literally seconds until I get recommendations. That's why I switched my writing projects to Roam and other alternatives and use Notion only for task- and project management.
This is obviously uninformed and likely bad advice to divest their marketing budget from presumably successful channels.
But the advice to invest more in engineering is spot-on. It’s clear that Notion went through a period of hypergrowth and likely generated a lot of tech debt, but I’m hoping they’ll pay it off over time.
In particular, as the parent comment mentions, anything involving search or autocomplete has horrible performance. There are also some questionable UX decisions that I personally find annoying, like defaulting to opening a page in a modal rather than the current window.
A good starting point for a roadmap would be the Notion subreddit. Most of the time I Google for a specific feature, the top result is a post in that subreddit requesting the feature in 2019.
I think the point about performance seems relevant in my experience.
This is a problem Slite seems to be facing as well. We used both for a while and actually gave their teams a lot of feedback. They were very grateful and communicated well, but moved very slowly and performance decreased quite a bit over time. We ended up focusing most of our planning/note taking/scheduling efforts in Linear instead. Much, much different but it works well enough while remaining extremely speedy and productive. I do miss a lot of what documents had to offer our team. I don't miss fiddling around with slow documents which didn't offer all of what we needed (and might never offer it).
I'm not sure why but most document-based apps like this seem to develop terrible performance. I suspect it's genuinely a difficult problem; I don't think I can 'make Notion in a weekend' by any means, or Slite for that matter. I trust they're doing their best.
I also know these tools suit some teams incredibly well, too.
Honestly I think this is because Notion, Slite are mostly frontend apps at the core. And thus attract talents who are strong in frontend, and the culture is biased toward front end (actually in Notion it is even biased toward UI). And thus they neglect backend due to their culture which leads to performance issues.
I agree that you can't do Notion in a weekend, I have been working on something similar and it took me 8 months full time to have something that starts to look ok.
But that's also why I'm not bearish on having good performance in that kind of app. Notion made very dubious choices regarding their data model which explains why it is slow. Slite did not, but I thought that Slite had better performance though
You are absolutely right that building a performant rich-text-editor for large document is indeed a very difficult problem. Mixing real-time collaboration put further challenges on api design and server processing. It's a whole different level of engineering challenges compare to building a performant CRUD web app...
I am wondering how your team does note taking in Linear - are you guys create one issue for each document? It doesn't support collaborative editing, right?
I should have been clearer. We essentially abandoned note taking and began storing all of our tasks in linear in a more granular way. We also all began participating in our issue management more, as it became sort of like the core of project management for us.
Looking at linear can give you a very clear picture of where the team is right now, what we’ve been doing, and even what we will be doing. Our issues are a place where we discuss implementation decisions, relate issues together in various ways to provide more clarity, link to external resources relevant to issues, and we organize them into projects and cycles as well.
The goal was to convert a process we already used into a more robust and useful process which might make note taking redundant. It has mostly worked.
Since we work in software and we’re a small team that’s intimately familiar with most of our code (or at least what the code does), tooling and practices like version control, idiomatic naming conventions, and supplemental commenting in code can helpfully serve as sufficient documentation for the team right now.
It’s a much different thing from real-time collaborative documents though and I do worry that as we grow, it won’t benefit less technical roles we’ll need to support the team. That’s where something like Notion becomes very compelling to me.
