Original link: https://maxoxo.me/notion/
In 2018, Notion released version 2.0 on Product Hunt, and immediately received more than 6,000 Vote 1s . Today, the number is 9,000+. In the words of Notion founder Ivan Zhao:
Notion 2.0 is really the 1.0 for us.
Notion 2.0 truly implements Notion’s All-in-one workspace. I use Notion mainly because the team is using it. Notion is not suitable for my personal notes. I prefer an offline note – taking system2. Notion as an All-in-one product written by a team can be said to be unbeatable. Before that, our team used Confluence, Google docs and some open source Wiki systems for document management, but we finally chose Notion, even if we press The per capita charge is really expensive, but it works really well.
Product form
There are countless note-taking products. I use Microsoft OneNote, Bear, Evernote, etc. In essence, Notion is also a note-taking tool. From the point of view of note-taking tools, the biggest difference between Notion is that it is based on cloud services (SaaS software), which is different from other note-taking products. , your notebook is still in your local area, and you can access your notes even if there is no network. Notion is completely based on the cloud. Basically, you can’t access your notes without a network. This is the reason why I don’t use Notion, but in reality, it is rare to have no network, especially with the development of mobile Internet. , Modern people are connected to the Internet almost all the time.
In terms of ability, Notion is completely different from these predecessors. The traditional note-taking software is based on content (text or pictures), while Notion is based on Block. This Block can be text, pictures, DataBase, Board, and blocks can be Interconnected and transformed, this flexibility allows Notion to move beyond note-taking software to a software for flexibly organizing content. It is this flexibility that makes Notion nearly omnipotent, attracting a large number of loyal users.
growth pattern
Every update of Notion will be released on Product Hunt, and each release has attracted a lot of attention for Notion. Notion has also tried to make some content by itself: blogs, videos to attract users, but in the end they found that there were actually some fans. I have formed a variety of communities in which to exchange and share experiences with each other. Among them, Ben Lang , as the administrator of a Notion forum with a large number of fans, finally joined Notion to be responsible for community operations. These communities include Reddit, Facebook Group, etc. Today, Notion’s Reddit members have exceeded 200,000, and the community has finally become Notion’s largest. customer acquisition channels.
With the customer acquisition channel, it is also necessary to convert these traffic enough. The way to convert is to allow users to quickly feel the value of the product as much as possible. Notion still relies on KOLs in the community, they are usually keen to write various Notion tutorials, you can also find a lot of videos on YouTube sharing how to use Notion, and even some paid tutorials, and some people have used it. for a living. These KOLs are very similar to Notion’s Partners. Notion makes profits by providing excellent products so that these KOLs can share their opinions, but traditional partners usually need to give them a share. For example, Microsoft Office365 can get 50K per month through Partners. SMB Client 3 . But Notion has no substantial business relationship with KOLs. Notion does not need to give KOLs a share. On the contrary, KOLs need to make customers buy his courses through their own efforts, or attract more traffic on YouTube. In addition to courses, KOLs will also release some Notion templates. These templates can also help newcomers to quickly understand what Notion can do and get started with products quickly. Among them, the famous Newsletter OS template has generated $68K for creators. income. Notion has also launched a Template section on its official website, which is dedicated to placing these Templates. Putting these on Product Hunt, you can see product releases related to Notion almost every day, most of which are various templates, especially in 2020 due to the epidemic, there is a lot of market demand for remote office, Notion Related products also rose exponentially by 4 .
Most of Notion’s revenue depends on corporate customers. How to get more corporate customers to buy Notion is also a problem. Notion’s method still relies on the community. As I mentioned earlier, we already have a lot of Notion customers within our company, and they will also share their experience, so Notion recruited this group of people to become Notion Champions , let these people promote Notion within the company, and invite more of people join Notion as enterprise customers. That’s why Notion announced that the personal version is free forever. In fact, it is also to lower the threshold and allow more people to use Notion. Ultimately, it is expected that these people can become Notion supporters, both within the company and for ordinary users. Promote Notion.
business model
Notion’s charging model can be said to be a very standard SaaS. It charges a basic subscription fee. For the team version and enterprise version, it is charged according to the head. This part is also the largest proportion of Notion’s revenue.
View
Today’s Notion seems to be an enterprise-oriented tool, but it is still an easy-to-use note-taking tool. Ordinary users such as personal collaboration and some auditing functions in the enterprise version cannot use it. Enterprise features, Notion remains user friendly.
As an All-in-one product, people often say that Notion can replace a large number of tools such as JIRA and Airtable. As I said when discussing Beamer , large and comprehensive products are more suitable for small and medium-sized companies, while large customers need more A tool to go deep into a field. In the field of note taking, Notion is very in-depth, which is why it can attract large customers, and in terms of breadth, if it is lightweight, Notion can indeed replace JIRA, which is also what small and medium-sized companies need. One product solves all question. However, for large customers, Notion is impossible to replace JIRA. Today’s JIRA seems to be a very bloated product, but it is indeed very powerful. For various customizations of the process, Notion will not be able to catch up for a while. It won’t catch up, and it’s similar to replacing Airtable and other products.
In my daily use, for some official documents or those that need to be communicated with the outside world, people still tend to use Google Docs or Microsoft Office, which can be modified offline. If some content is inconvenient to put on the Internet, it can be sent directly by email. For those involved, Notion will most likely not be involved in these scenarios. It may be too niche for them, and it is difficult to shake the status of the two big brothers, Microsoft and Google.
Microsoft announced the Microsoft Loop at the end of last year. It can be seen that Microsoft is also interested in the so-called All-in-one workspace. After all, Microsoft has created so many workspaces, and it is logical to integrate them through a tool. We also Having seen how Microsoft Team has seized the market of Slack, Microsoft may become a big threat to Notion in the future with its many years of experience in dealing with large customers.
- https://www.producthunt.com/products/notion ↩︎
- I’m using the OrgMode and OrgRoam plugins to take notes. ↩︎
- The Most Successful SMB SaaS Acquisition Channel Ever Built ↩︎
- How Notion fostered an avid community on Product Hunt ↩︎
This article is reprinted from: https://maxoxo.me/notion/
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