Hi Nikhil, Love this as well as your Consumer and Enterprise write-up! As an APM at Salesforce (specifically shipping products for Quip) everything you’ve mentioned in both are top of mind. Something I didn’t see you address here (and I’d love to hear your take on) is the role of deep enterprise entrenchment in product lines like G Suite & Office that are fueled by personal business relationships and sluggish change management! We’re seeing this in the case of Slack which has a superior product but hasn’t been able to capture the up-market as well as MSFT (Teams). Do you think Notion will be able to capture the billions of G Suite & Office users that you dub as up-for-grabs (if so, what strategies do you recommend it applies)? Or is/should Notion not try after this market and specialize in personal consumer & SMB enterprise segments? Love what you’re doing & stoked to read more of your stuff :)
As I shared Hiten's post there, Evernote faded away because of poor timing of certain things. However I do not see that happens to Notion any soon because it absorbs such a variety of userbase - structured and unstructured, collaborative teams and individuals, and they have a great community on their Slack workspace. Roam sounds super interesting but more likely for a small audience who prefer to keep things more structured.
Hey Nikhil! My name is Yash, and I am a medical student in Houston. I have followed your journey for the past 3+ year - ever since I caught the VC/startup bug. As someone who has looked up to you and the work you are doing, I loved getting a glimpse of a product that you use everyday and seeing how you use it. I also really enjoyed witnessing how you think about this product, its competitors, and the industry at large. Looking forward to learning more from you through this writing and hope to connect soon. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the write up Nikhil. We have not met in person, but I know of you from Jess at Sequoia. My name is Deepti and I work on a product Azure Sphere from Microsoft Research.
I do want to admit that I am sharing this opinion of mine coming from a Non-VC background. I found your article knowledgeable in the sense, I liked how it introduced me to a new product, touched on the features and UI experience of it. I was also wanting to grab a glimpse on how notion is serving its customers in terms of data privacy, storage, user authentication, but could not find this info.
You are very right that companies like Microsoft might have left some features on the table, but I must admit their story for security is trusting/ strong and they are picking up the market as these features are being made available with products like Azure DevOps.
I could also relate that may be as a VC, the talks about security and privacy, might come later in the game as user retention/ acquisition are 2 big things important for the early stages of a startup and hence these discussion tend to take a back seat. May be?
I think users realize the importance of security/ privacy when the data breaches happen. I have friends/ colleagues who are way more particular about security because they happened to be a part of one of the breaches. But we are seeing an increased awareness about security/ privacy among users.
Having said that, I enjoyed reading your post and I look forward to reading more.
Great write up Nikhil! I absolutely love using Notion as well and use it for pretty much everything at this point. After using it with our team, it's deeply integrated into each of our personal lives as well.
The shift in the industry was expected. Google and Microsoft were leaving many things on the table in terms of features. It appears that Notion and Roam hit different work styles. I am seeing that Notion is more a company or personal "dashboard" where databases are connected and you are linking daily journals with your quarter plan that then connect with your goals of the year. Notion appears to allow more "Design Systems". Definitely check out Marie Poulin's Notion work and guidance. https://mariepoulin.com/notion-mastery/
I am a big Notion user, using the "The Para Method" by Tiago Forte [https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/] for my note-taking. Definitely check it out if you are using your note tool daily across the different areas of your life.
Excellent start, NBT! Now I need to go check out Roam immediately...
Hi Nikhil, Love this as well as your Consumer and Enterprise write-up! As an APM at Salesforce (specifically shipping products for Quip) everything you’ve mentioned in both are top of mind. Something I didn’t see you address here (and I’d love to hear your take on) is the role of deep enterprise entrenchment in product lines like G Suite & Office that are fueled by personal business relationships and sluggish change management! We’re seeing this in the case of Slack which has a superior product but hasn’t been able to capture the up-market as well as MSFT (Teams). Do you think Notion will be able to capture the billions of G Suite & Office users that you dub as up-for-grabs (if so, what strategies do you recommend it applies)? Or is/should Notion not try after this market and specialize in personal consumer & SMB enterprise segments? Love what you’re doing & stoked to read more of your stuff :)
I saw it coming when I saw your LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6663799488592908288/
As I shared Hiten's post there, Evernote faded away because of poor timing of certain things. However I do not see that happens to Notion any soon because it absorbs such a variety of userbase - structured and unstructured, collaborative teams and individuals, and they have a great community on their Slack workspace. Roam sounds super interesting but more likely for a small audience who prefer to keep things more structured.
Hey Nikhil! My name is Yash, and I am a medical student in Houston. I have followed your journey for the past 3+ year - ever since I caught the VC/startup bug. As someone who has looked up to you and the work you are doing, I loved getting a glimpse of a product that you use everyday and seeing how you use it. I also really enjoyed witnessing how you think about this product, its competitors, and the industry at large. Looking forward to learning more from you through this writing and hope to connect soon. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the write up Nikhil. We have not met in person, but I know of you from Jess at Sequoia. My name is Deepti and I work on a product Azure Sphere from Microsoft Research.
I do want to admit that I am sharing this opinion of mine coming from a Non-VC background. I found your article knowledgeable in the sense, I liked how it introduced me to a new product, touched on the features and UI experience of it. I was also wanting to grab a glimpse on how notion is serving its customers in terms of data privacy, storage, user authentication, but could not find this info.
You are very right that companies like Microsoft might have left some features on the table, but I must admit their story for security is trusting/ strong and they are picking up the market as these features are being made available with products like Azure DevOps.
I could also relate that may be as a VC, the talks about security and privacy, might come later in the game as user retention/ acquisition are 2 big things important for the early stages of a startup and hence these discussion tend to take a back seat. May be?
I think users realize the importance of security/ privacy when the data breaches happen. I have friends/ colleagues who are way more particular about security because they happened to be a part of one of the breaches. But we are seeing an increased awareness about security/ privacy among users.
Having said that, I enjoyed reading your post and I look forward to reading more.
Great write up Nikhil! I absolutely love using Notion as well and use it for pretty much everything at this point. After using it with our team, it's deeply integrated into each of our personal lives as well.
Awesome write-up.
The shift in the industry was expected. Google and Microsoft were leaving many things on the table in terms of features. It appears that Notion and Roam hit different work styles. I am seeing that Notion is more a company or personal "dashboard" where databases are connected and you are linking daily journals with your quarter plan that then connect with your goals of the year. Notion appears to allow more "Design Systems". Definitely check out Marie Poulin's Notion work and guidance. https://mariepoulin.com/notion-mastery/
I am a big Notion user, using the "The Para Method" by Tiago Forte [https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/] for my note-taking. Definitely check it out if you are using your note tool daily across the different areas of your life.
Nice writeup. So which have you ended up sticking with? I am getting going on Roam, and enjoying it a lot so far