[HN Gopher] Notion Acquires Automate.io
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Notion Acquires Automate.io
Author : adithyasrin
Score : 111 points
Date : 2021-09-08 13:07 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.notion.so)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.notion.so)
| sharmin123 wrote:
| https://www.hackerslist.co/how-to-hack-someones-phone-6-ways...
| arcosdev wrote:
| Please someone help me get Notion. It's slow, it's missing big
| features like offline mode and localization. What is the
| attraction to this app? I've tired it 3 times now and I just
| don't get it.
| hbosch wrote:
| For me, it's simply better than Confluence. I much prefer
| creating my documentation in Notion.
|
| Also, it's just generally a good note taking app IMO.
| soultrees wrote:
| Marketing. However, there is value in it but you're mainly
| seeing the power of marketing at play here.
| Spivak wrote:
| I'm sure they have good marketing but that's far away from
| why I use it. At this point my whole life is in Notion. It's
| by far my endgame note taking app. The value is that it's so
| dynamic and infinitely nested and can absorb any messy
| unstructured thoughts or notes I have without having to stop
| and think about where it should go.
|
| Like say I make myself a todo list using a List database.
| Need to set a reminder for myself about some part of it? Just
| add it in the list item with @. Have some documents or code
| output that you want to remember? Just throw it in there!
| Crap, have a billion tabs open from researching and have to
| stop for the day? Just create a list inside the page and
| throw all the links in there. Need to take notes on some of
| those links because the SO answer wasn't quite right, just
| add it right _that_ list item. All the context for the card
| is right there in the card. It 's a project management board
| that actually bings value to me as a dev. It's not the thing
| I have to use to track time, it's a thing I want to use
| because it's where I can store all my thoughts instead of
| having to have two systems and keep them in sync which is
| always a chore.
| submeta wrote:
| I was in the same boat, until I started watching YouTube stars
| demonstrate how to use it as
|
| - a Kanban Board (abandoned Trello)
|
| - a Confluence replacement
|
| Now I love it for task- and project management.
|
| I use it in combo with Roam Research. Roam for writing, Notion
| for task- and project management.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| For me, it's the mix of markdown documents and Airtable-like
| databases. It's much more productive than the various Excel-
| based "trackers" and Word documents in multiple folders that my
| team uses at work. Being able to automatically link relevant
| procedures and documents to specific work items, keep track of
| the status of those items, and having an all encompassing,
| interlinked "homepage" of all the relevant information related
| to my job keeps my cognitive load minimal.
|
| I've used Obsidian and Dendron for a lot of this previously,
| but the real killer feature of Notion, IMO, is the databases.
| I'd kill for a local/offline-first alternative that also has
| mobile support, but I have yet to find anything as easy (other
| than Craft, but it's Apple only and the web version is still in
| beta).
| davidjgraph wrote:
| Seems like overkill to get the integrations into a single
| product.
|
| Surely, buy 25% shares and seat on the board. Make a contract
| that Notion integrations are advertised first and everything else
| is encouraged to work with it.
|
| That way automate still has a larger target market and provides a
| channel into Notion sales.
|
| This kills automate's growth. I wonder what the price tag was.
| johnx123-up wrote:
| IMHO, in terms of integrations, Restya Core seems to have done
| it correctly. (disclosure: I was on their private beta)
| pieno wrote:
| Buying only 25% sounds good from Notion's perspective but is
| absolutely the worst possible deal for Automate's shareholders.
| The value of the remaining 75% Automate shares would tank after
| that deal because Notion basically owns you with their 25%
| shares, board seat and preferred contract.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| From Automate.io's announcement [0], rather than Notion's, they
| will continue to operate independently. It doesn't appear that
| it's being assimilated to be a Notion-oriented product, but
| rather a closer relationship between the two while diversifying
| Notion's business.
|
| I guess time will tell, but I imagine it's safer financially
| for Notion to let Automate continue operating as it has been
| while working more closely to bring first-class integrations
| into Notion and improving Notion's API.
|
| 0: https://automate.io/blog/notion-acquires-automateio/
| dgudkov wrote:
| Any ideas about possible deal size?
| happytiger wrote:
| Haven't been able to find it either.
| ruchin_k wrote:
| As an Indian I'm super excited that Notion's first overseas
| engineering office would be located in Hyderabad, India as a
| consequence of this acquisition!
| avrionov wrote:
| They already have offices in Dublin and Tokyo. Aren't these
| overseas offices from American point of view?
| polote wrote:
| I really can't understand where Notion is going. They come from
| b2c, made b2c free pivoted to b2b smb and started saying more and
| more that they are a b2b enterprise company (even though their
| vision is not really compatible with that). And now they buy a
| company which is clearly in the b2b smb/b2c space. Confused
| spoonjim wrote:
| Ultimately there is very little money in B2C software sales
| compared to B2B. Every company that finds success in B2C will
| try to go B2B.
| swayson wrote:
| No idea, been happy with joplin app to be honest for personal
| note making. Simple enough and captures most use-cases cases.
| Just not as elegant as notion, but optionality is great
| foenix wrote:
| Seconded with respect to Joplin. It's the only solution I've
| found which lets me sync iPad notes & photos & videos to my
| linux boxes & android. Perfect for dumping screenshots and
| adding context to them and for copying pages down for later
| reading / annotation. Oh and it's all E2E encrypted through
| dropbox (I want to get it on a personal cloud soon too, but
| alas the chefs never cook themselves gourmet food). The only
| "missing feature" is the lack of an in-built ability to
| "share" but as a personal journal I think it's perfect.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Been using Notion for over 2 years now, and unfortunately I must
| say I am not going to be using them moving forward. You end up
| with a soup of documents each with their own structure, search is
| terrible, creating is easy sure - but finding the right content
| sucks.
|
| I'm not sure what the solution is, but after putting Notion
| through its paces I know this isn't it.
| sirspacey wrote:
| Checkout Coda.io
| sergiotapia wrote:
| If you've used both, could you compare them? Why did you like
| Coda better than Notion?
| Kappa90 wrote:
| Checkout Saga [0], we've been building this for over a year
| exactly to fix the "I can't find anything" problem. Any
| feedback appreciated!
|
| [0] https://saga.so
| FractalHQ wrote:
| Your home page overflows on my iPhone11 plus. Missing some
| max-width: 100vw's
| z97zz wrote:
| Good move by notion
| 88913527 wrote:
| Having a team in a different timezone from the main cluster of
| office timezones can be a win for ops-related activities, but
| I've found as an employee it risks work-life balance because
| people want real-time help (example: UTC+8 workers asking
| questions to UTC-8 workers). I've explored switching to a smaller
| company like Notion, but it seems offices everywhere is becoming
| the norm, so it's difficult to find roles that don't require
| cross-timezone collaboration.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| Perhaps a remote-based company, like Gitlab, would be
| preferable for you? You get the global distribution while, I
| imagine, also having the respect to work hours since the
| company started with that distributed structure.
|
| I can see remote-based companies becoming more of the norm,
| especially post-pandemic, rather than multiple-location
| startups/corporations.
| brianbreslin wrote:
| Makes sense strategically. I wonder if Zapier will acquire a
| company like Notion (maybe Coda?) and we'll start seeing bundling
| occur.
| mbesto wrote:
| How so? What would be the point of bundling?
| infofarmer wrote:
| Google Sheets seems to be by far the #1 endpoint on Zapier.
|
| Lean automation is asking to grow a little fat at the middle
| so that it's easier to view and control data flows.
| junon wrote:
| I must have read that title five times and it wasn't until I
| looked at the comments that I realized it wasn't Norton
| (Antivirus).
| sheikheddy wrote:
| I have moved from Notion to Obsidian.
| shampto3 wrote:
| I did the same for my personal wiki; however, I don't think
| Obsidian is currently set up to handle the type of group
| wiki/task management that Notion is often used for.
|
| I love Obsidian, and it's exactly what I was looking for.
| Notion has a slightly different usage for people, so it's not
| always an easy switch.
| eklbt wrote:
| Recently did the same. I wish Obsidian had some of the nicer
| looking UI elements (such as editing a table without switching
| to markdown). I plan to stick with Obsidian for now, but am
| looking for something else since Obsidian is too limited(but
| the devs are great)
| omarhaneef wrote:
| Is automate the same as IFTTT and Zapier? There are many such
| firms (I think). Is there a benefit to buying a particular one? I
| am sure they are hard to build, but could Notion just build one?
|
| Any insight into why this particular company?
| frijole wrote:
| I used IFTTT religiously a couple years back and I tried
| Automate.io for Notion and Google Sheets about a month ago, and
| I've got to say that Automate.io has a much more intuitive
| design for creating the automations.
| falnatsheh wrote:
| You could always tell when a company switch their priority from
| B2C to B2B. Notion felt different when it was first released but
| in the last few years new competitors were able to replicate what
| they've done and make it better and faster (e.g. Craft) while
| notion focused their energy on teams/enterprise features.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| If you're looking for a B2C productivity app, checkout
| Homechart: https://about.homechart.app.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Speaking from personal experience, people don't pay* for
| software, especially productivity software, while businesses
| do.
|
| *yes, some people do pay of course, but the dichotomy between
| B2C and B2B revenue is vast
| clpm4j wrote:
| When a productivity app raises $50m at a >$2b valuation, they
| have to focus on very large teams / enterprise.
| [deleted]
| Andys wrote:
| I only use notion as a private shared wiki. Do you know of any
| better apps out there for this?
| thebooktocome wrote:
| Obsidian.
| maneesh wrote:
| Vimwiki integrated with task warrior for terminal goodness
| buryat wrote:
| b2b is where the money is so no wonder
| avrionov wrote:
| Crunchbase shows only $150k investment in automate.io [1].
|
| If this is true, it is a great success for the Automate founders.
|
| [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/automate-
| io/company_...
| ctvo wrote:
| How much were they acquired for that we know this was great
| success?
| avrionov wrote:
| They've built a profitable company with 40 employees with
| almost no outside investment.
| submeta wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I switched from Notion to Obsidian, and couldn't be happier
| personally.
| lancesells wrote:
| I switched from the Electron app to using Notion through the
| browser and things are much faster for me.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| 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.
| FractalHQ wrote:
| I loved Notion and used it constantly. Then it became really
| really slow, and I realized I needed it to work offline while
| traveling.
|
| Using Apple notes until I find a good alternative.
| [deleted]
| buryat wrote:
| without seeing numbers you don't know whether it's good or not
| for them, it's possible that they get plenty of growth through
| these channels
| submeta wrote:
| At what cost? If growth means the platform cannot handle the
| traffic properly, you'll loose users.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Agreed, it's definitely how they lost us.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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.
| polote wrote:
| 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
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| I didn't realize how much Stockholm Syndrome I had with
| Confluence until we switched to using Notion for our game design
| documents. It's fast and responsive, which somehow in 2021
| Atlassian still hasn't figured out how to replicate with any of
| their products.
| sanedigital wrote:
| After fighting the move to Jira/Confluence for years, my
| company finally migrated away from Notion & Clubhouse. I
| couldn't be happier. Notion was great when we were <5 people,
| but it feels like a toy compared to Confluence.
| Spivak wrote:
| What am I missing out on? I get Confluence has lots of
| enterprisey features for sysadmins but as an author it has
| always been a terrible experience, especially for code.
| There's so much friction to actually creating documentation
| that nobody actually does it or if they do never bother to
| update it.
| tomComb wrote:
| I find it brutally slow. At first I was a big fan but over time
| I've mostly stopped using it because I just couldn't stand how
| slow it is (using it in browser on a laptop).
|
| I hang on in the hopes they will address the problem.
| polote wrote:
| Confluence is too often used in use cases it was not design
| for. That includes being used by companies with less 50 people.
| This probably contributes to its criticisms. But Confluence
| will almost always beat Notion when the company reach more than
| 150 people.
|
| <100 employess : Notion clear winner
|
| > 150 employees : Confluence clear winner
| zerop wrote:
| How confluence wins when you have more employees? I find it
| pretty bloated and outdated. Same for Jira.
| polote wrote:
| By being better than the competition. And in this specific
| case by having no competitors ( see other comment, they are
| different products)
| cjlm wrote:
| is there a magical tool for the 100 <= employee <= 150 gap?
| polote wrote:
| None that I'm aware of. Thing to understand is that Notion
| and Confluence are vastly different products.
|
| Notion is more for sharing a set of documents that are
| often used. And thus create some hierarchy of content
| without right management or structure. Works well if you
| are business owner or a team, or a small company. Or if you
| want to onboard noob users into documenting their work. And
| Notion is very good at that
|
| Confluence works better to manage a lot of documents, give
| rights, structure content, organize. Confluence is not very
| good at it, but this is a difficult task and competitors
| don't do better
|
| So depending on where you are at, you can pick the one
| which suits you best. They are others less popular tools
| than Confluence and Notion but still are in the two
| categories described above
| tmpz22 wrote:
| > It's fast and responsive
|
| What parts of notion are you claiming are fast and responsive?
|
| In my experience using the web app is very slow, and search is
| monstrously slow. We still use it but slowness is our chief
| complaint for the platform.
| Spivak wrote:
| If all you know is JIRA then Notion feels like a breath of
| fresh air. Like it's not fast, but I never really expected
| blinding speed since Notion pages are so dynamic. But it's
| also not JIRA's click on something then wait a few seconds
| for the UI to catch up on a many thousand dollar laptop.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| > wait a few seconds for the UI to catch up
|
| When loading it absolutely takes 4-6 seconds to complete
| rendering.
|
| If you're talking about intra-page actions like adding a
| complex ui element after load you're right it is better
| then Jira in that regard.
| [deleted]
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| People who have not used a lot of JIRA may not understand
| that there is "slow" and then there is "JIRA slow" when it
| comes to webapps.
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| Yes, this. We've been using JIRA, Confluence, and Bamboo
| and dear god does it drive me nuts how slow things are.
| packetlost wrote:
| Switching pages and search are infuriatingly slow on Notion.
| I still love the rest of it, but my _god_ switch to using a
| local cache for searching or something _please_
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(page generated 2021-09-08 23:02 UTC)