[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion
Author : noahbragg
Score : 133 points
Date : 2021-10-21 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.potion.so)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.potion.so)
| rbalazsi wrote:
| I've been following Noah's journey on Twitter for some time, and
| I really like his short sneak peek videos on new features. This
| tool is just awesome!
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Don't take this the wrong way, it must be scary to do a Show HN,
| so high5 to you, but...what's the appeal of this over a Carrrd,
| Wix or Squarespace which already has a good UI / drag and drop
| editor and has all the redundancy, SEO compliance and user access
| management in-built?
| noahbragg wrote:
| Hey! Thanks for the question. Potion is really for those that
| love Notion. Notion is really great for certain kinds of sites.
| A wiki, help center or those that just want to have their
| portfolio site through Notion. Pretty powerful to be able to
| edit your notes and site in the same place. Instead of going
| back to your website builder where you are rusty and haven't
| touched for a couple of months.
| jitl wrote:
| (I work at Notion, bias etc)
|
| Think about how content of any kind ends up published:
|
| 1. Ideate - what do you want to make? Brainstorm, keep notes of
| ideas. Make plans.
|
| 2. Draft - put your ideas down in their native media. Write,
| paint, etc.
|
| 3. Revise, collaborate - polish things up, retouch photos, etc.
| Loop in your editor.
|
| 4. Distribute - publish your creation, so others can get it.
| Transform it into a form that's sharable. Focus on reach.
|
| A product like like Squarespace is really only concerned with
| step (4) of the creative process - publishing to the web. So
| you'll need to do the rest of the steps with other tools; maybe
| just pencil and paper or maybe Google Docs, and then bring that
| content into Squarespace for distribution.
|
| But, Notion does (at least a passible job at) all steps in this
| workflow, especially for text content. People use it for notes,
| then share privately to collaborate with comments. Publishing
| is a single switch to make a page public. We're not as fully-
| featured as a Wix; for example Notion doesn't offer analytics
| or advertising placement. But since we're pretty good at all
| the other stuff, it makes sense for people who like Notion to
| find a way to augment the publishing use-case with something
| like Potion.
| IceWreck wrote:
| I mean this is cool and all but this is literally double lock in.
| Notion can't be self hosted and neither can this. Why would you
| depend on either of these for your website.
|
| Not to mention using Notion as a CMS means you're limited in what
| you can do, zero extensibility, etc.
| rchaud wrote:
| I think it's more for existing Notion users that may wish to
| have a tiny microsite about something. Someone already invested
| in Notion isn't going to care about self-hosting.
| pydry wrote:
| A tiny microsite for $120/year tho.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| This. $10 a month isn't unheard of but when commodity VPS
| hosting is $5 a month (if not less) and stuff like
| WordPress.com is $8 a month and Netlify and GitHub Pages
| exist, I don't know how broad this market is. Especially
| when you're talking about the lock-in imposed by using this
| sort of thing.
| danuker wrote:
| As opposed to what? Hosting your own server for $120/yr in
| electricity, but with hardware costs on top?
| somebodythere wrote:
| What microsite costs $120/yr in electricity to run?
| maccard wrote:
| Likely a digital ocean droplet, or other vps for $5-10
| per month. Except neither of those Integrate with notion.
| khanmaytok wrote:
| I prefer to use Github Pages
| notJim wrote:
| Two nice coffees per month, not so bad. Can fund it by
| canceling a rarely-used streaming service.
| maccard wrote:
| A microsite with a cms that is neatly integrated with a
| produce that charges that much per user - sign me up!
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Notion allows you to export your stuff as Markdown. Couple of
| scripts later and you're ready to dump it into whatever other
| thing you want. It's not that bad.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Most people don't care, they just want a site that works. It's
| useful because Notion itself is WYSIWYG where whatever you type
| is what shows up, much more flexible than something like
| WordPress.
| noahtallen wrote:
| > much more flexible than something like WordPress
|
| WordPress is endlessly extensible and customizable, so I
| don't think Notion would be more flexible. Maybe Notion is
| simpler or easier to use, but at the end of the day, you'd
| still be very limited in what type of site you could build.
|
| WordPress is also getting close to releasing a WYSIWYG editor
| for the full site, which is also extensible and customizable.
| But this is already available for content, which is mostly
| what potion would be handling anyways.
|
| Looking over the list of potion benefits:
|
| 1. Nothing to install
|
| 2. It's simple - focus more on your content
|
| 3. Update and it's instantly live!
|
| 4. Use Notion (You already know it)
|
| 5. No page limits
|
| 5. Potion generates pretty URLs and preview images auto-
| magically from your page titles
|
| Only 2 and 4 seem to be things which something like WordPress
| might not have, and they are very subjective anyways. For
| number 1, there are lots of hosted WordPress platforms which
| don't have you installing anything. For 5, there are probably
| lots of plugins you supplement the default social image
| behavior if it doesn't work for you.
|
| I think this is a very cool project, and it's always nice to
| see more experiments in the CMS area. But I don't think
| flexible is the right word to use to describe it :)
|
| Disclaimer: I've been a WordPress contributor, so I'm
| definitely biased. :p
| input_sh wrote:
| WordPress uses a WYSIWYG editor called Gutenberg for quite
| some time now: https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/
| noahbragg wrote:
| Well there are lots of people out there that don't know how to
| or don't want to host a site on their own. and maybe they don't
| know how to code. So this would be a good option for them.
| Seeing lots of people like this for my current customers.
| rikelmens wrote:
| ... that sock over the mic :)
| zoozla wrote:
| Potion is an awesome project and Noah is a great guy. Been paying
| him for a while with https://softdiscipline.com, not planning to
| stop any time soon.
| noahbragg wrote:
| Awesome! Glad to hear it.
| chasebank wrote:
| Very off topic but you live in Nelson!!?? Whitewater is such an
| awesome hill and Baldface is all time! What a great playground
| you have!
| zoozla wrote:
| I do and it is!
|
| Ping me on Twitter @finereli, let's connect!
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Hmm I built something like this on top of Svelte Cloudflare
| workers API, and the configs controller for the site itself is
| using a Notion table.
|
| The reason I built this to replace a Wordpress site is because
| the rest of our ecosystem is a bunch of Svelte apps, and with
| this we could just drop content from Notion straight into our
| site.
|
| We can even use fancy pants things like synced blocks for site-
| wide announcements, etc. etc.
|
| One caveat with using Notion though is that without a good
| caching strategy (which we don't have), the site's going to be
| pretty slow, because Notion's API just fetches block by block.
| You have to have a "cache mode" for production - something that
| fetches and caches every X amount of time, and have users hit the
| cache rather than straight from Notion, since it sometimes can
| take 10+ seconds, which will time out your worker.
| zapt02 wrote:
| Could you use CF KV for this?
|
| https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-kv/
| ignoramous wrote:
| See also: https://flareact.com/
| noahbragg wrote:
| yeah, that makes sense. Potion actually recreates all the
| Notion blocks from scratch and then hosts it statically. Thats
| how we get around that issue.
| damechen wrote:
| Love it! I have multiple sites hosted by Potion. This is just one
| of them: https://support.testimonial.to
| ljm wrote:
| The beauty of the web is that you can take something and then
| make something else out of it. I love that.
|
| Potion has pricing though. And I'm not gonna pay, because I don't
| know what the setup is - am I paying for Potion to run a Notion
| account with my stuff in, and then they layer on top?
|
| Or are they reselling part of their own account?
|
| Or do I need to pay for a Notion account also?
| zapt02 wrote:
| It's built on top of Notion, so you pay for Notion and you pay
| for Potion as well. :-)
|
| Actually it's a bit funny because Potion is 2.5x more expensive
| than the Personal plan on Notion, even though the utility of
| Potion is provably smaller.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Thank you so much for this. I have wanted it for a long time. Not
| gonna sign up today, but let me just file a todo here...
| noahbragg wrote:
| Awesome! Let me know if you have any questions.
| andygcook wrote:
| Noah's a fun person to follow for those of you who are interested
| in indie businesses and are on Twitter[0] He's been sharing his
| MRR growth and learnings while building Potion for awhile now.
|
| @noahbragg - Given that you're built 100% on top of Notion (or at
| least I think you are), how are you thinking about platform risk
| long term? They could cut you off their APIs, end life for some
| undocumented API you rely on, or just build your features into
| their own product at any point.
|
| [0]- https://twitter.com/noahwbragg
| noahbragg wrote:
| Thanks Andy! Yeah there is definitely some platform risk. I'm
| trying to build a close relationship with Notion which can help
| a bit. But at the end of the day there is still risk building
| on a platform. As soon as I can I'll try to be using the
| official api which will take away some risk. But it's not quite
| ready yet.
| intunderflow wrote:
| Nice stuff, what sets you apart from your competitors like
| https://super.so/ ?
| judge2020 wrote:
| There's also this direct comparison page:
| https://www.potion.so/super-alternative
| noahbragg wrote:
| Thanks for the question. Two main things currently. When you
| update your Notion page or styles it updates your site
| immediately so it makes for a nice editing experience where you
| can see what your site would look like easily. Others don't do
| this as quickly. Could take a minute or two to see updates.
| Second Potion has a pricing model that is more friendly towards
| having multiple sites.
| atroxone wrote:
| Do you poll the notion page to get the notion data so
| quickly? Is there any rate limit on requests?
| zoozla wrote:
| I switched from super.so and I absolute love the instant
| update. Used to smash the refresh button quite a bit to get
| things to update!
| noahbragg wrote:
| Glad to hear it!
| [deleted]
| aetherspawn wrote:
| I haven't been this excited about a website builder for a long
| time. I can definitely see myself switching from Squarespace to
| this!
|
| Could you please clarify whether we can use something like AWS
| CloudFront or Cloudflare in front of this without issues?
|
| Edit: Really need hierarchical nav menu's though. That's an
| immediate killer. I'll switch right now if you say that you can
| support submenus in the next month or so.
|
| Edit 2: Another suggestion, can we have per-page injection? And
| split the content injection capabilities so we can inject in
| either the header or the footer? This would be useful, for
| example, if we want to inject less important scripts or styles at
| the bottom of the page so that we don't drop lighthouse ranking.
| This is a low priority feature request.
| itake wrote:
| notion websites are so slow. Google's page speed for your home
| page has a score of 42. Why does it say "fast page speed" and
| "great seo"?
|
| This [1] demo scores 81 and this[2] has a 68.
|
| [0] -
| https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
|
| [1] -
| https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
|
| [2] -
| https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
| tshaddox wrote:
| To be honest, 42 isn't actually that bad. PageSpeed Insights
| scores are incredibly strict (that's a good thing) and not at
| all linear with visitor perception of loading speed.
|
| news.ycombinator.com has a 100 score, but if you compare the
| actual "Lab Data" it's not a massive difference.
|
| First Contentful Paint: news.ycombinator.com: 1.3s, potion.so:
| 2.7s
|
| The biggest difference is Time to Interactive:
| news.ycombinator.com: 1.4s, potion.so: 11.2s
|
| That 11.2s is pretty bad, but PageSpeed Insights doesn't take
| into consideration which interactions work _before_ all the
| JavaScript has loaded. In the case of potion.so, the HTML is
| rendered on the server (or perhaps statically generated), and
| the vast majority of important interactions on the homepage are
| simple HTML links that work even with JavaScript disabled. The
| 2 big exceptions (and probably the biggest contributors to that
| terrible Time to Interactive metric) are the third-party
| embedded video and chat widget.
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| The hit to your SEO rankings matters a lot more than the
| actual load time.
| josephg wrote:
| I actively don't use notion because of how slow it feels.
| It looks beautiful, but feels bad.
| jitl wrote:
| (I work at Notion)
|
| It looks like most of the guidance on Pagespeed for large
| images, and layout shift due to images. The guidance to fix is
| to set fixed images sizes for these elements, and to re-encode
| images into more efficient image formats, at their displayed
| size instead of their maximum source size. Potion probably
| doesn't currently know the correct width for an image because
| they give their users kind of unlimited style control to choose
| the image's size and layout, so they request the image at
| maximum size to make sure it's as sharp as possible. The images
| are still coming straight from Notion.so, and aren't served,
| transformed, or cached by Potion.
|
| The rest of the page is fast - it's static HTML pre-generated
| or incrementally generated using Next.js, with a bit of JS on
| top, which is faster than Notion's fully dynamic thick client
| Javascript app. The example sites look good!
|
| On the subject of Pagespeed's image guidance, Notion gets one
| out of two correct - when viewing these images from a Notion
| doc, we request & serve images at their displayed size using a
| query parameter, but we don't currently transcode the image to
| a more efficient format based on the browser's image support.
| noahbragg wrote:
| Thanks for this! Really interesting.
| fragmede wrote:
| Where does adding the ability for Notion to transcode images
| sit in y'all's backlog? As much as it's not Notion's fault
| here and an underlying issue of image (re)sizing, it still
| gives the impression that Notion is slow.
| jitl wrote:
| Sorry, but as a rule I try not to make forward looking
| statements about our plans. We are hiring, though!
| https://notion.so/jobs
| okhuman wrote:
| Keep going and keep building!! <3
| noahbragg wrote:
| Thanks!
| brundolf wrote:
| How does this compare to, for example, Squarespace?
| rchaud wrote:
| These days it comes down to whether you need ecommerce
| functionality or not. Squarespace and other SaaS website
| builders offer that. Everyone else can get by with a free CMS
| and a basic theme.
| tgibb wrote:
| The onboarding flow gives me pause - I'd like to check the speed
| / perf w/ my content before signing / paying.
| goforbg wrote:
| Nice
| shoto_io wrote:
| What's the thing about notion anyway? Can someone explain what I
| am missing out on and how it compares to other tools out there
| like google docs?
| yawnxyz wrote:
| I wish in Google Docs you could smash a Google Sheets (with
| sorting, filters, editing) right into a Docs. Google Docs also
| don't let you link to other docs by @docname-ing them, and
| creating tables of linked documents.
|
| Google needs to hurry up with their Workspaces and build
| something closer to Notion or Coda
| arduinomancer wrote:
| It's more like markdown that Google docs
|
| And it behaves more like a wiki than Google docs
| katsura wrote:
| Off, but is that a sock on the mic? Fun. :D
| noahbragg wrote:
| Yep, haha. It does the job and doesn't smell!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-21 23:00 UTC)