Reviewing Notion note-taking App as a Product Manager

Eighteen years ago, I strongly felt a need to organize my content, notes, and digital footprint. I have tried OneNote, Trello, google-drive, keep, Evernote, Wikidpad, vimwiki, and many others over the years.

As a Product Manager, I work on various topics, attend a lot of meetings, write a lot, and need a way to organize my content in a well-defined way. And I see this will be the case for many people and thus the total addressable market (TAM) is huge for any note-taking app.

A month back, I started using the Notion note-taking app, and I am hooked to it. Nothing comes closer to Notion. Great app if you want to organize your work and life. Used for daily journaling, travel plans, money plans, todos, book reading plans & notes, annual/monthly/weekly/daily plans, jot down your ideas, blogs you are working on, and poems you like, story bank, and much more. You can make it your second brain to note a lot of different things. It’s great to see how people use it to organize their lives. https://notion.so

Having everything in one place – The best value

As a user, this is critical and this is the core reason to go for this product. Your notes, meeting notes, blog, journal, schedules, to-do, book reading list, travel plan, money plans, expenses, grocery list and everything you think off can be jotted in one place and well organized.

Ready to use Templates to save your time

The best part of it is ‘Templates’ for creating To-dos, keeping a journal, making a list of books to read, expenses, and more. Numerous templates for users to pick from. Every user can share their own template that can be used by the public.

Offline and online version

Apps for Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac to take your notes on the go. I mostly use the web view on https://www.notion.com and it works beautifully.

Make your notes public and create a website out of it – Key Differentiator

This is a great differentiator for Notion. You edit your notes and if you decide you can make your notes public. Anyone with the URL can view the page as a webpage. You can design your entire website out of Notion and continue to edit it anytime behind the scene. Here one of my Book-Reading list pages that you can see.

Tables / Databases & Views – Differentiator

Tables are a great way to store related data. Linking them together across tables takes it further. Making it available in different views (filtered, calendar, status, boards) like magic. Notion does it all. You can create your own simple table or a complete CRM using notion. Workflows and tracking become so easy and effortless that I have not seen it anywhere before this. Here is a simple habit tracker table from my Notion

Many more features that I will skip detailing

Hierarchical pages
A page starts with a clean slate to let you focus on your thoughts
Team collaboration with real-time sync
Page Properties to filter content
Various types of content can be added – Text, Images, Videos, Tables, Audio, File, PDFs, and many more.
and more ..

Long video(48mins) if you want to make the switch to Notion. There are many other videos on YouTube as well.

Business model

Notion is free for personal use. They charge for Personal Pro, Team, and Enterprise versions. Making it free for personal makes it adopted by many people without worrying about an upgrade. It brings in a huge user base to move them to business versions if they are part of a team. A team collaboration framework of Notion makes so much sense to get any team quickly onto it and start building their knowledgebase and workflows. And this surely is the reason to upgrade for a team version.

Increasing the stickiness

As you use Notion, it lets you import notes from various sources like Evernote. It prompts you to download the app on mac/windows and your phone for offline use. Guides you to install a browser extension to bookmark the URL and add it to your reading list. All this step by step to get you ‘credit points’ in dollars. It then lets you use these credit points for free when you upgrade to Personal-Pro or teams version. As a Product Manager, you can clearly see the path to increase stickiness in the product and how to convert users from free to paid. Absolute amazing work here by Notion.

Notion – A Highly recommended app to organize your life.

Warning: You will need to put in the time to make it yours. Watch videos on how people use Notion, spend time creating your pages. I have spent 5+ hours over the new year to make the most of it. It’s worth it.

Show me your Notion / Templates if you think I can use it.