I logged into my work email this Monday morning, as usual. I’d received an email from a service called Notion.so; somebody at my company had shared a document with me. The email was pretty sparse. It read something like:
Hey Johnny!
Exalted colleague #12 has shared Super important document with you. Click here to view it!
Notion.so
All in all, this is a pretty standard corporate email. The only problem is, I have no ruddy clue what Notion.so is. And the email isn’t giving me much information here. I’ve got the name of the document and my colleague’s name, but not much else.
The colleague who me this works in the media department, and although we’re pretty close friends, we rarely work on anything together. I initially thought that Notion.so has something to do with filmography or movies or something. I was pretty excited to open the file and see what kind of cool stuff was waiting for me inside!
But alas, it turns out that Notion.so is just a note-taking app. It’s got some useful features, and I’m sure there’s a whole heap of stuff that I’ve not discovered. But from my very surface-level view of the app, it’s just for taking notes.
But the features that Notion.so offers aren’t what concerns me here. It’s how the company introduced itself. There was no welcome email, or even a paragraph detailing what Notion.so does! Not that I would have read either had they been available; at best, I would have skimmed it. Still, Notion.so is under the impression that I know exactly what this app does, and they made little attempt to tell me otherwise. The service has decided that because someone at my company has signed up to Notion.so, I also know what it’s for and how to respond to it.
Now, this isn’t the worst thing in the world. And I’m trying hard to not come off like a complaining little arsehole here. I’m attempting to point out how strange of an assumption this is: that a business-to-business company only has to sell themselves to one influential person. Once they’ve persuaded that one person, then they’re in! They’ve got access to potentially hundreds of eyes, and they don’t need to try to explain what they are.
That might not be news to any of you, but it was an eye-opening realization to me.
That’s all. I’m going back to playing Golden Axe now.
Just as an aside, I quite like how Notion.so looks. There are a few too many features for me though. I like my notepad apps to be just text and a link to share. But I really, really appreciate that the Notion.so company chose a name that _ kind of_ represents what the app is about: **Not(e)**ion - they make notes. No idea what the .so top-level-domain is about, though.
