All-in-one productivity and collaboration platform
Noticed one feature showing pull: Noticed one element of the product (editor + collaboration) that people were using and loving, and went all in.
No-code app/website builder, Webflow meets Figma
Low retention
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVl6tUSHcmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7qnyvZzpY8
“Very few people were interested in doing that, building apps. I think if you’re a programmer, you might as well build the real thing; you don’t want to use Notion for it. And then if you’re not, then is that really what you want to do? And then the second thing was I think it was also fairly unstable. I think the tech stack we had used in the early iterations of it was fairly buggy. It didn’t actually do what you really wanted to do. The company almost ran out of money. Well, actually it did run out of money and Ivan had to borrow some money from his mom to keep it going. And then the final shot at it was essentially Ivan and Simon moved to Japan for a few months and rebuilt everything from the grounds up. We realized that as some of these people used it, they liked some parts of the editor or they liked some parts of the collaborative features that the product had. And through that, I think the insight was the wedge into the market is probably more docs and wiki, rather than the apps, like a build-your-own-thing kind of thing.” —Akshay Kothari, co-founder and COO
4 years
One feature