Over the years, I’ve had a love-hate-love relationship with Notion. I now use it mostly for lightweight work-related databases. Things that I want to track that need structure, or the ability to sort and filter to make sense of.
I’ve also tried using Notion to write and store shareable notes with my team but, as Notion got (and gets) more complicated, I’ve found it harder to navigate. Not to mention the motivation to open it in the first place has faded; more on that below.
Separately, I’ve been using Granola to transcribe meetings for the last year or so. My initial intent was to continually export the notes from Granola back into Notion so that Notion would be the one source of truth for my office.
But that hasn’t really happened. The surprising thing about Granola is that I’ve found that just having the notes somewhere matters more than ever rereading them. Occasionally when I need to, I’ll use MCP to surface insight from these notes, and that’s all I need from them.
And that’s the beauty of Granola. It frees me up to be more present in meetings, knowing that one day, if push comes to shove, I can use a large language model to uncover something that Granola has captured.
And yet there are times when I do want to capture text notes for my team. I’ll be out walking, and some thoughts will come to me: a loose outline for a project we’re working on, a punch list of things I want to remember to tell a colleague. Just random bits of text that need somewhere to go.
In these moments, I find myself opening either Apple Notes or Bear. Both are simple, open quickly, and get the job done. I have a particular fondness for Bear, which is far more pleasing to look at than Apple Notes, and has a powerful toolbar that allows me to quickly tag a note or add bullet points, something I tend to do in these instances.
But both are single-player experiences, not ideal for sharing with others. What I want is Bear, but multiplayer.
So where does that leave me with Notion?
Honestly, probably still with Notion.
But I recently saw an announcement that got me thinking. Coda, now rebranded as Superhuman, is working on a database product, memorably called Superhuman Databases. Could this be a tool I use for structured data rather than Notion?
I’m not in the beta yet, so I’m not exactly sure whether it can replace Notion databases, or even if that’s the intended use case.
And even if it can replace Notion databases, I’m still left without a place to quickly capture shareable text notes.
Or does it?
Superhuman has another product, its original product, a collaborative document environment called Docs. (Side note: not all products need clever names).
Could Docs be the solution I’m looking for?
Maybe, but just like Databases, I’m not sure what Docs wants to be. When I first tried Docs several years ago, back when it was called Coda, it seemed to be something akin to Notion, a jack-of-all-trades canvas that could contain docs, wikis, databases, and tables.
But if Superhuman now has Databases, does it still need Docs to wear so many hats? Does it still need to be so Notion-adjacent?
Could moving databases to its own Databases silo free Docs to be the exact kind of simplified multiplayer writing environment I’m looking for? A tool that enough people on Twitter and Reddit still seem to want?
Again, I don’t know what Superhuman wants from Docs. This is more wishcasting than prognosticating.
But for Superhuman to build the “Bear but for teams” writing surface, they would have to make some big changes. Simplify the product. Pare it down to its essence. And probably get rid of the web-wrapper on mobile. Or at least make it feel like I’m writing on a surface meant for local text entry.
I’m also not sure how I feel about Docs’ nested pages. Or its lack of tags. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
If Docs and Databases could deliver this one-two punch: a powerful place to store structured data, and an elegant way to share text, I suspect Superhuman may have a shot at finding a market that Notion is drifting racing away from.