How to Use Notion Effectively (for Startups)

The Notion Conundrum

I’ve used Notion for many years. Don’t think I could run a business without it.

It’s one of those products that has grown a gigantic following in recent times — it’s userbase has 30x’d since 2019, with millions of startups / students / young professionals adopting it to manage their daily lives.

And the growth is mostly justified. Notion is probably the most flexible, richly-formatted general-purpose ‘productivity’ software on the market — it gets the job done for a lot of people, in place of many traditional / specialized tools (Google Drive, Trello, Confluence, Microsoft Office, etc.)

But that same flexibility can also make it suboptimal for startups in many ways. It’s a blank canvas that can be infinitely customized — which in reality can make it hard to maintain / standardize, and easy to overthink. Said perfectly by @pa1ge on Twitter:

It’s especially true for early stage startups and first-time founders. When you are first starting out, with a team of 1-4, you don’t really know what you need to document and how to organize it. It’s hard to envision how that documentation should be built to last, what’s worth documenting and what’s not.

I know this was true for us. Our first 3-4 years using it we’d just put pages and databases wherever we felt like. After awhile all that flexibility made it essentially unusable — mainly for the fact that it gets so easy to lose things.

Now, 5 years into using it I feel like we finally have the right system in place for using Notion as an effective part of our broader internal communications framework (I’ve written more about internal comm’s generally here).

If I were to start all over from scratch with Notion for my startup, here’s how I’d do it:

Things You Shouldn’t Use Notion For

First, just because Notion is uber-customizable, it doesn’t mean you should use it for everything. In fact, I’d argue there are many things you should NOT attempt to use Notion for within your startup — you’d be better off using other tools for these things:

• Task Tracking - yes that’s correct. Many do this (we did for years), it just isn’t ideal, especially for development-related tasks. Other tools like Bloom Growth or GitHub Projects (we use this) are just way, way better for tracking tasks on a daily / weekly basis. For things like this the extra guardrails help.

• CRMs / Customer Data - if your list of customers / prospects is longer than ~30 people, you should not be using Notion to track them. Two things it lacks are 1) aggregate manipulation and analysis abilities (use Excel) and 2) automation and contact tracking abilities (use a specialized tool like Hubspot)

• Financial Planning - same as above. A spreadsheet is just better. Specialized tools like Parallel or Forecastr are great for doing it for you or providing templates. Yes, every startup should have a financial model of some sort for the next year, and you shouldn’t be doing it in Notion.

• Code Documentation - yea no, don’t do it. Notion is great for documentation generally, but for code documentation, versioning / mapping directly to the codebase is critical. Use something like GitBook or simply GitHub for this.

• Large File / Asset Management - storing / organizing design files, videos, and other large documents is one of the few things Notion isn’t built for. Tools like Figma (for design) and Google Drive (for general files) are better for this.

This is from personal experience, and yes we have attempted to use Notion for all of these things at one point or another. There may be exceptions here and there, of course it depends on the type of business and team you are operating with.

I’m also not saying that you need to pay for 5 different SaaS products to accomplish each of these — I’m saying you should use free tools where you can. Obviously one of the big ‘benefits’ of Notion is that you can theoretically do everything in the same place, and thus save money. But in reality it just isn’t good enough for most serious startups past idea stage with most of these things^

How My Startup Uses Notion (Effectively)

Now that I’ve outlined what not to use Notion for, here’s how I’d recommend using it. Generally Notion is like Google Docs on steroids, it’s good for knowledge-basey things.

Notion is best for things like wiki’s, SOP’s (standard operating procedures), project plans, meeting notes, and top-level resources. Those are the things we use Notion for, and that’s because they all generally:

• Don’t need to be frequently updated (quarterly?)

• Benefit from rich formatting / hierarchical organization

• Should be easily searchable / cross-referenceable

• Requires moderate collaboration (but not simultaneous editing)

• Flexibility is helpful but not overwhelming

These are the areas where Notion’s flexibility and robust formatting shine. Here’s how I structure our team’s Notion dashboard:

1. Project Plans

The most prominent area in our Notion dashboard is our projects table. It’s a list of dedicated pages for all our archived, backlogged, and archived projects. For us, projects are generally independent products that we are bringing to market (more on that here). Any project-specific info goes in these pages. We use them to organize:

• associated documentation

• notes & reference material

• broader roadmapping outlines

We do not track individual project tasks in here — we keep a singular company-wide task-tracker in Github Projects for that. One of my favorite project planning books is Shape Up from the team at Basecamp and I’d say this approach was half inspired by them, half inspired by the Entrepreneurial Operating System outlined in Traction.

2. Top-Level (Department) Folders

Then, all of our higher level non-project specific stuff is generally grouped into folders. I try to keep this simple, and have found that there are really 4 or 5 folders that make sense to have at this level:

1. Admin & Legal (mostly paperwork for HR, investors/advisors, taxes, etc.)

2. Funding & Financials (non-admin finance stuff like pitch decks, budget notes)

3. Dev & Engineering (non project-specific technical docs & notes)

4. Sales & Marketing (general branding, marketing strategy, sales scripts, etc.)

5. Internal Operations* [optional] (organizing specific procedures, delivery, etc.)

Again for the most part the contents of these folders are notes, documentation, and links. We try not to keep things like content lists or large files directly in Notion — it’s best utilized as a centralized place to link out to those other tools (CRM, Google Drive, etc.) in a more organized manner.

3. Operating Procedures

Specific to folder number 5 above, we keep SOPs (standard operating procedures) for any important tasks that require consistent execution across team members. Things like internal communications (which I’ve discussed at length here), or routines like

• running meetings and writing meeting notes,

• creating notion project pages, defining project tasks, etc.

I severely underestimated the impact of intentionally documenting processes until recently — early on it can be easy to discount this while things are still forming into routines. But it’s better to be intentional upfront; whenever we establish a new SOP I like to think "how should this work if we doubled our team?” or “how should this work if I were no longer available to do this task myself?”

4. Meeting Notes (Internal v. External)

Another great hack for us has been meticulously tracking notes for all of our meetings, both internal and external. Notion is great for this with its database feature — you can create a page for each meeting and easily sort / filter by different categories. For us, each meeting is labeled with:

• Name - Purpose of meeting & name of person(s) if external

• Category - Main subject(s), either a project or department

• Contact Type - For external meetings; advisor / sales / investor / etc.

• Date - Obvious

• Transcript - I use Granola AI to document our meetings, my new fav product

Within each meeting page we generally will write any important notes leading up to the meeting, then use Granola to summarize / transcribe our meetings. This is especially useful for internal weekly calls as a way to keep track of exactly what we discuss week-to-week. Another hack I’ve started doing is recording voice memo’s as I walk home from coffee shops and using Granola to summarize and put them in the table.

5. The Kitchen Sink

This is pretty much anything that doesn’t fit into the above categories goes into a box over here. This is generally things like:

• Important links to external resources (Github Tracker, Google Drive, etc.)

• Miscellaneous pages like for us, our internal list of book recommendations

This should usually be a pretty short list, and if you are really on top of your sh*t you may not even need a section like this. We’ve found that generally there will always be a few random things that are good to keep separate from the rest (even if you link to them within some of the other places), and this serves as the place to put them

My Starter Notion Template for Startups

To recap, here’s how I’d describe the types of things that Notion is good for and bad for:

I figured with all of this talk about how to use (and not use) Notion, it would be most helpful for me to create a template of the dashboard that we use so that others can use it too. So I did:

It’s a boilerplate version of our tried-and-true Notion dashboard, thoughtfully structured for early stage startups. It’s something I truly wish I had on day one of launching my first business.

If you want a copy, just reply to this email and let me know :-)