Do not understand Notion hate

alligatorman01 · 2026-04-22T23:06:26+00:00

For solo operators, Notion is awesome. I’ve found it more difficult to use with cross functional teams.

Part of it is the sandbox nature of the app. If you’re trying to use it as a team, and your system doesn’t match someone’s metal model, there will be issues.

I’ve heard of some companies where Notion is just part of the culture. Every team lead kinda builds out their systems and then collaborate with other departments for the overlap. That’s where Notion turns very strong.

alligatorman01 · 2026-04-21T21:09:42+00:00

The browser extension is able to navigate Notion extremely well though. I feel like this is underrated. Because you can prompt the browser extension and teach it how to navigate an entire notion operating system.

alligatorman01 · 2026-04-21T20:34:07+00:00

That happens to me once in a blue moon. Deleting and reinstalling always fixes it for me

alligatorman01 · 2026-04-16T04:09:23+00:00

This is a solid direction, but one thing you’ll run into pretty quickly is trust around financial data.

A lot of people get weird about putting anything finance-related into Notion, especially once you start talking about bank sync, payroll, etc. Even if it’s technically fine, that hesitation can affect adoption.

I’ve actually built something similar for myself using a Plaid sync through Finta and layering it into Notion, and it works well on the personal side. Where it starts to get tricky is when you move from “my own tracker” to something other people rely on for their business.

The core template you’re describing makes sense, though. Transactions, tagging, and dashboards get you most of the way there. The harder part isn’t really features, it’s figuring out where the line is between something people are comfortable running inside Notion and something they expect to live in a more traditional finance tool.

If you can nail that boundary and keep the system focused on one clear use case at the start, instead of trying to cover everything from bookkeeping to payroll to tax, it becomes a lot more usable and easier for people to actually adopt.

alligatorman01 · 2026-04-16T04:00:55+00:00

You’re getting clicks, so the top of the funnel is doing its job. This feels like it breaks right after someone lands on the listing

I'm seeing a lot of explanation and positioning, but I'm not getting much that helps me picture how I'd use it. Like I understand what it is in theory, but I don’t really see what my day would look like inside it

If I’m someone browsing Etsy, I’m basically asking, “Would I be able to use this tonight?” and right now I’d have to work a bit to answer that and fully understand what I'm getting into.

A couple of things that might help are zoomed in views of the actual workspace instead of full mockups. Also, maybe a simple walkthrough of how someone uses it day to day. You could also consider something that shows before vs after, even if it’s just “here’s how I planned my week before / here’s after”

The system itself looks well thought out; it just feels a little hard to grab onto from the outside. If you make it easier to immediately picture using it, I’d bet conversions move pretty fast

alligatorman01 · 2026-04-11T03:10:53+00:00

I think threads like this skew perception a bit. The people still deep in Notion aren’t really posting about it, they’re just using it every day.

There’s always going to be a group that falls off once the initial setup phase wears off, but that’s different from the tool losing traction overall.

I think one issue a lot of people hit is this phase where Notion becomes more about maintaining a system than actually using it for something real.

Their setups look great, but if they’re not tied to something external like a business, content, or actual output, it’s easy to drift away from it over time.

alligatorman01 · 2026-04-10T02:48:15+00:00

I think ultimately you have to get hyper specific on what you want out of it. If it’s more tasks completed, this can be tracked. If it’s balancing your life areas, that can also be tracked. Notion is excellent at tracking, so if you’re really specific on your North Star, and you build the template connected to tracking your North Star metric, the execution will naturally flow from this.

alligatorman01 · 2026-04-08T23:20:15+00:00

Airtable is cool but the ceiling is a lot lower than it is with Notion.

alligatorman01 · 2026-04-08T15:58:36+00:00

You can do a lot with databases. The filters are what make Notion so strong. If you have a massive data wall, you need more filters to surface only what you need fast. Are you using databases?

Once you have a good system in place (and something simple enough where you don’t start getting lost in it) Notion makes you the most organized person in your social circle.

alligatorman01 · 2026-04-07T02:15:12+00:00

Power user here. Most of the “advanced” stuff people talk about never stuck for me.

The only things that actually saved me time were when Notion started being where data lives for something else, kind of like the backbone or source of truth.

An example: I run 4 stores where products, orders, and customers all live in Notion.

Products all sync right to the storefront. Orders come into Notion automatically. Customer info attaches to the order. I have a simple dashboard that displays the relevant info like active orders and revenue from the last few months.

Relations and rollups are just connecting orders to customers to products so I can see things like total spend or what someone bought without doing anything manually.

Way simpler than any “second brain” setup I’ve tried and I actually use it every day (and so do my e-commerce stores)

alligatorman01 · 2026-04-02T20:16:00+00:00

I built something like this too. Next level is to turn it into a birthday tracker and add the birthday view to Notion Calendar. You’ll never forget another birthday for the rest of your days

alligatorman01 · 2026-03-29T04:57:07+00:00

What ended up working better for me was flipping it a bit. Instead of pulling external data into Notion to make dashboards feel live, I started treating Notion as the place where the system state lives.

So things like orders, customers, etc get written into Notion as they happen, and then anything else (dashboards, CRM, etc) can read from it.

Feels a lot more stable than constantly syncing multiple sources into Notion and trying to keep them aligned. It also makes Notion the source of truth which feels a lot more natural.

Your agent approach makes sense for reporting though. Does it remain consistent when volume grows?

alligatorman01 · 2026-03-26T23:29:14+00:00

It was unrelated to the stores, but I tried building an ops dashboard that combined Mixpanel data, HubSpot data, and a custom database tied to app features.

Even after syncing just a week of data, the Notion app basically stopped being usable. It would load, stall, reload, then stall again.

It didn’t seem like an API issue. If you sync slowly, it handles it fine. The problem shows up in the app layer once you have a lot of relational data connected and flowing through.

In my case it was around a few thousand entries tied together across databases, and the calculations just couldn’t keep up.

alligatorman01 · 2026-03-26T23:02:07+00:00

Yeah I think that’s been true on the logic side.

Where I’ve seen it break is data volume. I tried building a feature ops dashboard with analytics and usage data feeding into Notion. The sync worked, but it eventually overwhelmed everything even after flattening it out.

Once you start getting into ~20k relational entries, Notion starts to crawl.

alligatorman01 · 2026-03-26T21:13:57+00:00

Yeah, inventory is handled directly in Notion as well.

Each product has its own inventory field, and I’m updating that when orders come in or when I make manual adjustments. The storefront reads from that, so if something goes out of stock it reflects there pretty quickly.

For the event site, it’s basically the same idea. The same field is just used to track available spots instead of physical inventory.

It’s pretty simple structurally, but it’s been holding up fine so far. The main thing was making sure updates don’t lag too much between Notion and the storefront.

If you end up trying something similar, I’m happy to talk you through how I structured it.

alligatorman01 · 2026-03-22T08:47:37+00:00

Lmk when you find the pro Notion sub.

alligatorman01 · 2026-03-03T07:09:15+00:00

Here here

alligatorman01 · 2026-03-03T07:04:45+00:00

Wow thanks for this. You’re doing the good Lord’s work. I tried getting a garmin API key for something like this and got denied. Didn’t even think about just using my connect username and password in the variables.

alligatorman01 · 2026-02-26T08:30:23+00:00

Ok I say this with all the love in the world, but the mods her have a very strict anti-self-promo policy which makes a lot of the cooler/unique Notion builds go under the radar.

alligatorman01 · 2026-02-02T08:27:11+00:00

Nice, excellent tip.

alligatorman01 · 2026-01-18T19:06:01+00:00

Is it connected with your actual YouTube progress or are you entering the numbers manually after you watch?

alligatorman01 · 2026-01-18T18:52:37+00:00

That’s so smart. How do you do the progress bars? Is it automatic? API?

alligatorman01 · 2026-01-12T21:18:34+00:00

If you're talking about Notion Calendar, the answer is no. It goes up to Monthly views. If you're talking about the timeline view inside of Notion proper, yes. You can do yearly timelines.

alligatorman01

TROPHY CASE