Product Hunt Daily Digest
February 23rd, 2022

We’re Notion users here at Product Hunt, along with 20 million-plus users out there. It’s probably not fair to call out alternatives to Notion when the real hovering giants are MS Office (includes Word) with 1.2 billion users and Google Workspace (includes Docs) with 3 billion users.

Though Notion may have a long way to go until it reaches mass adoption like Microsoft and Google, it’s done such a great job fostering an avid community while tending to individual creators that it often feels bigger than it is.

Over the past few years though Coda has gained a lot of steam and emerged as a noteworthy competitor in the space. The startup reached unicorn status in July after raising $100M in a Series D funding round. It has 1 million-plus users.

Co-founders Shishir Mehrotra and Alex DeNeui, two MIT graduates and both formerly Microsoft and Google makers, launched Coda’s beta four years ago, noting to the Product Hunt community that they started building a new type of document from scratch that “erases the boundaries between words and data.”

Coda went on to iterate, consistently taking a spot among the top five products of the day. It launched Packs in 2019, which is Coda’s name for building blocks that turn the tools’ workspace into a way to manage apps. Figma founder, Dylan Field, who hunted it noted: “I was super impressed with how this release lets you connect all sorts of things to Coda via the web, including sending text messages via Twilio, automating Github PRs and creating conditional formatting based on live weather forecasts.”

With Coda’s newest launch yesterday, Mehrotra shared that the team has been rebuilding Coda’s editor and reimagining the Pack ecosystem: “We found we couldn’t fully realize our vision of the all-in-one doc until we bridged a few more divides, some of which have been entrenched in documents for decades.”

Packs is now an open platform and users are invited to create Packs that can be shared with others. This opens the door for makers to build off of what Coda and Packs can do to increase productivity. To support this new ecosystem, Coda introduced a marketplace, a revenue-share system, and a Maker Fund. “Right now we have dozens of Packs, soon we’ll have thousands.”

Changes to the Coda editor includes customizable page layouts and the ability to include pages inside of table row. Another feature users will love is dark mode. But we think the most interesting part of this launch is the new Packs ecosystem to rival the kind of community that we’ve seen Notion create.

Makers are weighing in and asking questions on the launch page now. What do you want to know about Coda?

Not to be out-shined, London-based Supernotes had a great launch yesterday (Product of the Day) with some early adopters saying:

“I consider myself a heavy note-taker, and tested all possible approaches, from TiddlyWiki to Obsidian, Notion, Craft, and back. None of them really stick to me - but Supernotes takes a different approach..."

Now seems like a great time to test some new note-taking tools.

• Harry Dry, founder of Marketing Examples is doing an AMA on Discussions today. Ask him about marketing tips and how we grew his newsletter to 90k+ subscribers.

• Highlight moments from podcasts to take notes or save for later with Snipd.

• FailScout is a crowdsourced collection of broken products to help you identify common failure modes and solutions to fix them.

• TrueUp helps you find jobs in SpaceTech companies like SpaceX, Relativity Space, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and more.

• Integromat (acquired in 2020) has rebranded and launched Make, a new visual no-code platform to design, build, and automate anything.