A structured home for our thoughts and data

Having just found and defined our vision and framework, we needed a place to put down all our thoughts, decisions, workflows and ideas.

Being already familiar with it from personal use and at the company we are employed at, we started with Notion. The free version for teams and collaborative allows for 1k blocks.
We were lucky and Notion forgot how to count for the first weeks of our usage, so we could exceed that limit, which we did in a matter of days.

Very quickly we collected ideas for names and domains, actual business ideas, to-do lists and boards as well as our vision and workflows.

Notion's ability to display entries in a database in multiple different ways (list, table, board, calendar and timeline) as well as allow for different filters and sorting settings on each view, helped us keep track of everything.

Even better, the new display of integer fields as progress and percentages as well as the formula property, helped us immensely whilst rating our business ideas. We could calculate an average, sort them by that value and filter out entries that are currently not relevant.

Startup Credits

Notion is great but can be too expensive for people just starting and aiming to keep their cost down as much and long as possible.
Notion helps out with this by providing a startup credit program to which anyone with a website can apply. It doesn't even have to be set up in English.

They grant $1k in credits as a maximum, but lower amounts are possible as well.

To learn more about Notions Startup credit program and apply, visit the dedicated landing page: https://www.notion.so/startups

Workarounds, tips and hints

If you are still missing a website or valuable content, there are other ways around the limitations.

When working with a team, create a central account that you all use together to avoid the limits placed on collaborative workspaces. To associate tasks with members of your team, create a separate "team" database and work with relations.

This has the additional advantage of allowing to reference users who are not yet onboarded to Notion and external partners that will never be in Notion as well as retroactively noting down team members who are not part of the Notion team anymore.