Strategy | Notion

<aside> ♟️ Format: Be the ___, ___ & ___ freelance client portal.

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“The essence of strategy is that you must set limits on what you’re trying to accomplish.” — Michael Porter, Competitive Strategy

“There are two kinds of difference. There is a kind of difference that says nothing, and there is a kind of difference that speaks volumes.” ― Youngme Moon, Different

<aside> ❗ We’re focusing on being different first—not better necessarily.

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#1. Competitive analysis.

I read articles to find out why freelancers like each of our competitors as a freelance client portal (our product category—also our top SEO keyword), listed the named benefits as features, then ranked each competitor on how great that feature is on their platform.

I’ve also ranked how our featureset will turn out if all goes well.

I know we’re not directly competing with these and we’re actually gonna integrate with them aka work with them probably, but I’m thinking in terms of substitution products. If someone is already using say, Notion, they can probably satisfice the need for progress updates for clients within Notion. In that way these platforms are our competitors.

	Copazetic	Trello	Asana	Notion
Project management	0	10	10	7
Client collaboration	0	8	10	7
Visualization	10	10	5	7
Notifications	0	5	10	7
Calendar views	0	3	10	10
Template boards	10	5	5	9
Schedule reminders	0	4	10	9
Checklists	0	10	10	10
Timeline view	5	0	10	10
Reporting	10	0	10	1
Mobile app	10	10	10	9
TOTALS	54	65	100	75

Screenshot of table above if it isn’t displaying right…

#2. Overall insights.

We have the lowest score across the board and are missing some maybe key features.
Trello is ok, high marks for visualization—freelancers like the color coding, image attachments, flexibility, etc.
Asana is the best solution according to this criteria (again, sourced from freelancers’ own experiences) but the visualization and templates are just ok. That and the fact I couldn’t find a lot of articles on freelancers + Asana makes me think it’s more for teams at least perception-wise.
Notion shines in terms of content type flexibility but it has minimal reporting (like ETA) which we will have.

#3. Ideas.

Here are some ideas I have based on the above.

We could make notifications cool with emoji and everyday language. Better than the default “... posted an update, click here to see it on Trello.com” boring notification or whatever.
Making visualization (aka customization, art direction, color coding) a star feature would be easy win for us since I would design the app this way anyway.
Template boards we were gonna do anyway I think, and it turned out to be a strong idea.