3 Reasons Notion Is Overpowered For Growing Your Maker Small Businesses
If you're growing your business and are looking for robust tools, Notion is completely overpowered.
Since I first started posting content online, I've used pretty much every popular platform for my content calendar, project builds, and video ideas. I've jumped around from Google Sheets to Monday.com to Trello to AirTable to ClickUp and even tried pulling different note apps like Apple Notes and Evernote into complicated automations with Make.com. Every tool has its drawbacks, but I find my favorite has been Notion ever since trying it out in 2024.
Notion has some downsides, but here are my favorite reasons it is OP specifically for Maker small businesses.
Reason 1: Relational Databases
Don't let the fancy name turn you away if you aren't technically inclined, Notion makes it very easy.
Notion combined the best concepts of Notes apps and databases where every entry in a database is it's own page and pages can "link" together in structured ways across different databases. For example, 3 of my databases are Build Projects, Ideas, and Inspiration, where I keep what I'm building in the first, different ideas that aren't full projects in the second, and anything that inspired me to want to build something in the third. What's cool is I can look at each of these separately, but I also can go into a specific Build Project and "tag" multiple ideas that came together for it as well as what different things inspired either those ideas or the build.
Notion somehow doesn't limit how big your databases are (just size of individual files), which is amazing for trips to Galaxy's Edge if you want to upload 200 photos of droids, lighting, and greeblies to your inspiration database, pull them into ideas, then later combine them into a project and be able to see where it all came from.
Reason 2: Database Views That Link To Pages
You might be thinking this all sounds like a pretty version of a good Excel or Google Sheet spreadsheet, but Notion has a major advantage: pages.
In Excel or Sheets, you can create endlessly complicated ways of pulling the data you want to see into another place to summarize it. But the major downside is that if you want to edit the underlying data, you have to go to the source, find it, and enter it in a very specific way (which can be a lengthy process if your lookups are complicated). In Notion, every database entry is its own page and every view that shows you a page lets you click on it and immediately go to the source, from anywhere (saving you countless clicks and searches).
The only downside to this approach is that large databases can start to take more time to load because of all the linkages, but it's only noticeable when your internet is going in and out.
Reason 3: Notion Goes Where You Do
As much as I love Excel and Sheets, their mobile apps are objectively terrible.
In 2025, I would expect any software that stores information in the cloud to have both a robust desktop and mobile application. Unlike Excel and Sheets, the mobile and tablet versions of Notion give you a largely identical experience and set of features as desktop. The only difference is how big your screen is and whether the keyboard is on screen or physically separate.
The mobile app is amazing and I use it every day, sometimes even sitting at my desk where I also have the desktop version open as well.
The biggest downside to Notion though is how much time you will want to spend getting your setup the way you want it.
Because it's so easy to create databases and connect them, you'll want to spend a ton of time creating a perfect setup. Remember that the goal is to create a system that frees up your time, not dive into a rabbit hole to suck it away. Notion is flexible enough that you can continue to make changes to the structure as you need to later.
