Coda is failing down

41

I don’t want to rehash all the excellent points made by others, for example around the UX. But would like to add a few observations … in the (vain?) hope that someone from Coda might be reading???

Communication, or rather, the lack of communication … Why no roadmap? Why so little interaction with the community?

I get that some big announcements have to be kept quiet until they are announced (eg. Snowflake) but tell us what you are planning; tell us how you are going to improve Coda over the coming year; show us you are listening.

The lack of communication, innovation, or even just basic improvements, leads me to worry that Coda is simply not making enough $$. Because this is the kind of behaviour that companies end up demonstrating along the slow descent towards failure.

It would be extremely hard, if not impossible, to change the pricing model (I remember the furore when they started charging a few years ago, and I left at that time because of … their poor communication around it, not the pricing itself).

Therefore I would have thought that focusing on individuals and small teams would be a far better strategy than Enterprise.

Why go after companies with hundreds, even thousands of users that may only need a handful of Makers? Loads of data and resource usage for little return. But if they focussed on small teams and individuals, then the ratio of paying makers to non-paying editors might be far more favourable.

But this then swings back to UX because there really does need to be significant improvements here to really draw in those groups.

I also think there should be an additional pricing tier - the jump between pro and team is significant and I just can’t justify it at this point, but something in between I probably would - for example, I don’t need locking yet, but there are a few packs at the team level that might be useful (yes I know I could purchase them all individually, and maybe at some point I will).

I love Coda. I genuinely have fun building with it. But I am concerned for its future.

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42

You raise a valid point: the SBA will tell you that 90% of all businesses in the United States are defined a Small Businesses, which means they have under 100 employees.

43

to be honest im not an expert in the business side of coda and its not my personal concern. the roadmap is going to be very valuable but sometimes the path is unclear and most of company does not provide roadmap including all the apps/websites mentioned in the post.

in term of revenue, from this site : https://getlatka.com/companies/coda
you can see that coda is doing great compared to last year. but comparing it with notion you might see some difficulties : https://getlatka.com/companies/notion

however, coda in my humble opinion is great tool, it need some refinements and will beat most of the tools but also their marketing need alot work to be done. The youtube space of all creators are mostly dead now. Packs and showcases and templete are old and not functioning sometimes. My main suggestion for coda to have sustainable sharing revenue with creators beside packs renting/selling. something related to marketing somehow like affliation links, tier or affliations, some sort of awards things like that.

tool is near perfect
ui/ux works , usable if done perfectly, unusable for normal user
marketing is almost dead

anyway if we see numbers coda is doing better this year, but we all hope to not just reach notion but beat it exceptionally that notion has notion to offer beside user expiernce design.

this my own conclusion of the business side of coda

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44

Thanks for that link. Revenue doesn’t necessarily equal profit of course, but I certainly hope you are correct that they are doing well, and that what they mostly have is a marketing issue!

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45

I know your concerns but lets see the public data for a while … we are comparing Coda with 10x company like notion which is not fair.

In term of usability:
:white_check_mark: Coda has far more superior formula
:white_check_mark: Coda has more powerful automation
:white_check_mark: Coda has ability to have custom pack
:x: Competitors has more up to date UI , which to be honest can be solved
:x: Competitors can create using mobile app
:white_check_mark: Coda connections with other apps and sites are amazing, also embedding website can make it greater one place hub.
:white_check_mark: Coda customizations are top notch, you can custom buttons, names and so much more

In term of community:
:white_check_mark: Coda has very advanced users in the community
:x: Competitors social presence are amazing and they have stores which share revenue or showcases
:x: User case selling products like templete and showing the revenue is more present in internet

In term of finance:
:x: Roadmap is hidden from us, which also the same case for most of the competitors
:x: Competitors are more likely to have greater revenue
:white_check_mark: Coda pricing is much more reasonable based on the previous discussion which is more sustainable for most business which means that users more likely to stick with coda
:white_check_mark: eventhough Coda is weird with pack pricing but this can be way to get revenue with coda
:x: in same way, Coda lack store for templete, showcases, also tutorial

Those all thd points i got from all the discussion above. And from that i can feel confident that Coda is mostly the best alternative to all other competitors especially for the pricing / value which makes them valuable and hard to be missed out.

Remember, even the big tech industry are scared to do something similar to what those small company do. Microsoft for example are not struggling but losing their identity with loop for example… so i hope this can solve your concerns which solved initial concerns

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46

Hello, I’m not very active in the Coda community, but I just wanted to share that Coda has been a great help for the company I’m currently working at.

My company is a small business in the property sector, relatively new and still in the growth phase. The employees are mostly from the younger generation. Because of this, we lack IT integration systems, especially in terms of applications (I am currently working on building the company’s ERP), and everything is still in development.

That’s why I proposed purchasing Notion to my superiors, but with its pricing, it seemed difficult to implement. So I looked for an alternative and found Coda.

As mentioned in the points above, Coda has the advantage of better pricing, but it lacks in templates. Moreover, I often find it difficult to ask for help from other Coda users. Honestly, I don’t have the skills to implement formulas, so I need to ask questions to keep learning. However, I also feel hesitant to ask or make community posts because I’m afraid my questions might be trivial since I’m a complete beginner in this.

If only there were a more compact and quick discussion forum—using something like Discord would be really helpful.

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47

Hi Erwina,

Welcome to the Community! And please, always, feel free to participate.

Everybody was a beginner at some stage… :wink:

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48

Hmm. This is a depressing thread. I really like Coda in many ways and have been planning some major (for me and my church) work in it. But for someone like me – where my docs aren’t too many, yet – would it be better to “start” in Notion? Last year when I started with Coda things were popping but it just feels a little “slow” on Youtube etc. as folks have mentioned…

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49

Consider reading my last post which i summarize the whole pros and cons of the platform … i think coda is far superior for long term and i think in my humble opinion just calendar in coda sucks lol

50

I struggle to understand the repeated comments from various people about things being “slow” on YouTube.

There are videos available from beginner to advanced topics, why reinvent the wheel?

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51

I really like Coda and find it far cleaner, more fun, and more visually appealing than Notion

However I agree that Coda’s roadmap is hazy and it would be nice to know more about their short- and long-term vision and what features are coming up. I understand how this vagueness may lose them some users

52

Youtube is the 2nd search engine in the world , lacking videos about coda for more than a year is very concerning, this feels less community engagement, less updates in the platform, and overall lack of relevant. Thats said, even in Google the 1st search engine coda remain silent in written format too… the most well established either this community or sometimes reddit community but there is no websites, blogs, landing pages, courses about coda anymore. This repeated comment shows a problem need to be solved either by someone like you ( who has better experience ) or by coda.

I’ll provide 2 cases of competitors creators :
August Bradley :

this creator for example taking notion very seriously and has been promoting kinda a new way for personal organization system and using notion as the tool for that system… i understand that system does not work for anyone but at least showing his usecases inspire more people to use notion / get customers either for his system or notion knowledge.

Thomas Frank Explains :

This is a productivity influencer which changed his whole direction of content into explaining notion which as very successful compared to his old productivity business. He has courses, template (main product), and now he is building notion chrome extension which is fascinating from what i have seen about it.

Those are the pioneers but there are many others which push the boundaries of the platform. Those are the voices which the company hear and build their roadmap based on them. Dedicating your whole company in a platform is as saying the future will be in the platform and ill bet on it. Coda infleuncers are not like that in my humble opinion at least if they have business they are working secretly. This is a pain point in the community and i would encourage anyone to solve it instead of silence them.

Lets say you believed in this platform as those believed in notion, there are many ways to benefit the community in many topics and you can master one or master them all… this could be :
1- Building system from A to Z ( This can be personal, professional like the previous cases)
2- Teach certain use cases in depth like grid, table, formula, relation combining knowledge with actual usage of the platform
3- Packs creation!!! no need to detail but 10year platform with only 4-5 videos about packs creation this is just a shame … even teaching how to use packs is important … i don’t think there is videos about using packs like human… even coda’s videos are just a shame… either packs are weak feature or its not important feature to be ignored that much!
4- System integration like how to integrate other platforms with coda doc this include the uprising platform like xano, supabase, zappier, n8n, openAI, Lama, and alot more which already some of them has packs but no body knows about them.
5- News, New feature, Q&A, Tips & Tricks.

To be honest, your comment just saying there is no much content to talk about in this platform while something like Excel has Alooooot to offer… if you just search for excel in youtube rightnow, you will find things in this week not month or querters or like coda in a year…

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53

Agreed and I think Coda is missing out on a large user base by not catering more to bloggers and website creators too

Coda’s app-like interface is really unique and appealing for blogs and websites, and as a writing tool it is extremely efficient. As a blogger myself, Coda’s interface is one of the best I’ve found and most enjoyable to use.

We need more SEO, CMS, and writer-oriented plugins imo. This would help Coda compete with Notion and Obsidian Publish better - which many YouTube influencers are also promoting

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54

Obviously Notion is a much more dynamic ecosystem, but I don’t agree at all that somehow the current situation has anything to do with what you call ‘Coda influencers’ not being as motivated or talented as the ones from Notion. Just to name a few, we have top people like @Paul_Danyliuk or @Scott_Collier-Weir who have created great content on Youtube and on the written form @Christiaan_Huizer continues to go strong, publishing very insightful posts every few days on Christiaan Huizer – Medium.

The sad truth is that Coda, despite being awesome, is too niche and doesn’t have the critical mass to support a creator economy, like Notion. Creating content is very time consuming, specially Video, and creators would need to have enough return of investment, not only to subsist but to excede the cost opportunity of doing something else that brings real money, like working on client projects. This isn’t the case for most, obviously.

Notion seems to have several order of magnitudes more users than Coda in the consumer market and almost impossible to revert in the short or mid term, since its the result of decisions taken many years ago and the compounding effects over time. These are some of those decissions from my point of view that offer a stark contrast with Notion:

  • Lack of a reasonble free plan (until recently): Who wants to spend the time to set up a template that a creator built, even if it’s free, that will stop working in a few months because you reached the rows limit?
  • Wrong marketing strategies: Maybe people didn’t experience the limits because they didn’t even get to discover Coda
  • Steep learning curve: Maybe enough people discovered Coda but were discouraged by the steep learning curve or the lack of ui polish

Maybe that’s why Coda seems to be giving up on the consumer market and focusing on enterprise features. Let’s see how the next few months go.

But anyway if you want to try to help with the situation, I think you don’t need to be a community champion to create content. I’m sure that people who don’t know Coda or just started would benefit from your experiences in your few first months using Coda and am sure they would appreciate your enthusiasm :wink:

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55

In French we have a YouTube for coda :wink:

in France we are building a community (discord, slack NoCodeFrance,…) Build pack, template (fr), …

for the creation of packs, the developers are concerned and I’m not sure that many people see the videos.
Coda has a very good doc for their packs.

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56

+1000

Focusing exclusively on the corporate segment seems to me to be an even more complex task and does not relieve the responsibility of creating quality and simple solutions. This situation is deeper than it seems at first glance. In the example of Notion, the development of the consumer segment created a consumer impulse, which in turn significantly influenced the enterprise segment and triggered an entire chain of interconnected events.

The focus on simplicity, accessibility, and convenience made the product popular among individual users and small teams. People actively began using this tool, gaining skills that became part of their professional toolkit. These skills were then transferred to the corporate world when those users became individual specialists or moved to larger companies in higher positions, where they started demanding similar solutions.

The simplicity of use allowed users to learn the platform more quickly, which, in turn, boosted the product’s media presence. A wealth of user-generated content began to appear. This contributed to the organic growth of the product’s popularity on social media and educational platforms. The community thus became an important asset: optimizing the product for the consumer market led to the formation of an active community that not only used the product but also spread knowledge about it.

All this led to the raising of user experience standards, as a product designed for the mass market with simple interfaces, flexibility, and intuitiveness becomes a kind of benchmark. Corporate clients, in turn, began to expect the same level of convenience and efficiency in complex enterprise solutions. This is precisely what now forces major players to adapt their products, making them simpler to use, more modular, and more flexible. Just look at Notion’s main competitor, ClickUp.

This approach has also expanded the responsibility zone of specialists. Such a product now requires less effort for implementation, and users themselves start developing their workflows. Professionals began taking on tasks previously performed by IT departments, and this “self-learned” experience transferred to the enterprise segment, where specialists no longer wait for complex implementations but instead propose ready-made solutions themselves.

In this chain, it is clear how the consumer market can influence the enterprise market and how it can be genuinely beneficial. Personally, I believe this is precisely what the Coda team is missing.

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57

HI @SALEM_MALIBARY

How much are you willing to pay for a monthly subscription to a YouTube Channel?

P

58

I am one of the few that can track interest in ‘all things Coda’ via my blog posts on Medium which I share often on X. I don’t mind to share that the interest for my work is declining already for quite a while. Besides a repost and like on X, there is no support and that combined with the little interest in my many contributions (it is rare I receive feedback), makes it unlikely to make money with a YT channel or something else.

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59

It’s a pity that this is happening. Your posts are very high-quality and useful.

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60

What do you think the solution is to a problem like this?