It’s been an eventful year at Super. We’re very excited to share the highlights and accomplishments of 2021 with you!
This past year has been Super’s second in business. In it we’ve worked tirelessly to make our customers happy with many new features and platform improvements. Along the way we’ve hit milestones, validated the notion-as-a-site concept, and inspired many people to build products in this market we pioneered.
We can’t however take all the credit for our accomplishments. We couldn’t have done it without the support of our amazing community! We’re very grateful to all our customers, theme builders, power users and the Super community as a whole for the constant support, kind words, feature requests, and bugs reports you’ve given us in 2021. Together we’re making great innovations in no-code websites and helping build a faster and better web.
Platform Improvements
It’s been a long year for the Super product. Our platform has grown a lot since its early days of being a simple proxy. We’ve pushed updates almost every week this year and often multiple times per week. The most noteworthy updates are:
- Super Static - The option for fast and powerful sites we offer came out of beta at the beginning of 2021 along with support for page properties and site search. At the time this was called “Super Static” but now it’s our main product.
- New Dashboard - To house this new product and all its future updates we completely redesigned and rebuilt the dashboard from the ground up. Version 2 of our dashboard has enabled us to build powerful and enjoyable experiences like site previews and enhanced code injection. The architecture of our dashboard uses industry leading techniques and technologies which will allow us to continue building powerful features and beautiful experiences for years to come.
- Automatic pretty URLs & per page settings - Before 2021, URL slugs needed to be manually created if you didn’t want the ugly Notion page ID to be used. This process is all automatic now and slugs are generated from page titles in a smart way. When pages are registered in Super - manually or automatically - settings can be applied to them individually. These settings used to only be possible on a site-wide level.
- Augmenting Notion - It’s cool turning Notion pages in to state-of-the-art websites optimized for SEO and speed, but whats even cooler is adding more capabilities on top of that. Some of our favorite additions have been password protected pages, RTL support for Hebrew & Arabic, and a custom navbar builder.
- Free sites - Previously the only thing free offered by Super was a 7 day trial but along with the new dashboard and other V2 features we launched the free super.site subdomains. Every site gets one and each account can set up a free site with one and no payment commitments.
- Notion parity - Over the year we’ve worked hard to support all of Notion’s features. Since Notion is always adding more this is a moving target. Some of the more complex one’s we added this year are calendar support and database view switchers.
The Super Builder
No-code website builders always have an easy to use drag & drop interface for creating pages. Due to the nature of Super using Notion, making something like this in the dashboard is nearly impossible, but Super felt incomplete without this kind of functionality. To us impossible only means we needed to think a little more creatively.
A few months ago we introduced the child of our out-of-the-box thinking. The Super Builder is a collection of components, themes, and a drag & drop interface for building pages completely within Notion. The template can be duplicated for free and used in any way, with or without Super. However when used with Super extra features become available.
The Super Builder is the fastest way to build and maintain a rich website using Notion, since launching this free part of our product we’ve continued to release updates adding more components and themes.
Community & Ecosystem
A product is only as strong as the people who use it. Connecting with our community and fostering its ecosystem of designers and creators is a really important part of what Super is about. We’re delighted that many creators have been inspired to make their own products on Super or utilize it for their own businesses. Over 30 beautiful templates and themes were added to the Super Market by us and featured designers in the last year for many different use cases.
For lots of people, commercializing the content they had in Notion was just not possible. With the support of our community we've helped bring together a group of people who are supportive of one another in solving some of these integration challenges. With the launch of our discord server late in the year, we've seen even more people engage and support one another in their quest to build the best version of their sites.
The Super Company
2021 was an important year for Super as a business. Building this fully bootstrapped start-up into a growing business capable of supporting people committed to its mission is an achievement we are tremendously proud of and grateful for.
Our growth has allowed us to expand the team bringing on dedicated support, product management, design talent, and developers. The team is 100% remote with every member living in a different country.
We closed over 5000 support tickets this year with our response and resolution times dropping by over 5 hours to 8 hours on average. Answering support requests has allowed us to form a clear and structured vision of where our customers need us to take Super, and where we want to go.
Our engineering efforts have made Super among the most performant platforms on Vercel, our hosting provider, with help from their amazing team. Of course none of this would be possible without the incredible work Notion’s team does building a wonderful product and vibrant community. Notion-as-a-site is here to stay and the possibilities of integration between of our platforms is extremely compelling. We also got shoutouts from Notion which was pretty cool.
Super is on its way to becoming the go to place for Notion users to make websites. We’re committed to providing you with the easiest and most elegant solution for creating lighting fast, powerful and highly optimized websites using the latest and greatest in web tech without needing any coding skills. Thank you for being part of this journey and stay tuned for lots to come in 2022!
