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Category: Productivity Tips
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If you are a VC that invests in cuttingedge technology, but your own systems are still stuck in the '90s, well, you've come to the right place. Hey, I'm Matias and I'm building Europe's number one notion consultancy.
It's our job to make your job easier.
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And we do this by building optimized notion workspaces and helpful automations so that your Dflow becomes easy to manage, your world-class team doesn't have to waste hours on manual data entry, and so that you can finally escape the hamster wheel of countless
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admin tasks. In short, we help you get back to investing.
We've already worked with a lot of asset managers, for example, Ras Media or Xand, the VC behind funds for people like Kevin Hart and KSK. In this video, I'm going to walk you through everything you need to
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know to go from an empty page in Notion to a fully functioning operating system. It's a bit of a long video because I really go over everything.
No jumping ahead. You can follow along step by step and build all of this yourself.
Or if you don't have the time and want us to
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do this for you, well then just let me know. My team and I would love to be a help here.
But for now, back to the video. We've split it into three parts to make it easier to follow.
First, we'll have a quick big picture overview of the thing that we're actually going to build. So, you get an idea of how
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these different building blocks build towards it. Then second, we're going to take a deep dive into the notion setup.
Both the databases that you need to power the system and the dashboards to actually use it. And then last but not least, we're going to take a quick sneak peek at a few helpful automations that
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you can start to implement to make your life that much easier. Ready?
Let's go. We have a central landing page for our team that allows everyone to quickly dive into the specific funds, right?
See the most recent deals that have entered the DFlow and of course jump into any
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active projects. If you look for example at a specific fund, we can see okay, these are the companies that are in our portfolio here.
These are the LTS that have invested and in previous stages right we can see okay these are the deals that we need to investigate for this one. We can also right as individual contributors see everything
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that is assigned to us whether that's tasks, deals, project but any moving piece in the system will have a way to be tied back to us. So so everyone has a single source of truth for their setup and we have of course a way to manage our default right from quick insights
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analytics over the ability to see okay these are the last deals that we have to adding them quickly to your own task list right setting up meetings tasks and everything around it. So how do you actually build this?
When designing any advanced system in notion, we need to
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borrow some best practices from software development. A great notion workspace has a scalable back end and an intuitive front end.
The back end is your data infrastructure. So all the databases that will capture all the important information that you need to run your VC
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firm. The front end, on the other hand, is how you're going to interact with all of that information.
Sounds a bit complicated and abstract. Well, no worries.
It will become clear in a second. So let's go ahead and start building this out in notion.
When building out any database system in
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Ocean, your first thought should always be what kind of information do I actually need to track? And this will very much depend on how you want to run your fund.
But there are certain general databases which will probably make sense in this situation. And I started to list
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some of them out just to show you how to think about them. In terms of VC specific databases, we probably need a way to track your deals or investment opportunities, your current portfolio, the different funds that you're running.
Uh then in sort of like a general CRM
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functionality, companies and contacts, ulps, and then sort of like to illustrate a point I'm talking about that in a second, due diligence. After that, you also then have general databases, right, which will you which will be encountered in pretty much any company setup.
Um but of
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course they're relevant here as well. Tasks and projects for your project management, docs and meetings for your knowledge management and then updates and team directory as two supportive databases.
The idea being that you want to figure out what are all the different you know data points that are flowing
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through your company that you need to track and make sense of when it comes to optimizing your day-to-day workflows. You can either create your own list, right?
go sort of through things that you think are relevant or what I would recommend right if this is the first time you're setting up something like this go with this default list that I
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have here for you and then think about are there one or two extra things that you want to add but also don't overdo it right this is a great starting point for it and the beauty of it is that this is a very modular system so you can always build on it later down the line once you have that list of databases you want to
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go through every database and figure out okay what is the information that I actually need to track on here Let's take the example of tasks. In the task database, you of course have well the actual task, but what major information needs to be in the system.
For example, for a task, we need to know who is
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responsible for this, right? So, the owner of a task.
We need to know what is the due date for this task. We need to know the status, right?
When is it supposed to happen? And then probably we need to know the context, right?
And then with context uh we could mean the
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project it belongs to right or maybe the um portfolio company it belongs to or the deal right this is these are probably like the main elements that you will have tasks for in your list and then you make sure that you can assign it to the corresponding entity. Let's
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take another example for contacts. Well, we definitely need the contact itself, right?
That's sort of the given on it. But the other information that we might care about is for example the email maybe the phone number, the location might be relevant, the LinkedIn profile,
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the company right that this contact belongs to, maybe also uh an industry and then probably since this is a generic contact database where we might have like a lot of different type of contracts in there, contacts in there, the type, right? Is this contact a potential investor?
Is this a potential
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founder? Right?
who do are we actually keeping track of to further break down our CRM. Now, when going through this exercise, the biggest mistake that you can make is to create too many properties.
When you are in notion and you start building out these systems, you often have this moment where you're
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like, okay, I can start to track everything. So, you create, you know, 90 different properties to capture every potential angle uh around uh, you know, like a different entry.
And then later you realize, well, if this data isn't filled, right? uh then it doesn't do anything for me and maybe even if it's
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filled it might be completely useless in 99% of use cases and only sometimes be very tangibly uh relevant for a workflow. So to get started my recommendation is to keep it to sort of the minimum viable properties the minimum viable information that you need
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to work with that individual entry. Right?
What do you need to absolutely know about a contact so it makes sense in your CR? What do you need to absolutely track about a task in your project management system so that nothing falls through the cracks and then start with that you can always
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later very easily add more properties to add more complexity also once your team is getting used to the system right there will be a lot of more opportunities where people say well can we start you know tracking this because it would help me do why these are then the moments to listen for but in the beginning keep it better simple now I
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went ahead and filled this out for the whole list And before we now dive into building these databases, let me just point out a few patterns. First, you might notice that we will have on pretty much every database an owner property.
And that's because notion is amazing at
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building systems of accountability. In fact, as a rule of thumb, I would say pretty much every database that you set up in notion should have always an owner property to indicate who is responsible for that.
And this owner property should be set to only allow one person because
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if everyone is responsible then no one is responsible. So it's very important right that you have a clear single responsible person for every entry.
Another thing that you might notice is that a lot of these properties database have status properties right that allow us to build these pipelines to move
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people through. For example the deals right have their own deal stages.
Um the portfolio ones will have their own um status property to indicate where they are in the life cycle. Uh funds same here and another element is then that a lot of these databases are related among
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each other. Right?
I've showed you earlier this um flowchart of how all the databases tie in together. And this is how we're going to build this out.
And one thing to keep in mind there right is that we want to avoid double data entry. So if we have certain information
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already on the contacts database then there's no need to add it again elsewhere. So for example a deal doesn't need uh an email right for the person that we reach because we will get that from the contact.
Same for um for example an LP right the LP will also be
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related to uh our contacts. So we can get all that you know core person data from that property.
But enough of the theory now let's dive into the actual building part and start creating these databases. So you see how it all comes together in action.
Now in order to
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create your very first database, you can simply press enter once or twice here top of the page and then type / database and then we will create an inline database. Now very importantly we only do this in the initial page of it where we build out the whole system.
Later we
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will turn all these databases into their own individual pages and move them into a back end so that our workspace is very clear and organized. But in particular for this like initial buildout, it's helpful to have all the databases on one page, one below the other because you
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might have to jump back and forth quite a bit. Often as you build out these systems, you will remember that you actually forgot to add a property on contacts, for example, when you come to your company's database and it's just much easier than having to swap between different pages.
So just keep in mind
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this is not how the final system will look like, but for now it's exactly what we need. So the first one that we want to set up is actually our puns database because this will be a very central building block.
So we're going to click on new empty database here and we're going to build this one from scratch.
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And I'm going to show you two shortcuts afterwards to set up databases much quicker once you've gone through this initial uh prep work. So let's go back to our punt one, right?
And just pull this up here to see okay, what is it that we want to add here? First things first, you want an owner property.
So
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let's click on plus, right? Let's look for the person property.
It's here. And then let's just type owner as a name and then add that person property to it.
Perfect. You see now right if we have sort of like our first fund can now click in here and we can assign people from our company from our workspace as
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the owner. One note in general what I would recommend to do is that you for properties never leave the default icon and instead assign an icon that makes it very clear what this property is and then you use the same icon across all database for the same type.
Right? So
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you see we have owner databases everywhere. So it will use always the same icon which makes it much easier to have this consistent visual design language particularly when you have big databases.
It will make it much easier to quickly scan information. So let's just look for the other person option.
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Since this is an individual person, right, I quite like this one which makes it very clear. Okay, this is one person only.
Speaking of one person, if you click on this database and then on edit property, you will see that you have certain options and that's a general design pattern in whenever you add a property, you want to quickly check what
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are the options that I can set here just to be sure that you have everything set up correctly. In this case, what we want is a limit of one, right?
Because there should always only be one person who is responsible for it. And then we also want to set a default, right?
Because no entry should ever be without an owner.
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So to make sure this is always filled, we're going to click on default and say created by, which means now I'm in there already. And whenever a new entry is added, by default, there's one person already in.
And then you can assign it to someone else very easily, but nothing will fall through the cracks. So what
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else do we need? We need a vintage here, right?
So vintage uh here and then select the date property here. Let's maybe go with the play icon to indicate that this is where things have started.
We need the font size, right? So fun size.
This will be um a number property
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over number property. Right?
If we click over here, for example, we can see okay, we can change type of number. We can change the decimals.
I'm happy with this one for now. Right?
Size, let's actually maybe use the weight um for this one. And for the vintage here, date properties, same game here as well.
Right? All the free settings look pretty
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good to me. But if you could change right the date format if you wanted it differently and then we have committed capital and deployed capital.
Now interestingly both of those will be different type of properties that kind of special ones for which we need some of the other databases but we can
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already go ahead and create these as placeholders if we want. So let's add um committed uh capital as a text property in a placeholder and let's add deployed capital as a placeholder text.
Then
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target sectors. This we can already fully add.
Let's click on plus. Whenever we want to be able to select something, our options in are either the select the select property or the multis select depends on whether you have one or several options.
Now, since we have target sectors, right, plural, we will
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probably want to be able to select from a list of multiple options. So, let's go for this.
Uh, and let's call this um target sectors the here. Maybe take a construction like a a crane, right?
Might be a nice one
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for this for the sector. And then let's add the fund status.
Before I add a status though, one quick side note, uh you might have caught me adding a property first. So for example I can also click on status then adds it with the default name but then you can always click on an entry right again and then
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rename it to something else. So if we wanted to call this fund status right we could and here we see if we understand status property notion by default will give us always these three not started in progress and done but we can now modify it.
So for the fund status right this would probably be the first status
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would be um planning right then in progress we probably need several we might be in sort of we might be raising couple right we might be um deploying or investing right uh actively investing uh
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and then we might have also a managing uh stage we can reorder them in whatever order we want we can also change the colors right raising might be yellow uh actively investing blue. Okay, man purple.
And then for uh done, let's call
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this closed. And this is the general idea, right, of how you can create your own pipelines uh in these um yeah, for these status properties.
And there you have it. Our first database is pretty much already done right for now.
We will probably add a few more properties as we
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go and uh you know, build out the rest of the system. But this looks pretty good.
What we can do now quickly before we move on to the next is maybe reorder the properties. we can do so by simply dragging them in whatever order we want.
Right? The status, we might actually want to see this at the in the very front of the database.
Alternatively, we
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can always click on settings here and then on property visibility. And that allows you also to sort of like move these things around a bit quicker um than otherwise.
But yeah, this is a pretty good starting point. So now let's move on to our deals database and look at a shortcut to creating this.
Now
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since we already went through the hard work of defining the properties that we want on this, let's just quickly copy this for now and then go again here right and type again / database and this time use the build with AI option. Now this is only available if you have
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notion AI active on your workspace but can really help shorten your execution time. So in this case we can now describe what kind of database you want and what we want is please build us an database to track deals/
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faculties uh in VC term use the following properties and then we can paste what we already worked on. Now this pasting is really important.
If you just ask it to build you add database for then as
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always with AI right it will go off and think what's best and the general rule of garbage in garbage out applies here as well now that doesn't mean it's always bad to do this right there might be situations when you have no idea what properties you might want to track and then it's nice for first idea but most
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of the time right I would really recommend to be very conscious about what properties do you actually need and start with that and then tell AI what it should do so we're going to hit enter And now we can to watch it build this. And how closely it aderes to the prompt
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varies sometimes a bit, right? Sometimes it's exactly what you need rather than just follows it to the tea.
Sometimes it deviates a bit and adds more properties or it forgets something, but still it should get you 80% of the way there. It's also quite good at already assigning icons and building some views.
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We'll get to that in a second. So it's definitely will shorten your development time but just keep in mind that you definitely want to check the output right to make sure it looks correct.
So here it has set something up for us and it also suggested some additional properties for us right so for example
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deal nodes. Now I would put this into description but if you wanted a separate one we could now just turn this on here right we see our little preview of this database here and then when we're happy with it right we can click on continue here we also see that we have some options for additional views but again
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we'll touch on that in a second so for now we're just going to ignore this click on done and then we see with just a few clicks we have our second database here now this won't be perfect right so let's go through it and double check it first owner property generally good but what did we say we always want this icon
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So let's click in there. Let's swap the icon to our default owner icon.
And let's make sure right that the limit is set to one person and the default is created by. So quicker to do it ourself.
But right this step is important. For company it just add a simple text property.
That's fine. Right?
This will
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be a placeholder. We will create our own um company database later and then related.
So we can ignore this for now. D stage.
Let's see whether it actually got the ones that we wanted. Right.
So I believe for deal stages. Let's pull this up to the top.
We had um sourced initial
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review. Perfect.
I got that deep dive, IC prep, IC decision, term sheet, due diligence, and closing. Perfect.
That's pretty pretty impressive, right? That stuck to all of them.
When I look at this now, I realize one thing that I forgot, right? Let's also um add a
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second completed stage, which will be rejected, right? So, this would be a red colored one.
And then we probably want to um change uh one of the due diligence colors to something else. Um maybe due diligence is instead like a purple or like a
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an orange maybe something that we haven't used there. Deep dive.
Okay, that's fine, right? We might want to align them a bit better.
But in general, that's pretty good. Initial review is also in progress though, right?
So, uh let's let's do this and then click out of it. But pretty nice.
That was much quicker than doing scratch. Industry, it
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already created a select property and gave us a few options. So, that's great.
Although, you will probably want to go in there, right, and adjust this to the industries that you invest in. target investments.
That looks good. Revenue, that also looks good, right?
A fund. Now, here it just made something up, right?
It's a text property. But that
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doesn't matter because now we can actually, since we have funds already set up, create our first advanced property. To do this, let's go in and let's uh change this fund property from a text property to a relation.
So now to do this, let's click on fund. Let's say change type and let's pick here the
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relation option. A relation allows you to connect one database to another and basically tell notion that an entry in database A has something to do with an entry in database B.
What that relation is right that's up to you to define but this connection is so important. So in
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our case we want to be able to relate this to our funds database. So this is what I'm going to select right funds.
And here what we want to do is we want to turn on two way relation which means that both on the fund database it will show an option to select a deal and on the deal database it will give us an
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option to connect to the fund which is 99% of the time the sort of default that you want. So let's click on add relation and see what happens.
First we notice that the text disappears that wasn't here. We also get this new icon which is the default relation icon.
They're going
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to replace this in a second. And you see on funds we have now also this new property deals and if I click in here I'll see all my options from deals there right and if I click into here to the fund I see all my fund option and I can
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start linking them. So I could say right this one belongs to the first fund and we see it pops up here and this one also belongs to the first fund and will pop up here as well.
So that's kind of the base idea of how to create relations in notion and we'll touch on a lot more use cases for this but it's one of the most
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fundamental important principles when building advanced notion systems. Now it might seem minor right now but we need to do something about the icon here again because this is the default relation icon.
We will have dozens of relation all over the place and we can't have them all look the same. Instead,
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the golden rule is when you create a relation to another database, it should by default always have the main icon quote unquote of that other database. So, what is the default icon for a fund?
Well, we haven't set one yet. So, in this case, let's actually just go with
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this circle with a dot. I like this as sort of like a a neutral one.
And then for a deal opportunity here, we could go with maybe the rocket, right, to indicate, okay, this is a cool opportunity. So whenever in the future right we reference deals anywhere it will have a rocket whenever we mention
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funds anywhere it will have this and again I'll touch on a few more use case for this but it will make it much easier to quickly identify what is what later down the line now contacts will also be a relation but we haven't set up the database so we can skip that for now description is a text property this is
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perfect uh it's already pre-filled with sample data one quick note right if I right click this um there's this option to wrap text in view right which basically makes span which is particularly useful for longer text properties. It will depend on the specific way that you want to see the data, right?
Whether this is something
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that you want to have or not. We'll talk about different view options in a moment.
But just as a quick side note, um the thesis it also took um Whoops, where did it actually go? Did I I think I I hid it by accident.
So, let's bring this back. Yes.
So, whenever you you can hide properties, again, something we'll
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touch on in a moment, you can always bring them back by clicking on the settings and then property visibility. for thesis.
It added um a text property, but what I wanted here is a select because I wanted an option to select sort of like if you have like two or three core investment thesises, right?
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And you want to be able to track, okay, which lead fits in which one. Um I think a select property is nice.
So in order to change this, I'm actually going to delete the content here quickly and then I'm going to say change type. Please give me a select property.
And then for my thesis, right, I can just create some options. So this is one uh this is two
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and this is three. They behave very similar to the way that a status property behaves.
You can click on edit right in here. You can now change the options.
You can change the color if you wanted to right uh maybe yellow uh green and purple. Um and then have an easy
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option right to select one and will always be one or the other thesis. If you would like to be able to assign several remember multis select is your friend.
Business model. Let's leave the text one.
Initially, I actually thought this should be a tech a select one as well. So, have to select is it a marketplace?
Why? This is a SAS company.
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But depending on what kind of companies you invest in, you might not need this, right? If you just invest in SAS, then having this as a separate property is redundant because it gives you information that you don't need.
So, in this case, maybe a free text to just expand a little bit on it might be nice. Reason to reject here.
Um, I definitely
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uh want like a select property. So, let's switch this to uh select.
And let's say for example um you know business model uh not convincing or uh valuation
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valuation all right too high whatever the typical reasons are right if you want to track them later uh you know why do you actually reject these can generate some interesting dashboards based on this notes is fine as a text property and yeah now we're done with our biggest database probably in the
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system and much quicker thanks to the help of AI Now, as promised, a second way to speed up the creation process, and that is through other AI tools and the MCP. If you don't know, MCP stands for model context protocol, and it's
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basically a handbook for other tools uh like claude or checkpt on how to control the notion API. So, instead of using notion AI to do this, right, we can also tell an AI to like claude to please generate a database for us.
Right here, I have my instruction in there. Please
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set up a database named portfolio. I've copied the instructions again on the properties in there to make sure it knows exactly what to do and I can hit enter.
It will maybe ask me to confirm a security setting. Sometimes uh when we do this for the first time, it's necessary and then it will go ahead and
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create that database. And then we can look on our actual notion page, right?
We'll probably pop up here at the bottom in a moment um with all the properties hopefully. And it's one additional way, right, of how you can just speed up this process for your build steps.
If you want to know exactly how to set this up,
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uh I'll leave a link for this in the description, but these tools make it easier all the time. So probably by the time that you watch this, there's already an easier way where you can just go through the settings here, right?
To do this. But now here it is, right?
We have our database. It is here.
You see actually it was created as its own page. So what we're going to do, so we're
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going to just pull this up to our other databases. And then in order to be able to easily go through the properties, right, and see what we have there and what we need to change, we're going to turn it into an inline database.
We'll do this by clicking on the six dots here and then saying turn into inline
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database. And here it is, right?
our portfolio database and let's check here for the properties how good of a job claude did versus um notion AI. So we see we have our status property.
Let's pull this to the beginning. But the first thing we might we notice already
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right status is a select property. It's not the correct um uh status property.
So again right just as with notion I we need to go through it make sure it is all correct. So let's actually add in here as an option.
Let's then go in here and say change this property to a status
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property. What are the statuses for um uh you know a portfolio we want.
Well uh we have sort of like uh not started that we can delete right this will not be necessary. So let's delete it.
We will have active. That's perfect.
Let's set this as the default. So anything in here
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right will always be on active and make sure that this is our sort of um in progress step. Exited.
That's good. Written off.
Let's add both of these to the complete step. Let's add and delete this default one.
And then we need sort of like a to-do option, right? If we
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want to actually we can also skip it all together. Maybe make sense because the second something is a portfolio company, right?
It will probably be an active in progress one. Let's just delete this last option here and then go with these three options, right?
Um maybe we want to swap the colors around uh to make
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sure that green is always like a done step. Um but otherwise, this looks good.
Let's keep going. B seat for checkbox.
Yes, this makes sense. Company placeholder database.
So, we don't have our company database just yet. Current valuation.
Uh, exit date, exit return.
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All good. Fund.
Nice. It set up that relation property.
Right. This is one thing that Claude and CHP can already do through the MCP.
What notion AI currently won't be able to do. So, particular as you go later down the list, right?
You want to make sure your databases are correctly related. This is
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a benefit. But, of course, we need to make sure we have the correct icon here.
So let's swap fund icon out for this one. Um let's also make sure that this is a two-way relation.
Yeah, perfect. That's nice.
So here again, right, we can select now that this is part of our first fund as a company. We have our
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initial investment, investment date, owner, ownership. All looks good, right?
Owner again, we need to go in change that property to this one. Make sure we have our limit set to one and the default for created by.
But otherwise, uh, again, right, just as with No AI, a quick way to speed up the database
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creation process. All right, so I've asked AI to create also a bunch of other databases for us based on our instructions and what we initially uh laid out here just to speed up the process.
But now, let's go through them and make sure everything is set up the right way. First up, companies.
This
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will be a very central part of our CRM. So, let's make sure it's correctly connected.
We had both on deals and portfolio placeholders for this, right? So let's make sure they are correctly connected here.
Company, let's change this from this text property to relation. We want related to companies
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uh both ways. Yes, please add relation.
And then as the icon, right, let's add maybe the factory to indicate a company always. And on the company's database, right, let's go in here, look for deals and make sure deals is correctly um associated with a rocket.
Same again for
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portfolio. We can do this from both sides.
So we could also if we don't have a placeholder here uh I think I accidentally deleted it. You could also do it from companies, right?
Let's click on here. Create new property called uh portfolio.
Make this um a relation to the portfolio database two-way and
30:05
relation. And same game here, right?
Make sure that for portfolio um let's actually I think use a briefcase. I don't think we have an icon for this yet.
And then on the other way from portfolio to um the companies, let's make sure we have the factory here again. And you see how this is starting
30:20
to come together with our interconnected entries. Now the reason actually why we have companies as a separate entry and that we relate both from portfolio and from deals to it is that this uh you know separate companies database is a great place to just have all the generic
30:37
general information that we relevant things like the location right the contact and so on and so on. And uh we will build later a smart smart automation so that if you have a company right then it goes sort of through your pipeline of okay first it's a normal company then it becomes um a deal or an
30:52
opportunity and then it becomes a portfolio that sort of like automatically moves through this and automatically creates entries in these other databases right so you don't have to do this manually but you always have this track record back oh that's something for the last part of the video right when we build automations but just
31:07
sort of to explain this um reasoning right why we have sort of like three databases here for what in the and is all ultimately a company. Going through this further, we see that AI messed up a bit and added two contacts here.
But no worries, we're just going to delete this contact text property and then we're
31:24
going to take this relation which is already set up to the next database here and going to rename this, right? So this will be um contacts for that.
We can pick a person property, right? whichever we like maybe the two users and then here uh we make sure that the relation on the way back will be um u with the
31:41
correct icon of using the company once so now in company right let's just say we have yeah uh Apple ink we have we can add a contact here we have our location currently is a free text property if we want to switch this to a select and force always the same type we could but
31:58
it's fairly flexible on our owner right make our usual changes of adding this user icon Setting the limit to one person and the default to created by type is fine, right? We have a few options for companies in here.
We might also actually instead of having these options, maybe just um change this to
32:15
more like is this actually, you know, is it a vendor that we talk to? Is this a potential target company?
Depends really how you want to slice and dice your uh you know CRM website. That makes sense.
Portfolio, right? This this is what we already set up.
So, let's just fill this with a bit of sample data. Um, for the
32:33
location, right, let's just input Germany per second. And then for contacts, one of the cool things with these databases is that we can add them from both sides, right?
So, we could add a contact here and link it, but we can also do it here, right? So, if we want to add Finn Cook, right?
Uh, he doesn't exist yet, but we can create a new
32:49
entry. And now you see he pops up here.
It won't be the final interface, of course, right? This is very rudimentary in the back end where you kind of see like how things are coming together there.
So now that we have um the companies set up right on contacts, let's double check this database. Email, perfect.
Industry as a select property.
33:05
Exactly what we want. LinkedIn and then location, right?
Again, as a current um text property would probably make sense actually now that I think about it to change this to a select just to make it easier comparable. One thing that you see is if I had text already in there, it will turn this into a select option.
33:22
So let's do this on both sides. Both of them can be um select properties.
Here we go. Uh owner right also here.
Perfect. Go through the same rule again.
Making this um a one person uh created by default. Phone number.
And then we
33:39
have already here relation to LPS and to meeting sort of like a preview of what will come in a moment. So moving on again, right?
Let's go through a piece. Committed date, committed to fund.
That's perfect. Contact person.
We'll swap that out. Right.
this will be this icon. Um, otherwise that looks good.
And
33:55
then on LPS, we can figure out what will be our person icon for them. Maybe for LPS we do the walking person.
That's a nice one, right? Let's all this do this.
And the idea here is the same as with companies, right? Of course, an LP is also a contact.
But by separating them
34:10
in two databases, we can make sure that we have the general contact information of them all in this one single CRM database. and then the dedicated specific information about what makes them an LP in here.
And again, where we can add an automation later to move a contact very quickly into the LP
34:26
database so that we have no problem whatsoever there, right, to keep track of all these connections. Now, there's one last thing that I didn't get quite right about LPS and that's this committed to fund, right?
It made this a text property, but actually what I want here is I want to be able to connect an LP to a fund. So, we're going to change
34:43
the type, right? It will be a relation uh and will be a relation from the LP to um our fund right let's search for this database here it is to a relation right add a relation make sure here right since it relates to fund that we have this icon and then we can go all the way
34:59
up right to our very first database that we set up here and we see now we have also LPS so for LPS we're going to change this um into our running person and then our portfolio um company right portfolio we add and update this for our
35:15
um icon with the briefcase. Now I know this was a lot so let's just take an opportunity to quickly zoom out and look at what we actually built.
We kind of built the VC specific part of this um operating system and we have our funds
35:32
and our funds have LPS and they have portfolio companies. our portfolio companies um spring from a deal right and are linked to a company and of course the deal I forgot it's actually here to visualize right is also linked to a company so this is sort of like
35:48
this has the general information about any type of company and it can be then become a portfolio company or idea we also have contacts which just like basically everything links to contacts in some way shape or form because at NLP at a portfolio company at a just generic
36:03
company and at a deal opportunity we will always have a contact person. So, you know, looking at it like this, it hopefully becomes a bit clearer what it is that we actually build here in notion.
Um, and on the notion side, right, it's really just about making sure that every single one of these entries has all the database properties
36:20
that you need. And then it has the relations to the other databases that are relevant.
Now, one relation that we haven't created yet, but which we probably should create just to be, you know, a bit more disciplined with it is to make sure also a piece, right? LPS might will probably be companies as
36:35
well, right? So here we would need to add this relation at the very end to in the same way as we do with contacts, right?
Have these oops um uh companies be uh connected to everything. Just track the general information.
But again, here's also where your preference
36:51
comes in, right? If you look at this and say like actually I don't need this for a piece, well, the world is yours, right?
Like this is your notion system. You can just as easily skip this part.
You can make sure this data model works for your specific use case. This is just a starting point that I would recommend.
Now, we're not quite done with our
37:06
database architecture, of course, just yet. Besides the VC specific elements uh of it, we of course also have the general databases which will be present in pretty much any company setup.
So, let's literally zoom out a little bit and look at those. Right.
What we're
37:21
still missing are projects and tasks as the core project management elements and then meetings and docs as two very essential um knowledge management elements. Now for these um the relation will look much simpler, right?
We have projects at the top and then projects
37:38
can have meetings, projects can have tasks and projects can have documents. And then depending on how far you want to take it, right, you might want to be able to have tasks uh sort of like related to meetings.
So you can track in which meetings did you discuss which tasks and you might want to be able to
37:53
link also docs to task if you have specific standard operating procedures right and you want to sort of like link okay here's how you do it to a task and this sits for now a little bit isolated and next to the other system but the common connector ultimately right will be um docs and tasks because docs and
38:11
tasks and maybe meetings they can of course also be related to all these other elements. Again, it comes in down to how do you actually want to create it for your system.
But in general, um you want to think about okay, where will things become relevant? To keep this in the beginning a bit simpler, not to
38:28
overengineer it too much, let's assume for meetings, we want to be able to track which of the contacts when a meeting and then we will have meetings for portfolio companies and for deal opportunities. Tasks can also be associated other than to a project to a portfolio company or for a deal.
And
38:44
same with docs, right? Docs can be linked to a deal or portfolio.
And again, but you can expand this later on as you want, but it's a pretty good starting point. And then you see we have sort of like these two databases uh running around here on the outside.
Updates and a team directory. Both of those are pretty much quality of life
39:01
databases, right? Updates is for a very specific kind of workflow that I want to walk you through when we start building out the UI and the interface.
And team directory is just a nice to have thing, right, to keep track of who's actually, you know, in your company. um but it's not technically needed for the sort of core workflow here.
But yeah, I think
39:18
this is a pretty good representation of what we need. So now let's ask AI to create also based on our instructions uh property databases for projects, tasks, docs, and meetings.
Those will be a bit more simple. And then we're pretty much done with the back end except for one
39:34
crucial step. All right, so here are our tasks, projects, stocks, and meetings, right?
With just some very basic elemental properties for tasks. We want of course the status of the task, the owner and the due date.
And now we add the relations. Right?
So we'll have an option to uh link this to a project.
39:51
What is we will link it to our projects database that is in here. Here we go.
And if you're ever like doubtful about which project database it is, right? You will always get this like little um you know like back uh breadcrumbs in your in your workspace in case uh you have a lot of databases like
40:07
me. But ideally, right, if you're in your workspace, you should only see one project database because everything shouldn't be in one and the same.
So, turn on two-way relation. Add that.
Make sure for projects uh let's actually maybe add this as our standard icon here. And for tasks, we can add as our default icon the checkbox.
Um tasks
40:26
should also be related, right? What did we say to deals and to portfolios?
So, let's add deal as a relation, right? and pick your deals database notion for VC perfect two-way relation um that will be tasks here again right this will be the
40:43
rocket error as our icon and we have that and then the last property relation here would be the relation to our um portfolio so let's add this as well and then after we've done this
40:58
let's talk about one little trick here that is good to keep in mind and that is in this situation Right? A task could be linked to either one of those three project, a deal or a portfolio.
And that of course, right, like means uh if we like display it later in different
41:14
settings, it might be quite hard to know what this task is actually about. Now, to help us with this in these situations where we have an entry that could have one of several parents, uh we can create a property that sort of just aggregates it.
Now, in order to do this, what we're going to do is click on plus and we're
41:29
going to add our first formula property. Another really fun and little advanced trick.
And we're going to call this um let's call this context, right? And um let's add a formula property.
Let's here for the context maybe just add a
41:45
magnifying glass or something like that. And then click into edit property and then edit the formula.
And what we can do now is we can say okay depending on whether project deal or portfolio is filled show me that filled entry. There are few approaches.
Now ideally you
42:00
probably want to make sure that my task either belongs to a portfolio or a deal or a project right so it's sort of like very specific and in this case what we can do is we can write a simple ifs statement where you can say okay if project is filled then give me project otherwise if deal is filled give me deal
42:16
and otherwise if portfolio is filled give me portfolio now I'm moving quite fast here with this formula because this is not a video meant to be a deep dive into that right you can sort of just copy what I'm writing here and duplicate it and And if you um want to dive deeper into how to create notion formulas, I
42:32
have a full master class for this linked below down in description. For now, let's just click on done and see how this works.
If I now add a new task, right, sample task and we go in here and we say, okay, this is linked to let's actually create a project, right? Sample project.
We can do it right from here.
42:48
Create this, right? We have a new entry here.
We see context shows me sample project. Perfect.
But if I now have a you know like a an deal task and in this deal task I will link it to a deal right let's say to tech fusion we see tech fusion here and this will allow us right
43:04
later when we build this interface to make sure that there's one property that just displays okay this is why this task matters right this is why we do this and yet at the background still contain these several relations to different databases to have very granular control over it perfect so much for task let's
43:20
move on to projects and here we have another opportunity for a formula and this kind time for the progress formula. Now there are a few different ways to get the progress uh of a project right we can uh write a formula to look at all the tasks and see how many of them are checked or we can actually use a rollup
43:37
this is another advanced property that we haven't talked about yet but it's great to keep it in mind let's actually take a simple example first just thinking of this before we move to this formula application let's have a look at um contacts and companies let's say
43:53
right on the company database we want to show the contact email for the company and we have that information here, right, for Tim Cook. We have sort of like timapple.com.
That's his email. So, we we don't really want to like have a separate property here on companies again, right?
Where we just enter the same information. We'd
44:09
rather just look up the information based on the contact and display it here. In order to do this, let's add a new property here.
Let's click on plus and let's pick uh let's say sort of like contact email and as the option, let's choose rollup. And then let's add we can
44:25
change this right to our uh at symbol um and make sure that here we go into relation and we set up. Now the first thing that uh sorry a rollup the first thing that a rollup always needs is a relation.
A rollup always works in tandem with it. A relation tells notion
44:40
these two entries are collected. A rollup tells notion from this connection get me some information.
Kind of like a VLOOKUP in Excel. So here let's say as our relation we will pick the uh context relation then we can check what is the target what information do we want to
44:57
display here and how do we want to display it let's leave it actually at name and original and we see it just like repeats the name right cuz this is not helpful so let's click in here and change name and you see the options that we get are the properties on the contact database right from the relation that we're looking at let's say okay I want
45:12
to grab the email and show original is still what I want and now we see okay we pull in the contact email here from Tim Cooker And if we added a second contact, right? Uh if we added went in here, right, and said, "Okay, I also want Steve Jobs.
Let's create him as a new contact." And for Steve, let's say Steve
45:29
at apple.com, right? We then now see in our rollup, we will get both the contact email addresses listed here.
So that's sort of like the main use case for rollups. But in some situations like here for projects, we can also use them to calculate the progress.
And to do so,
45:46
we're going to click on here. And we change this first to um actually a roller property.
Then we're going to say okay please for the progress and actually let's get like a little chart icon here. Uh for the progress let's make sure that we look at our task relation from tasks I care about the
46:03
status and for calculation don't show me the original because I don't care right about it showing not started. Instead, I want you to go in and give me the percent per group that is completed.
Right? It currently is 0%.
But if I now
46:18
uh take the sample task and check it off, it will be at 100%. And if we added another sort of like third task, right?
And if we related it to this same sample project, we will go down to 50% because half the tasks are done and half aren't. That's pretty neat.
But let's make it a
46:34
bit nicer visually. So let's click on here again.
Let's say edit property. And let's say here right I would like to show this actually as a bar.
And now we see right that we get um next to our number property of 50% this neat little bar chart that indicates that right and
46:50
if I sort of had like another task and if we linked this to our project as well we see now right that we are at 33%. And the more we check off right the further our progress bar you know keeps going.
Again there are bunch of ways to do this. You could also do this with a
47:06
formula, but in particular if you're a beginner, it's a bit easier to do it through a rollup. Now, for talks and meetings, the drill will be the same, right?
We will create the same relations, two um projects, two deals, and portfolio companies. So, I don't want to bore you with the same walk through again.
Just one quick shout out or like notice on one thing for
47:23
meetings. You see that I've created two attendees properties and that is so that when we create a meeting we have one option a to uh add our internal people right through notion person property and then we have the external property to add people from our contact database and that allows us right to bridge the gap
47:40
between notion's internal system and person properties and the external ones that we meet with them but they are not in our system. So just as a quick side right this is sort of like the only last outlier in uh for like docs and meetings everything else works exactly the same as you see before now yeah with uh you
47:56
know this setup we have a lot of databases to work with we have pretty much all the business intelligence that we need there's just this one last step that I was referring to right that we need to set up here before we move on to building the actual interface and that are views right notion database views
48:12
are what really is going to allow us to build the rest of the system out much quicker I'm going to explain in a second why that's the case. But first, what actually is a database view?
Well, a database view in not is a way of slicing and dicing the information in a database. Let's take a look at tasks for
48:28
example. Right?
Right now, we see all our tasks here. And that's not the best way to do it.
We probably want to have some way to only show certain tasks, hide others, and not have to deal with all that information at once. Also, not all properties might always be relevant.
So in order to do this, what we want to
48:45
uh do is set up specific views for specific scenarios. For example, we might want a view with all our overdue task.
We might want a view with all our open tasks. We might want to particular team environment, right?
All the open tasks that are assigned to me. So in
49:00
order to create them, we're going to click on this little plus button here and then start creating our first use. Now I can't click on here because I might or might not leak some new notion database views.
But after you click on here, you will get the option to select a specific type of a database. We're first going to go with a table view,
49:18
right? Sort of the same type of view as we have it here.
And then set that up specifically for the scenario of I want to see only open tasks assigned to me. All right, I created this first additional task uh view, right?
My open tasks. You can rename this very easily, right?
Give it also an icon, a different
49:34
name. And now what we can do on here, right, chosen right now the same thing as before, but I can now go ahead and set filters and sorts for only specific information.
Let's go ahead apply our first filter. I would recommend to always add an advanced filter.
The only reason when you want to add a simple
49:50
filter, which you get by clicking directly on a property, is if you want to be able for the user to directly change this. So for example, right, if you want to be able that the user can select the uh portfolio that this belongs to, you would add a simple filter and this gives you this little drop down.
So someone can easily go in there and change it. But most of the
50:06
time we want to set general filters for a database, right? That should not just be easily changed by a user.
So in that case, always go for the advanced option because it gives us a lot more options to play with. And we have to click on that and then we say, okay, what do we want to filter by?
In this case, I want to filter by status, right? Wherever the
50:23
status is not done, right? Those are the tasks that I want to show here.
Pretty good, right? Now I see only the open tasks.
And on top of that, I might only want to see open tasks assigned to me. So that's a second thing, right?
But before we add this, let's actually take a look at
50:39
this. Right here we have a lot of the different properties.
Maybe we actually want to hide this. Maybe here we only want to see context.
So for that, let's click on settings property visibility. And let's turn off project deal and portfolio, right?
Which means we just have now this very simple, easy to grasp
50:54
view of open tasks plus the context in which they are relevant. in order to now add to this view, right?
The filter for me. I could just do it here, but actually I want these as separate views, right?
I want one view where I have all my open tasks and I want to have a second view where I have all open tasks
51:10
just filtered for me personally. In order to do this, let's just click on here.
And this time we can duplicate it so we don't have to build it again from scratch. And let's call this my tasks.
And one thing that I like to do is for like these messes, right, that are showing all the items that are for me, I
51:26
always like to give them the star icon again, right? for this visual uh clarity across the workspace.
Now that we've set it up, we can click on filter and we can say again, okay, here please add as an additional filter that the uh owner contains. And then now me, right?
You
51:42
could select Matias, but that will mean that on every view it will always show Matias's task. But by selecting the MI filter, you make this dynamic and whoever looks at this page will see the tasks assigned to them.
So right now that's me, right? that if Jill who's in my team, right, looks at this, she will see currently no tasks because none of
51:58
them are assigned to her. But I can assign now one to her own, right?
That means the task assigned to her disappears. It's no longer assigned to me.
But when she looks at this view, she will see it. Now, why is it so relevant that we set up these views at this point?
As you might remember from earlier, right, these databases will
52:15
live in a separate back end of our workspace. And most of the time, we will not visit the database itself to do work.
Instead, we're going to build dashboards to interact with that information. So why not just build these views on the dashboard rather than here?
Well, the reason for that is that all
52:30
views that you build on the main instance of a database will become accessible as templates later on. Let me show you what I mean.
We just quickly, you know, pretend that we're navigating away. Let's create a new page somewhere, right?
Let's call this our dashboard for whatever, right? And let's say we need a
52:47
view of our tasks on here. We going to add this, right?
This is sort of like a bit of a jump ahead for later. We're going to say create link view of database.
I'm going to look for my tasks database in my um for my notion for VC setup. And you see now okay I've pulled
53:04
in that and we have in general just this general table view right with all our properties visible but I can pick also from views on tasks which is default view but also the open tasks right filled out for everything else open and my open tasks filled out for only mine.
53:20
So by setting it up once in the back end for all our different databases, right? These most important modular views, you'll make your life so much easier later down the line because if you need this my task view in three different places, you don't have to rebuild every single time.
You build it once and you
53:36
can deploy it everywhere. Let's take a look at two more examples here.
First on our funds database at the very top, right? The default again, right, is our uh table view that we have with all information.
But maybe we want to actually have them in some situations as a gallery view. So I've already created
53:53
this here and this gallery view right again just by clicking on the plus button and then choosing gallery. And here uh what we basically get are then these big individual buttons.
And this is great as navigation right we will see this later when we start building the interface. And that's why I prefer to have in particular for these like
54:09
highlevel uh databases like funds probably also deals and portfolio always this gallery view present that allows us to yeah basically have these buttons right to open more information about it. Now we can make it a bit more interesting than just having this button.
We can click on the settings and then on property visibility then make
54:26
sure we show whatever information we care about when we want to see it in this context. So let's turn on the status property, right?
So we see when this fund uh is um you know what status it is in and then also the target sectors maybe right and then we have now a little bit of a bigger card right and
54:42
can easily choose from there. We could now of course also layer filters again on top of this.
Right? So let's actually maybe um if you wanted to run we could duplicate this and say okay I want to only see the active funds but as then we will always only have like a smaller number of funds.
I think this is good
54:57
and instead we could add just a sort right so we will have the vintage here. So let's say this was something uh in terms of a date property right let's say we start this fund uh on Jan 2025 and maybe then there's a second fund right um second fund and that one uh you know
55:15
is like now more towards today so somewhere around 1st of August maybe this is also already you know managing and here we are currently raising um and then what we can add to make sure that the second is always shown here right which right now is And yeah,
55:31
coincidentally, because it was the the new entry, we can add a sort and say, okay, please always sort by vintage year descending. And that way, right, we always get this order whenever we load in this view anywhere.
Moving on to deals, right? On deals, as you notice, we already have views set up because
55:48
here we used not to create a database. And if that's the case, no will try to give you a few sample views.
And that's quite nice, right? to get a bit of inspiration of what's possible and shows uh already one of my favorite views in particular for these kind of longer pipelines like deals which is this board
56:04
view. So again right in order to create you would simply click on plus and then choose the board view and then here what you can see is we basically have this kban uh style board view that shows me all my different entries.
So this is already quite nice but the default settings that notion AI chose
56:21
here are not my preferred way to display these port views. So, let's go into the settings and let's look at group.
Right, we see here we're currently grouping by DSH. That's perfect, but it only shows me stages where we have deals inside of it.
And that's not what I want. So, let's click on group.
And then let's
56:36
make sure we toggle off hide empty groupoups. And this means we now get our full um pipeline view here, right?
I'm also going to turn full width on on this page just so we have a bit more real estate. Now we have larger databases.
And we see now we go from source initial review deep all the way to uh our um
56:54
closing and rejected ones. Those actually I would like to not show you because those lists will both go very very long.
So again what I will do is I go to settings group and then I will turn um both of them off right. I will hide both rejected and closed but then I
57:09
will pin them right and pinning them uh will lead to them being here on the side. So I can always easily drag something in there.
Right? So let's say match a secure health platform right let's say this is a closed deal I can just drag it on top of here on the rejected one and that way right the pipeline stays clear can easily move
57:24
them to the entry where they belong but we also don't have this like ever growing endless list of deals stacking up in rejected otherwise these cards work pretty much exactly like the cards that we had up here right so we can turn on and off certain properties that we want to see so in this case we would go
57:40
to property visibility owner I like that right that is probably very relevant Um and you can just see okay what other information uh would you like to display here right is it relevant to display the contact person maybe right do you want to see beside the targets investment
57:55
also the industry uh could be useful right you can reorder the uh order here and then exactly make sure that you have all the information that you need right to make an informed decision when looking at this now whether or not you add a sort to these kind of views depends on your preferences but some
58:11
people really like to always see in alphabetical order you could do this Right? That we just like move actually now both in this uh one thing, right?
And then see, okay, let's add a sort by DN name. We could ensure that it's always in alphabetical order.
But my preferred way of sorting this usually is by last edited date. So making sure that
58:28
whatever was touched last shows up at the top because transa will be most relevant again soon. Um we don't have that property here yet though, right?
As you can see, we don't have access to it, but no worries. This is one of so-called notion's system properties.
So you can
58:43
add them at any point when you realize they become relevant. To do so, let's actually quickly go to our table view here, right?
Scroll all the way to the side. And then ah I'm just spotting we have tasks here and we haven't updated um this icon yet.
So let's do that. And then let's click either on this plus button here to add a property or
59:00
alternatively we can also go to settings edit properties and then here say new property. And what we want is this last edited time.
As you can see we also have created time as a system property. So, if you just want to sort by news ones, this is also a good one.
But in this
59:15
case, I'm going to add this property. I'm going to hide it here from my view because I don't need to see it either by right-clicking hide or by clicking on the settings property visibility and then hiding here.
But now, if I go to the sort option, right, particular on the pipeline board, we will see that I
59:32
now have access to last edited time and I can sort it in descending order, right? which means whatever deal was touched last always floats at the top of my calendar board.
Now we've seen pretty much all of the most relevant view types. There are just one big ones missing and that is the calendar view
59:48
which you probably want to add to your task or anything right where you have due dates you want to visualize them. So uh again super simple you by adding this color view to your database we can now say okay if there's a due date for example this one is due tomorrow right this one might be due today we see them then popping up in our calendar uh we
00:05
can then also go back to our properties property visibility right and turn on for example okay who's the owner of this task and what is you know the context in which this one is relevant you see also now how helpful it is to have this all in one property that way you don't need to toggle on these three different ones
00:21
um and then of course right maybe not see status of it uh actually as well in case it's not although we could just again might also say here actually since this is my calendar of things to do I probably don't want to show done items so let's add a filter to this status um
00:37
is not um complete perfect and that way right we created now this like new calendar view that we can later pull in in different places last but not least uh we have our timeline view timelines are probably most relevant on things like projects where that have a longer
00:52
duration It's exactly what it what the name tells you. It's this kind of Gant chart looking style where if you have no entries in here, right, and you say, "Okay, for the sample project, we have a certain duration." So, for example, from 1 of August and I can hold down shift and click on the 31st to set this
01:07
duration. Um, and now it will be visualized right here on my timeline.
Again, can turn on additional properties through property visibility if I wanted to. Probably not the most relevant one, right?
Unless you want to also like visualize the deal deal investment timelines but just a good thing to know that this exists. Now before we move on
01:24
I want to show you one last trick here which actually was already an automation but it's very relevant at this point and otherwise we need to go back and do a bunch of changes later. So let's talk about it now.
Assuming you have your task on your task base also one of these canon board use because you just like
01:40
the visual dragging and dropping between it. You could now of course go ahead and use the same trick that we used on the DS database, right, of hiding this done column and pinning it in order to drag uh tasks into this blast column.
But particular something with a very short pipeline like here, right, where you
01:55
have only three or four stages that a means you just have not so many things to drag between. Plus, you might also want to see the tasks that you got done most recently.
So in order to help with this and still avoid this from stacking up indefinitely, there are basically two
02:11
options. The there's one that uh involves uh takes the um last edit time and then there's one that uses smart notion automation.
That's a more robust one. So I want to show it to you here.
Basically what we want to do is on task database uh we want to add a property uh
02:28
and this will be a date property and we're going to call this uh completion date and I'm going to add it. It's anyway like a good practice to have this completion date property on uh tasks on databases that have a status and it can completed.
It's kind of a personal
02:44
preference but it's nice because then later you could go back and have a look at sort of okay how do we actually perform right what how do we track uh towards completion always. Now what we want to do is we want to click on the slash icon here and say okay um set completion right our first automation
03:01
this will be the name and the trigger for this will be that whenever um the status property is set to complete what we wanted to do is we wanted to go in and then as the action edit a property edit the completion date and then set it
03:16
to the date triggered and then we can click on enable. What this does now is that whenever we send any prop task right to done.
So let's actually move them back to a different stage right maybe this here and let's move this one now to completed. You see that in a second this will fill out with the
03:32
current date. And now this allows us to go back to our board view and set a filter.
And it will be an advanced filter where I can say okay please show here only things where the status um and actually like it's a good idea to turn
03:48
this into a group because we might want to add some filters to it in a second. Uh I'll I'll explain in a moment.
So let's say name status uh is not done which will hide everything in them or so let's click in here say or the
04:04
completion date um is relative to the date this week right that would be one option or we could say is on uh or after um one week ago right which would basically mean tasks will remain in this done column for one week and then they
04:20
will disappear so now what happens if I any task when I drag into done it will first disappear for a second because it is set to done and the automation still needs to assign a completion date but as soon as the completion date automation runs right this will pop up back here and you have this continuous log also of
04:36
things that you've completed which is just a really nice touch on there now why did I move this into um a group well this is kind of where the power of advanced filters comes in because as you can see um we have an off filter here right and so we say okay show me
04:51
everything here where it's either or was done in the last week. But now since this is in this group, I can add additional uh conditions to it like additional and conditions.
For example, if I wanted to see only my tasks here, right? I could now easily go in add filter rule, right, and say again,
05:06
right, where owner contains me. And you wouldn't be able to do this if you didn't have this in um a group because right it combines two different filter types or filters and end filters.
So, it's just a little bit of a background, right, to build more complex uh filter
05:22
rules here, so you get exactly the kind of view that you want. That was a lot of database work, but it also sets us up perfectly for the second part of our build when we're now creating the rest of the system around it, mostly the dashboards and interface.
To wrap this
05:38
part up, let's just make sure we follow the notion best practices when it comes to developing these workspaces. turning by turning all these databases into their individual pages and then organizing them in the back end.
Doing so is super simple. All we need to do is click on the six dots next to your database and say turn into page.
I'll go
05:56
through everything in a second, right? So you don't have to watch me do this.
Turn them all into um these uh individual pages and then organize them elsewhere. The reason that you want to do this is so that you a have all your master databases organized in one single place, right?
There's never any confusion around it. This will help you
06:12
also avoid duplicates, right? If someone doesn't know, do we have a database for that?
Well, there's one place to check. And second, it avoids you accidentally deleting important information because this right now, right, is our actual deals database.
So, if we delete this, the deals are gone. But later, we're
06:29
going to use a bunch of link views of deals, right? Create link to view uh and then go for deals.
We'll have this uh a lot of times. And this one with a little error, right?
This one we can delete without any worries because it's just a linked instance. Now when we build out a
06:44
system, we will often hide this part, right? To make it look cleaner and then it's really hard for someone to tell is this the original or is this, you know, a linked view and just just by making sure that there's never an original anywhere on a page or they are all separate in their own location, right?
You just eliminate this issue
07:00
altogether. Those are just like two reasons, right, for this, but just want to quickly explain why we need to go through the step of turning them into pages and moving them away.
So this is how our reworked page looks like. Now one thing that you noticed I have also added icons to all of them.
When you turn them into a page right you will
07:16
just have the default database icon there at first but then you can click on it right to change the icon. And we want to keep with our general visual design language.
So all those relations right remember that we set with a specific icon. Well let's make sure that that is also the default icon on that database.
And again we have these two database
07:32
updates and team directory that we haven't really worked with yet. Updates will uh play a role later in a moment.
Team directory is just another fairly straightforward one, right? You can sort of like fill out all the properties that you want on there for uh keeping track of your team, right?
You can add the the bio, you can add their email if you then
07:48
want to. You can create a gallery view that shows their profile pictures.
Pretty straightforward. Um so nothing to specifically uh take a look at.
And then once we have all of this done, what I would like you to do is create a new page, right? Uh let's call this our uh back end and give it an icon that makes
08:04
clear what this is, right? I like the server stack for this.
And then let's move all our pages in here. And you can do so by simply, you know, like dragging sort of like a selector around all of them.
Oops. Sometimes a bit iffy particular on if you're on the browser like I am right now.
And then we drag
08:20
everything uh in here. Right now we have all our databases organized in one place.
If you want, we can also like further break it down. So like core uh databases, right?
And um supporting uh databases. This comes in down to like how much of a data
08:36
architecture you have internally, right? But the most important thing is having it all separated in a database back end.
And now we can start building out the actual front end of our system. With this done, we can now start creating the front end for our system.
When doing this, you're basically designing a
08:53
custom intranet or a custom app for your internal team. It needs a landing or homepage.
It needs a page where people can find the most important information and all the knowledge of the company plus pages for all the individual workflows that people are supposed to
09:09
do. And here's where you can really express yourself and the needs of your team.
So take what I now show you as kind of a first inspiration and a starting point, but then try to really make it your own. Let's start by building our main navigation page.
And so in order to do this, I'm just going
09:25
to type slash page, right? And this will be sort of like home.
Uh and then I'm going to give this again right an icon just to stick with our uh design language. This one will be a house one.
And here for this main landing page, right? The first thing that you want to think about is well what is the purpose?
09:41
And it really works a lot like the landing page of an intronet right or of a website. And typically what we like to do is to treat this landing page um as a quick navigation page, right?
This is the very first page that will open when someone enters the notion workspace and
09:56
then allows them to quickly go to the most relevant parts. So the question is what is the most relevant information about your fund about your VC film right that people need to see here so that they can quickly go to the areas where they need to be.
Let's start by actually
10:11
adding here two columns to sort of like lay out the page a little bit. And then let's add um a call out to the left side.
Now, one thing that you will see like by default your callouts probably look like this. You have this gray background and the emoji.
And that's nice if you want to have like a call out
10:27
in a normal sense of like drawing attention to something. But one trick for great notion layouts is to actually click on the icon, remove it, and then also click on the six dots here and changing the color from the default back from the gray background to default.
And what this gets you is just this nice
10:43
little outline box that makes for like really great visual elements on page. And we can just duplicate this by selecting it and clicking on duplicate or pressing command D.
And now we have these two nice boxes at the top of our page. And then on the left one, we can add something like welcome to the no
11:01
home for you know like um our um PC firm. Uh on this page uh you'll find all the key information to navigate this workspace.
something along those lines.
11:17
Now, a second uh tip for creating like nice visual hierarchies on your pages is to actually think about what is the main part uh when it comes to to text, right? Maybe want to bold this and then uh to sort of like help with this uh visual hierarchy is that we can actually
11:33
highlight this part and then change the text color from the normal one to a lighter gray. And this just in particular if you have like pages with a lot of text makes it easier for your eye right to scan and sort of like jump to the most important parts and then sort of dep prioritize the lesser parts and just again makes for more balanced
11:49
experience. On the other side we might want to add some navigation to sort of the other key workflow pages for example to our company wiki to our you know like deal management page and maybe a general project management page.
So, let's just um h call this quick navigation. And
12:06
then here uh let's just add a placeholder for now. We'll come back as we build the other things out and we'll actually link them there.
What I would already like to do here now though is to add a an option to quickly jump into our funnels and an option to quickly see the latest deals that we've added because
12:22
that might be just very relevant when we're here on this homepage. So let's click below here and then let's add a new H2 heading and let's call this buts.
Then below here now where our database back end comes in. We're going to type /create link view of database and we're
12:38
going to search for our buns database that we previously set up. And once I click here, right, you sort of know what to expect.
It pulls in that database. And you see the two views that we have set up, right?
This table view and the gallery view, they already appear here as options. So I'm going to pick the gallery view because this is what I really like for navigation.
And then in
12:55
order to just make this a little bit cleaner, what we can do is we can make sure that here, right, for this view, we can actually take out the name and just put a space in there, right? And then we can swap this icon for our general fund icon.
And it gives us this very clean and minimal look. We could even go
13:12
cleaner, right, by hiding this complete UI here on the side. Um, if we wanted to, right, if you want to keep the options there, we can leave them.
And that way, right, we have a quick way to jump into our different files. Now for now this doesn't do much right if I jump into hunt there's not much here it's
13:27
just like the database properties we haven't talked about this at all there's also nothing here right to further navigate and this is now where sort of like the next very important building principle about notion comes in and that is whenever you have these kind of uh database hierarchies right where funds
13:44
remember our flowchart connects to a lot of other elements you want to be able for users to click into a fund and then see everything that is related to but everything that they need to know there and for that we need to start building our first uh notion database templates and so-called self-referential filters
14:01
to get started let's click on any of these entries uh and now that we have the front here right what we will see is okay we have all our properties here um but not much else now in order to customize this we can hover over the title a bit and then we see here customize layout and this opens this
14:16
layout builder for now which allows us to structure how all the pages in this database should look like. So we don't just do this for the second fun, right?
We do this for all entries at once. The first thing I would recommend is that we move this property group, right, of all the database properties in this side
14:32
panel. Just click move to panel.
Now it's here, right? If you just apply this to all pages, what you see happens now, right, is that we have now here our fun and there's just this view details tab on the side to look at uh everything else um that might be relevant there.
So that's the first step. Let's go back to customize layout.
And now let's think
14:48
about okay what are the properties that are so important we always want to show them here at the top and you usually want to limit it to four so it looks nice and as well stacked in order to do this we can go here to the side right and let's think about what we want to pin probably who's responsible for this right we might also want to pin the
15:05
status uh of this fund and maybe the um target sectors right we could also add the year if we want to maybe that's also an interesting thing or the p size actually probably more relevant right let's have these four elements here. Again, we can click on apply to all pages to save it.
Um, and then we see,
15:22
okay, if we now look at our second fun, right, we have those details always at the top and we can click on the three dots to learn more about it. Let's head back to our settings.
Um, the next thing that we can do is in the property group, if we want to, right, we can a we can reorder things. So, we can say, okay,
15:38
you know, deals, uh, LPS, portfolio, uh, vintage ga, we want to see this order and then committed capital and deployed capital. Just realizing also we need to still update this with formulas.
Actually uh quick we'll do it in a second. They are still the placeholder text properties.
And uh if we wanted to
15:53
we could also add sections here. For example, we could say okay uh I want to have like one section with the uh funding details right and I want to have another one with sort of the um key relations.
And that will allow us to say okay everything that is a relation
16:09
property. So deals LPS portfolio right that will be here.
And then the fun details will be in here. And that allows us then to just navigate a little bit quicker, right?
To give you a lot of information, could hide and show certain of these and makes it much easier, right, to keep track
16:24
once your databases are getting really big. To further add to this, we can now actually pull the relevant information uh from these relations uh right from the connected deals and the connected air and portfolio companies into this um view.
In order to do so, let's click out
16:40
of the selection that we have here and make sure we're in the general setup page for uh the fun one. And here you can see we can change our structure from simple to tap, which is a fairly recent notion feature that's really cool and powerful in this context.
Once I switch to tapped, you see that I have here my
16:55
content tab still, but now I have this plus option. And if I can click, if I click on plus, we have the option to pick one of our setup relations that we have already set up.
So for example we can now say okay please show me actually here now the portfolio companies right
17:11
and we will see that we get pulled in a view of uh our portfolio database with only oops uh with only the um specific portfolio companies linked to our second fund and we can test this right if we if we have this highlighted the portfolio you see we have here now our database
17:27
setup options that we are familiar with and under filter it's already set up that okay show me uh only the uh funds uh the sorry the um full companies connected to this fund. We can then customize it and we can say okay which properties do we want.
Unfortunately here we don't have the option yet to
17:43
pre-select from our pre-built views. That's a bit unfortunate.
I wish no should add it. Or we can just simply figure out okay what what portfolio information would we want to see when we look at the fund right let's hide everything uh at first we probably want to know okay who is um responsible for uh this company right what is the
18:00
current valuation what was our initial investment um do we have a board seat yep that sounds good and then maybe also the relation to the company database so that we can could jump from there to companies that might also be relevant but of course right you can design this any which way you want right we can also
18:16
like resize the properties here to our liking. So it all makes sense and when we're happy we can again click on all pages, apply to all pages and see how it looks like.
So now second fund right here on content we still have our normal notion page where you could you know uh take any notes uh about this fund but
18:32
now we have a tab that shows us okay these are all my um portfolio companies. Now one thing that you might notice right like it's getting a bit to the side here right like there's again like a big database here.
So, what makes often sense is to turn on full width for all um data pages here. And we can do
18:48
this again by going to customize layout, clicking out of here um of the general settings and then making sure that full width is toggled on. Let's add the other tools as well, right?
So, let's click on plus. Let's add our LPS here.
Again, property visibility. What do we want to see?
We don't need to the commitment to
19:05
fund. Now if actually if they invested in several funds this might be relevant information commission.
So let's uh make sure we have we see again okay who is uh the owner on this property right um what is um what are the funds that they are invested in what is investment focus P actually all of this is pretty uh
19:20
relevant so I can leave all of these properties here and then last but not least let's uh pull in the deals as well right which would be sort of like the things that we currently looking for pipeline and then check okay what properties we need to see here maybe a bit less here right maybe here we mostly
19:36
care about the um the owner And we care about the uh status. Where's it?
Uh deal stage, right? That was our status option.
And then maybe the um the thesis, but you can quite customize it to your liking. Click apply
19:51
to all pages. Now we have this neat little option, right?
Where you can click through all the core information. We can also add more from here, right?
So a we can link to existing. So for example, if we had already an LP in there, I can click link on existing and pull it in there.
If we don't, we can create a new LP for this fund directly
20:06
from here. and it will automatically be linked to this fun right if I click on new page uh sort of like test LP right we'll see he's committed to the second fund that works already right uh this owner property is not set up correctly right so we would need to go back now to our database make sure we have our default in here that's something we
20:22
forgot earlier but yeah we have now this general building blocks in here to see all the related information to the fund now one thing that you notice is if we try to navigate back to our homepage it's actually a bit tricky because here in our breadcrumbs you see we have funds but that brings us to our database. Then
20:37
we have back end which brings us to our databases and then the sort of like parent page in Ocean for VC, right? And then then we back at home.
So it's quite cumbersome to do this. So instead what we also always recommend when building these kind of dashboards is to make sure there's a quick back home button on them.
In order to do that, right, what
20:53
we can do is we can uh click um uh on this drop down here and we can set up our first database template. Now the database templates and database layouts are two things that uh can easily be confused.
The database um layout that we
21:09
set up right automatically applies to all pages and whenever uh you can only have one per database and whenever you make any changes to it it will um make these changes on all pages. Whereas database templates influence what is in this content what it gets preloaded into this content tab here in the beginning
21:26
right and you can have any number of templates on uh a page right so you could set a different template for this type of fund or this different template for this type of meeting but uh once it's applied it doesn't automatically update when you change the template later on let me show you what I mean uh let's go to funds let's take on a drop
21:42
down and set up a new template you can do this from anywhere where you have this database let's call this just no new fund uh one Something I really like to do is to also set our default icon for funds here. We'll get to why in a second.
And now you can see I can sort of predefine what should come in here
21:57
into the page. And all I want is like I want a button that says um you know go home.
And we can uh add like our little house icon in there. And we can say when this button is clicked as the action please open as a page uh our homepage, right?
So let's search for home. Here it
22:14
is. Click on done.
And we want to open home as a full page. and then done.
And then we can click out of it. And now if we open any of our fonts, right, for example, the first one, we can see where we can apply this template.
So it will load it in. And in a second, um, you
22:29
will have the option to have or we have this button here that allows us to jump back to our homepage. Right?
So I click on here now. And now we're back on home, which makes for a much better experience.
Right? Now the uh the other one, second, right, doesn't have this already where we would need to click in here again to apply the template and
22:45
then to wait for it to load. So this is not the best user experience.
So what you want to do is uh as soon as we have our button here to go back home is to make sure that the template that we've created is the default. Right?
So let's click on the dropown set uh this as a default which now means whenever we
23:00
create a new fund it will automatically load this page layout for it. So I could create my third fund right and you see it's already uh loading down here and in the second right um we will have the option to go home with it.
Now the one thing to keep in mind here what I
23:16
mentioned right this this doesn't auto update uh let's say right we update this here and we we edit it and besides this go home button we also want to have you know um maybe there's some information we always want to collect about fund right maybe there's a little call out that we want to add here um you know um
23:32
we write a little about our or goals with this fun whatever it is um well if we create a new page You try the a fourth font if you want. Um then you will see that it automatically loads this in both the
23:49
button and uh this text. But our other fonts don't have this yet.
Right? So this is sort of like the drawback of using database templates.
They are a lot more they're very powerful with adding all these elements. But um whenever you uh change a template in the future, you would need to go back in and update that
24:05
template for your existing databases and entries. You can do so always by deleting all the page content from it.
Right? then you go back to the selector.
But it can get a little bit cumbersome. So just one thing to keep in mind.
But perfect, we've created our first nice little navigation loop, right? Where we have now on our main page, we can pull
24:22
in our funds. People can click on a fund to learn more about it, right?
They can see the core information. They can pull in everything else that we have on the database.
They can also look at the portfolio companies. So below this fund and all the information we have about that, the LPs, the deals, right, and sort of like start managing funds from
24:39
this fund dashboard. And we've learned how to create a database template, right?
Apply to it and a little bit of navigation and a little bit of context to it and use it to quickly go home. Right?
And just to iterate this point again, right? The page that you have here is just a normal page.
So it has
24:55
all the other blocks that you use to that you like. So you can add headings, you can create any kind of structure.
We will later with um uh projects. Maybe we will see like a little bit more of other elements that we would typically add to this.
But for now, this is a great start for our fund pages and allows us to
25:11
quickly jump around between our new homepage and our different funds. Now, the second thing that we wanted to add here, right, was a quick way to see the most recent deals that have come into our pipeline.
So, let's type /h. All right, let's uh call this most recent deals.
And let's add another linked view
25:29
of a database below, this time of deals. And here we have it, right?
We probably want to pull not the uh the full pipeline, right? just like a table in there because on this table we then just want to show the most recent dates.
Now the way we can do this is first we're
25:44
going to hide again like this uh database title might make it a bit more minimal. Change the name here uh just put a space in here and uh add the little icon for deals since the main heading on this page already tells us what this view will be about.
Right? Then what we can do is we can go to
25:59
property visibility hide them all and just think about okay what is the most what are the most important properties that we need to see when a new deal comes in probably the owner uh that's one I see the deal stage just in case someone has started working on this already um the industry might be relevant and then maybe um the let's see
26:18
the the business model yeah so some information about right so I can sort of quickly quickly scan that oops I don't want to add another property And then in terms of the sort, we want to make sure we see the newest ones at the top. So click on sort.
And then in this case, we're going to take the uh created time
26:36
uh as a property. I just actually created this uh offscreen in the break.
But you can quickly do this same thing by going to edit properties, click on plus view property, and then add that. And that allows you to set a filter, right?
Um for like the news, sorry, not a filter, but like a sort for just your
26:51
newest items. And whenever something new gets added to this list, right, it will pop up right at the top here.
So you can always do a quick scan of okay these are the last things that I've added our pipeline. Now of course in order to make these easier to navigate we should make the same changes that we did to puns.
So first uh what we want to do let's go in
27:07
and uh add a new database template right uh actually not ai as we can see created it and set something as a default. We can inspect this by clicking on the three dots here uh and clicking on edit and we can see okay this is the template I thought it should apply.
So that's not bad right? But we need to change the icon because our deal icon will be the
27:24
rocket ship, right? Can call this just new deal.
And then here we want to also add just this back button, right? So let's add a button.
Let's uh call this go home, right? Add our little uh house icon there.
And then as uh the action uh
27:41
select open and then our homepage as an option and then again right as full page click on. So that's step number one.
Now, one little trick here, right, to if you want to build out more robust navigation than just these go home buttons, uh, and be able to later update
27:58
it. Um, what you can do, uh, what you can use here is what is called a synced block.
So, if you just click out, uh, into the home and by the way, I'm just asking AI, right, to fill out, uh, this database with a few bit of sample data so we can later like visualize it nicely. So, don't don't be confused if things start popping up here.
But what
28:14
we can do is we could go back to our uh, back end, right? Then we could add a new section here.
And let's call this um synced blocks. And let's uh call this um like one one thing that we want to add here maybe is the the general navigation.
And so in order to add this,
28:31
let's type slash synced, right? This gives us this sync block option.
Now you see this red outline. Basically everything within this red outline can now be spread across our workspace.
And we make a change in one place. It will be updated everywhere, which is great for these elements that you might want to add to a tablet by for example like
28:47
navigation. or go home or go elsewhere and where you think like okay maybe I want to add additional eight elements to this navigation later on but I don't want to have to update like 17 different places.
So, this is how you get this done, right? Let's add our first button here, right?
The um the rocket ship. No,
29:04
not rocket ship, the house. And um go home.
Click on new action, right? Open page.
Make sure we open our home here as a full page. Sounds good.
And let's actually just to show that we have some some different elements also in there.
29:19
We can also just drag another block in there. So, let's just drag this block into our sync block.
And let's add here sort of like two columns. And let's have one block here on the left side.
And then on the later down the line where we could add sort of like a a second one on the side, I'm just going to add some placeholder text. So you get the idea
29:35
for it. Now if we uh just hover over this, you see this copy and sync option.
So let's click on here and then let's go first into our funds database. Update the template here, right?
Three dots, edit. Um delete the button that we have here so far and add in our synced one.
29:53
Same for uh deals, right? Let's click on new edit and make sure we replace um this one with our sync block.
And this has another advantage, right? If I apply this anywhere.
So, for example, boot labs, right? Let's apply our new deal
30:09
template and I go back to um my sync blocks placeholder 1 2 3. Right, I've updated this.
If I go back now to this same deal, right, food techlapse, we see it update here. So that makes it just like a little bit easier, right, to create these components on pages that
30:25
later update and you don't have to do it from scratch. But perfect, we have our go home navigation now also on our most recent deals.
You see this list has just started to fill up. So probably good to add like a load limit here now as the last step.
In order to do so, we can click on the three dots. Then on layout, I can't otherwise I will leak some new
30:41
database field partially. Bad timing for this video, but there's at the bottom a load limit option where we can just limit it to 10.
I'm just going to do this off screen. Then we have a bit more control here.
All right, there we have it. And now we see we always will see the latest last 10 deals that have been added to it with the option to load more.
And now if we click on any entry,
30:58
right, we have our uh sort of new template here that allows us also to go from there back to our homepage if we wanted to. From these, our homepage is slowly taking shape.
So let's actually add also the active projects below there. And I think then we're pretty good and can start moving into the
31:14
dedicated workflow pages. So /h2, right?
You know the rule by now. This will be active projects.
Then we're going to look for a linked database view of our projects uh database. Let's see where we are here with this project database.
And you see I have too many database in my
31:30
workspace. Kind of hard to find the correct one.
So let me actually quickly just go to the back end, right? And here projects.
Let's call this VC projects for a second just so we can easier find. It shouldn't be an issue when you are building this out, right?
Because I assume you have only one project
31:46
database here. But sometimes for these demo workspaces can get a bit tricky.
So link view database and let's look for VC um projects. Um yes, there we are.
Perfect. Uh and then we can pull in the navigation view right
32:03
we've already set up to uh quickly um just show these core projects here together with their progress bar. Let's then make sure that we as usual hide our database title, right?
and uh just replace the name of this with a space and then the target icon for the most
32:19
minimal view. And now we can quickly jump into our projects.
For projects, we will go through the same process of setting up our database layout and templates, but this time with a bit of a twist because I want to show you a second approach in notion to build these dashboards. Remember, similar to this dashboard that we built here for funds
32:36
to quickly access portfolio LPS and deals, well, there's another method that has a lot of benefits to it. gives you a little bit more control, but is a bit harder to update later on.
So, how does it look like? Well, let's start by actually clicking into a separate project and making sure we tidy up the
32:52
the layout here. So, customize layout, move this to the panel, and then pin the properties that we want.
So, we want to pin the owner, the status, the progress, and then the duration. We could pin or actually what you can do as well, right?
But if you want to highlight certain properties, you can also click on plus here. And that allows you to also um
33:09
sort of like display certain properties a bit larger than otherwise. Now, we're not going to swap this time to tap view, right?
Though we certainly could and we could then pull in the tasks for the sample project and instead we're going but instead, right, we're going to use this other method. So, let's quickly
33:24
quickly click on apply to all pages here. Um go back to projects.
And one thing I just noticed when looking at this um when I was setting up the database right we've uh jumped over creating the relations to meetings and docs right we only have tasks related so let me quickly fix this right I want one
33:41
relation to uh our um um meetings uh in the YouTube container here we are perfect this will be meetings a two-way relation right object and then with um our meeting icon plus a
33:58
relation to the um docs database also in our YouTube container. Let's see where that one is.
Here should be this one. Twoway relational projects add relation.
Perfect. Quick quick fix here to make sure we have all the things ready.
And
34:14
now what we want to do is we want to create another database template. So again drop down new template.
Let's call this new project. Let's give it the corresponding icon for it.
And now let's open this in a big view, right? and make sure we set up this uh template
34:30
correctly. So I will just type now /h2 and we will add a toggle heading and we will call this tasks.
And now what we can do is we can pull in here our task database, right? So let's type / create view of database.
Let's look for our VC tasks. I did the same naming trick here,
34:47
right? To easier find it and then let's pull in as a specific view, right?
All the um open tasks. Perfect.
So now what we have right is a link view but it shows all open tasks. So regardless of the project uh but the same trick that
35:02
we used right for when we set up the tabs it had automatically a filter applied to only show related entries. Well we can also do this manually here.
All we need to do is click on the filter say okay let's add a rule to this set is now done. Perfect.
And second rule where project contains and now new project
35:19
right this will always match the name of the template that you're currently setting up. So this will be that.
And now we see first everything disappears because nothing is linked to this template. But that's fine.
Once we apply it, it will work correctly. So let's just quickly hide this, right?
And then go out of here. Um click on our template
35:37
uh project, right? Apply this template.
See how it works in practice. And we see we have now this toggle here.
We can open it. And we have our open tasks.
So in a very similar way to the tabs, right? It allows us to pull all the related entries into the body of a page.
But with this approach, we can take it one step further because tabs they're
35:53
great. But uh of course, right, sort of like every tab is one specific view.
And specifically, if you want to have different ways of looking at the data, for example, all your open tasks or the tasks assigned to you or completed tasks, then it can get quite uh quickly
36:08
a bit uh uh tricky, right? With just the visual load of everything.
So this is uh a better way for a more advanced setup. So first let's actually make sure we set this as a default so it gets applied to all new entries.
Then edit it again. And now let's make sure that we build on top
36:23
of this. Add a few more views for tasks and then also add docs and meetings in here.
To do so, right, let's just right click this, duplicate it. Let's call this um done tasks, right?
And change this to um a fil checkbox. Where is it?
Here. And then we just add to this
36:40
filter we've already set up, right? We modify it to say where the task is done.
Perfect. And then if we wanted my task as well, let's duplicate the open task again, right?
Let's call this um my tasks and then the little star. And then here, right, water filter, we just add
36:57
onto this and um owner contains me. So now we have our three uh views here.
We can close this toggle just to reduce the visual load. We can go one further, right?
Can do another H2 toggle heading. This time we can call this meetings.
37:12
Now, one thing I also like to do, but that's sort of as a personal preference, I like to give them actually icons. So, I like to have the checkbox for the tasks, uh, for the meetings, usually it's the hand shake.
Um, and then for docs, it's the folder. Just makes it a bit easier to scan it visually.
So, for
37:28
meetings, same idea, right? Slash create link view of database.
Let's pull in our well AC meetings. There they are already.
Perfect. Let's pull in the um my meetings view.
Or actually like the the default view is fine probably because we probably don't have too many meetings here. Right.
So let's just call
37:45
this um all meetings. Add a little um nice icon here for the property visibility.
I think this should be fine. Yeah, that all looks good.
Project actually we can hide because it will be self-explanatory that it shows up here belongs to this project. Just need to
38:00
make sure we set our filter again, right? Add a filter where the project contains new project.
Perfect. And then just to go through this motion one more time, right?
Another toggle heading. This time let's look for a folder.
Uh let's call this docs. And then again
38:18
right here slashcreate link view of database. Uh VC docs.
There they are. Uh let's pull in again also here all docs.
I assume that we don't have that many there. My database title.
Right. Rename this to all docs.
Uh give it the folder
38:35
icon and then make sure that for our buildup. We have it set to projects contains um new project.
Perfect. So this is a simple dashboard, right?
For all projects, but just as a quick side, right? Why why don't we do this all the time?
Like why don't we use sometimes
38:51
the tab view, sometimes this actually is bit of a preference, right? Both of them have their pros and cons.
If you prefer this uh look where the toggles in the page, you could go to your funnels, right, and just change it. You could remove the tab stand, add this to a template or the other way around, right?
If you say now actually I want to have
39:08
these tabs everywhere, could take the same approach, right? By customizing the layout and applying this.
Just one side note, right? If you use this approach, uh what I mentioned already, if you've already applied a template to something, right, for example, here you see it doesn't automatically update like with the tabs.
So here I would now need to
39:23
just go in, right? remove everything from the page content and now I can load in this new project template with all the entries but of course so everything that you create new after it will automatically be applied right so like um let's say uh
39:38
link charter tooling system right this might be our project here we hit enter we see it immed everything that we create through here will automatically be linked to this project so if I add another task right so um via have the tears to fix our
39:56
notion, right? We see of course immediately the context is this specific tool, right?
That's where is assigned. Uh if we also look at the details, right, for this project, we see this is one of the tasks that belongs to it.
All right, so let's go back uh from here to our homepage, right? And there not much
40:13
to do, right? We already have our active projects in here, but now they have nice dashboards that we can click into, right?
And we see all the relevant contexts for that specific project. And with one click also can jump back to our homepage.
Pretty good. Now let's start building out our first workflow pages.
What I would like you to encourage to do
40:30
here is to keep in mind that this will be our main navigation page, right? Our homepage.
And now we want to build specific pages that help us do one thing, right? And that depends on the workflows that you have in your company.
But typically, right, it will mean, okay, we need one way to sort of just
40:46
see everything. That is what I like to call what's on my plate, right?
your tasks, the things that you own and so on and so on. Then maybe a dedicated view for specifically managing the deal flow, right?
This will be a very essential part of uh running your VC firm. Plus,
41:02
last but not least, a quick way to just access the information in the company. So, let's build them in that order.
And in order to start, we actually can go back up to a quick navigation and we can create a new page here. Now whether you create this actually as a top level page here or as a page elsewhere and just link to it doesn't really matter that
41:18
much particular if you do your first notion setup. So here what we can simply do is create type slash page and we can call this our what's on my plate page.
It's like a concept that I really like to uh create a lot of new entry-level systems just to help people you know
41:34
that everyone has one the same dashboard that they look at where they see everything assigned to them and we don't have to go out and create individual dashboards just yet. That's something you can do later and that's what we typically do, you know, with more mature teams using notion.
But since this will be your first notion setup, let's keep
41:49
it a bit simple and let's just look just for the food icon here literally, right? Let's what's on my plate view after all.
So this one is a nice one. And now here we're going to create a dashboard where it shows again everything from the whole company that has been assigned to me.
And since we have owners on every single
42:05
entry, right? That means every single data point that is relevant for me will show up here.
Now the first thing we need to do since we will have a lot of database on this page is we want to click on the top right corner three dots full width so we have just a bit more screen real estate and now we can kind of go through the most important points
42:22
on these pages since uh this is the thought the thought being here right that this is kind of my my to-do list and my entry way for a lot of my actual work uh I want to have tasks at the very top right even though of course on the main page we have funds then deals right as big entryways but when managing your day-to-day work you probably want to
42:38
start from tasks So let's tap slash um I like to add again these as toggles right just so we can organize and structure the page a bit and add um with a checkbox right by tasks part and then same game as for the dashboard create
42:55
link view of database look for our VC tasks and then pull in this time the my task view right we've already built and there we have it right all my tasks I can now quickly hide this and if I wanted to write I could create additional views here for like sort of,
43:10
you know, my tasks today, right? Let's actually do this, right?
Let's just as an example, right? Could duplicate this and then call this um today, right?
Maybe with a calendar icon to go with this and then add like a a filter to it. It says okay and the um due date, right,
43:28
is um on or before. So everything today and in the past that should have happened already is on or before today, which just gives me kind of my checklist for that specific day.
One quick notion tip also here. When you're building these to-do lists, it can sometimes be nice to not have this as a uh you know
43:43
this status property, not like this because two clicks to check something off can sometimes be a bit annoying. What you can do uh is you can simply hover over it say edit property and then say display as and then you can say for this specific U I would like to display this as a checkbox and now it's simply a checkbox.
You can move it to the very
43:59
front and you can make it very small. Right?
So you can make it basically nearly disappear. And now that's just easier, right, for people to then go through and just check things off.
Feels a bit like more like a traditional to-do list. And we still might have our context option here that quickly allows
44:14
us to add that. So those are tasks.
Let's go through, right? What's the next thing that we want?
Maybe um the deals actually next thing that I care about, right? But you can of course customize this to whatever um would be most relevant in your team.
Right. In this case, let's get the rocket.
44:31
Yep, perfect. Deals.
And then here again, right, great. Link view of database, pull in deals from our back end.
Um, pick my deals, right? You could also actually do the pipeline bot and then just filter this for my like let's
44:47
actually do this maybe, right? But you see, thanks to our pre-built views, right, it's so much quicker for us now to create these things here.
So going through this extra effort in the back end, even though it can be a bit theoretical at first, really helps us to put these things together much faster. Let's just add this me filter here right where say okay anything where the owner
45:05
right contains me those are the ones that I want to see here and then we can oops close it all off and now we see okay these are the deals that I'm responsible for let's move them a bit to the other ones just so you can see it clear we can also in here on this specific view right turn off this
45:21
information because it's kind of redundant I know that I am the person so we'll make this modification right turn on or off and set I want to see the contact on uh makes it a bit easier and then we can also like hide this database title and just call this you know like um my leads perfect one quick thing that
45:39
I'm noticing as we are looking at it is that actually here this is the plain text property right so um now that we're catching this we probably want to update it right so in order to do this we could just go to our property settings go on contact and make sure right that instead
45:54
of this being a text it is now a relation to our actual um contact database uh with another VC contacts that is which one is it? I think it's this one probably.
Perfect. Yes.
Uh two-way relation to the deal and now we
46:12
have actually the correct style set up here which means we can now connect those here. By the way, if you have these properties right, you can hover over the card, click on edit, and all the properties that you've added even if they're not filled out are visible in there.
So here we can simply link this right to Tim Cook and this one might be
46:27
Steve Jobs. And now we have a quick way right from our um port here from our personal board to jump also in the contact cards.
We see right the context we haven't really set up this but the same game would apply here right customize layout making sure we pin the most relevant properties but good for
46:44
now right let's close our deals part off and let's just keep going. Let's add a few more to our what's on my plate page.
So I just added pretty much all the database that we have right here in the system with our toggles and then always within the toggle the core view filtered for all my entries. But this of course
47:01
just a starting point. Again this is about creating this sort of like default homepage that makes sense for people in your team.
You can later customize them but for now right I would just encourage you to think about okay how how do I want them to navigate this? Right?
What should they see front and center? Maybe tasks are so important they shouldn't
47:16
live in a toggle, right? maybe want to pull that out or maybe we still want to uh have them, you know, see the funds, right, as this like quick navigation at the top to be easier uh make it easier to go there, right?
Or for projects, right? You could just drag them out of there, right?
Rearrange these elements
47:31
on the page like the building blocks that they are. You have full flexibility here.
One thing that I would definitely recommend though that you add is again write a little bit of navigation and some quick actions. So in order to do this, let's actually type call two.
And then here on the left side, we want to add um the uh the navigation bar, right?
47:49
So so like n placeholder. We're going to add this in a second.
And then on the right side, we want to have some quick actions. So I'm going to add a call out, right?
Just so we get our nice little uh button around it. And then here maybe also again in a two column layout.
So I'm going to add two more columns inside of it. Then I'm going to type /ton.
And
48:07
now these buttons, we can add them so that they can quickly create new tasks, new deals, right? New entries in our system.
of our task. Let's just say okay in this case we want the checkbox right and want when the button is clicked then please add a page to and we can select our database right so this will be VC
48:23
tasks perfect we can um give it a name if you want to but there's no need to right we could add any property so we could also say like add a task for the day and could set the due date for our you know current date if we wanted to it's actually called add task and then
48:40
when we're happy with it what I would always recommend when you add these these elements. So you add a second step and say okay and after we've added it please open this uh really add a page right in the side peak so we can edit it because otherwise you have this thing where people keep pressing the button they don't know does it do anything and
48:55
you just add a bunch of tasks and they're all empty not what you want so let's click on done right and then test it we click the add task but we can also open this so we see like how it looks like add tasks and there we see the new task pop up so let's say okay uh send not an email Perfect. We actually see
49:13
right that we don't haven't like customized this. So let's do this quickly because task is such an important database.
So let's go to customize layout. Um move this to the panel and then in here right what we want to pin is the owner the status and the due date plus the context.
That's
49:28
what we care about right all the rest can say here apply to all pages and then quickly head back. And now we see that we have our class that we just created and we can check it off if we wanted to.
And of course, if you check it off, we automatically set the completion date there as well. So, pretty neat.
That's
49:45
the first button we want to add. And we can add the same set of button pretty much for any kind of entry, right?
Where we want to add something directly. So, for example, we could just uh take another button, right?
Let's go back in here. Um let's say okay, maybe we want a second button um just to explain the
50:00
concept, right? Um for like a folder and let this one will be add doc.
Here our action will be to add a page to our documents. Um let me see docs right uh database.
There we go. Um second action
50:18
open page that we just added in our sidebar. Perfect.
Add doc. Let's test this.
Here's a new document. Right.
Sample notes. And we can see also if we check oops in our notes toggle it pops up there in a second.
Ah, actually it
50:34
doesn't because we forgot to set a default here for owner. So again, like as you build out a system, you will often find elements that you've forgotten to get to in the beginning.
That's totally normal. That's a good thing also about notion, right?
It's very forgiving. You can just as you encounter these things, uh, make sure you put on the finishing touches as long
50:49
as you know in general, right? How to build out this best practice system.
This will help you always stay on track. Now, let's do one slightly more complicated quick ad feature.
And let's do this for, let's say, um, contacts. uh that's I think a good example wherever
51:05
we want to make sure that we fill out certain data always right with something like notes uh or like tasks people might fill out some meter information they might leave a few others but when it comes to information for example like a deal opportunity right or a contact we want to make sure that the relevant information is captured all the time and
51:22
we can do this by creating a form for that let's actually navigate back to our uh back end for a moment so let's go here and let's do this for the contact database Here let's click on creating a new view. And here what we want to do is we want to create a form view.
Again I can't show you just the popup that comes
51:39
because that would leak something but you can click on plus and then select the form option. Once you select the form it will ask you whether it should basic based on all the properties that you have already add these ask questions to the form and let's do this.
Makes it a bit easier why we don't have to create from scratch. So let's say yes please do
51:54
this. We can give this a title right um add new contact.
Uh and then just give it a description. Please fill out the information below to add a new contact to our CRM.
Now you can click on any
52:09
field that you have in there and you can a see a bunch of options pop up that will depend on the type of property you have here and also reorder the form right to your liking. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you should always turn off sync with property name here because right now if we would
52:26
change the title of the question, we would also rename the property. And that's often not what we want quite often.
We want to have it a bit more explanatory here, but like very succinct in the database. So let's turn this off.
Now we can rename this to um what's the contact name if you want to. We could
52:42
also, you know, add a description to it. And we can make it required to make sure it needs filled out.
Then for location, right, same idea here. can make this required if you wanted to for another industry.
You get the gist, right? They have the pre-select options here.
Um they can select things on the dropown. You can also make sure um can they
52:58
connect this to several companies, right? Or should they always be able to connect to one?
Whatever it is, right, that you want. We're just going to like make a few of these options required.
Reordered a little bit. And then um just to show you like how you can then integrate with the system, you can then click on share form, copy the form link
53:14
and then we can go back to our um homepage and then to what's on my plate and add now here a new file right and say add contact graping icon. And now here instead of
53:29
adding an entry directly what we can do is say okay please open a page please open the um form that we just created when we can paste it in add new contact in a center peak right there as a nice pop-up click on done now if we click on this it doesn't add a contact yet
53:44
instead it just opens up the form and we can enter the information right so this would be ts frank hello at and ts frankde those I think are required right did we make something else required I don't think so we could say okay he's like a founder right is LinkedIn URL
54:01
linked right whatever we want in there the owner we can leave empty what's industry technology and so on right you see kind of like how this structures the submission a bit better now I can click on submit and it is been added and through that right you can make sure that people always fill out the relevant information when they do this so we have
54:18
a simple page done that will help our team stay on track of everything right that is on their to-do list kind of now let's build another one that is specifically focused for efflow. We're just grabbing another uh real line, adding it in here, right?
Typing again / uh page. And this will be our inflow
54:36
management page. Again, I want full width to just have a bit of screen real estate to work with.
And then at the very top, we're going to add again like probably our two column layout, right? With n placeholder on uh placeholder and then uh some quick
54:54
actions um on the other side. And we can see which actions make more sense here, right?
It will probably be around like adding deals through a form similar to contact and so on and so on. Can just leave this there for the moment and then focus on the rest of the page.
Now, one thing that often makes sense on these
55:09
like uh management pages, right, is to give people highle data at a glance. And since our deploy management, right, will mostly roll our pipeline.
Well, let's visualize that, right? Let's tell people how things are looking.
So uh in order to do this what we could do is we could maybe go for um like a two column layout
55:28
here as well right and in those two columns we can add two charts um and maybe actually um you know like do sort of like a 1/3 2/3 split here uh to now to add a chart right we type / chart and we can pick which one we want just move myself out of the way and let's here go
55:45
for donor chart first where we want to visualize okay so like our latest deals that have come in like how many have we recently you know added 12 pattern. So, I'm going to click on this.
We're going to look for our deals database. Here it is.
And now we can start building our chart. For uh a dollar chart, it's
56:02
pretty simple, right? We have one thing that we want to show.
Um and we can break it down. So, in this case, um what we want to break it down by?
Well, probably not by stage. And we would rather would break it down probably by industry, right?
Or by revenue model or whatever is sort of like the most important thing or like who brought it. Actually, that might also be very interesting, right?
Like who brought uh
56:18
which lead. But in this case, let's pick for now the industry.
And then each size represent count. That's great.
And then we're going to add a filter because right now it just shows us all our deals in the pipeline. But we want to see only the ones that just ended, right?
So let's add um a filter. Oops, sorry.
I'll
56:35
like this. Add an advanced filter and say, okay, give me everything where the created time right um is on or after.
And let's say 1 month ago, which shows us in sort of like our D flow, right, for last month. Now, of course, in this case, right, everything that I just added is within the last month.
Um, but
56:52
we can just pretend, right, that this is like a more mature setup where we can actually like filter down the information. And if you want to reduce the size on this, which I typically like to, right, because we don't need to see that much, we can go into the settings again and we can move the height from medium to small.
And we just have this
57:07
little bar here, the side where that tells us, okay, this is sort of like how our most recent D flow looks like. And then let's visualize how our pipeline overall looks like.
So next to it we're going to add another chart. This time I want a vertical bar chart.
And here we're again going to pick our pipeline.
57:23
Uh and what I want to visualize now at the bottom is the deal stage. That's perfect, right?
What what we want to show towards the top is the count of every item. That's also correct.
And this basically with just one click, right, gives us this overview. Okay, here's how our deals uh you know are stacking up um over this uh you know
57:41
whole period, right? Of all the stages that we have in the system.
If we want more information, we could say, "Okay, let's filter certain things out, right? Let's maybe focus only on the deals this year." Um, or let's um group it by who's the owner, right?
Or the industry. That's an interesting one.
In order to get this additional layer of data, you
57:58
can click on settings and then click on group by and could, for example, say right who's the the owner, right, for us internally or um what is the um again industry of these deals. Just gives it a bit more information here.
And then just
58:13
to make sure that all of these are aligned typically also here like to go in and say okay for um you know more stylo sheets let's change the height to small most of the time right we just want to get this high level overview this is a yeah you know helps us uh judge things at a glance and keeps both
58:28
of these sides uh nicely aligned. Moving on let's go further down the page and let's help us create some specific workflow views.
So for example right we probably want to start again with our target headings. I'm big fan of them to structure these long pages so you can hide and show relevant information.
And
58:44
let's start with um sort of like newly sourced deals. And in here we can go ahead right say okay /create link view of database please show me my deals and then specifically in deals I would like to see um all the deals.
And now we're
59:00
going to um modify the settings here. Right.
hiding this, right? Let's um just since the the headline here will be self-explanatory, right?
We can remove this can sort of just like add the clock icon here, right? To indicate it's the most recent ones.
Uh our sort is already there, right? But in case of the deal
59:16
stage right now, so I'd rather have that trade time descending, right? This gives me now my newly uh most recent deals at the very top.
And then we can work on the uh properties. Maybe here I don't care too much uh about that and I don't uh we don't need the company link there for now, right?
can add that in maybe
59:33
later. What I really care about is yeah, what is the the deal stage, right?
What is the industry? Actually, deal stage we don't care about either probably because we need to add this as a filter, right?
We just say, okay, only show me things here where the um deal stage is sourced, right? Sort of the the ones that are
59:49
waiting for initial kickoff. Um what is the industry?
That's perfect. What's our target investment if we have that at this point?
Probably not, right? So, let's um remove this.
This is something that we need to see only later. Revenue is relevant, right?
what fund we're working towards to maybe there's also like some data we could fill out later.
00:05
The way you want to think about this, right, is you want to only show the properties that are relevant when you're in, you know, reviewing newly sourced deals mode. The contact is probably a lot more relevant, like a thesis, right?
Uh the business model, these sort of things, right? That's what we what we kind of care about.
What other data do
00:21
we have there? Reason to reject is obviously not relevant at this point, unless we want to reject from this view.
So maybe, but let's actually hide it for now. Deal notes, let's hide this.
description is fine. Uh task we can also hide from now we have just the relevant properties right when we think about
00:36
okay these are our newly sourced deals. Now, one tip, even with this wider screen real estate, right, we still need to scroll um horizontally.
In order to make this a bit easier, I recommend you right click the first column and then say freeze. And this now allows you to, you know, scroll with keeping the actual
00:52
name of the deal here in front. If you wanted, you know, more things freeze, you could do that as well, but I find usually this is the sweet spot, right?
To keep all the context alive while scrolling, while still being able to, you know, read everything vertically and horizontally. Let's also use this opportunity to actually build our first
01:08
automation. I know automations are really for the third part of the video, but again like at this point it just makes sense to showcase one of the things you could do at this point right these have just come in and if we build the one automation I want to showcase later right they might actually come in also automated from our system.
So, uh,
01:25
what what we might want to do on this, you might put a newly source deals is we just want to be able to quickly claim it, right? Of course, we could go in, right, and say, okay, um, I am the owner rather than the AI that has set this up, right?
And I want to create maybe a task for myself, but we can also wrap this into a button. In order to do so, let's
01:41
click here to create a new property. And let's call this, you know, claim deal.
Um, and what we want to do is we want to make this a button. And on click, we want this to assign the deal to us and create our task for us to do the initial
01:57
um deal review. So, oops, sorry for that.
I clicked there on myself. Uh, in order to set this up, let's click on claim deal, edit automation, and we want to say when this button is clicked, what do we want to do?
Well, first we want to edit a property. We want to make sure the owner is set to the person who
02:13
clicked the button. Then we want to maybe also move it along in the stage, right?
So we want to say okay the deal stage will be moved now to initial review and then we need to add a task to my own task list right that I have to do this. So I click on add action add page
02:29
two and then we will add this to um our you know VC tasks VC task here we go and task name we can already give this a name right we know what this task is supposed to be it will be review uh details for and then we can
02:46
even input the name of that deal right and we can do this by typing f and here we now see okay from sort of like what page do we want to input right and we can just link to this page so review details for this page. And then last but not least, you want to make sure that this task is linked to this deal
03:02
correctly, right? So it pops up in the context.
So we say here, okay, deal, please uh connect this to this page that we have here. All right, so just to review again, right, when we click the button, we will update properties on the deal and then we will create a new entry
03:17
in our task database that tells us, well, I have to review this entry. If we wanted to, we could also additionally assign it to ourselves.
But right, we know tasks that are created by a person automatically belong to them. So we don't need really need to do that.
And we can just click on save. Now what should happen right?
Let's actually like
03:33
open this here on the side. What should happen when I when I click this button is that it should change the owner to me.
It should also uh create a task, right? Currently there's probably no task, right?
It's empty. And it should move this to next stage.
It actually means it will disappear from here, right? because it's no longer in this
03:49
initial stage. So let's click the button and test.
I click on here and in a second, right, it should change the uh owner property here. Let's see whether it does that.
It created the task successfully. Perfect.
What else did we have? It moved it for the initial review.
It didn't update the owner. So we need to have a look what the issue is
04:06
with that. Let's quickly look at the automation replace with whoever kicked the button.
Okay, maybe it has some, you know, maybe sometimes it needs to refresh once to correctly show that, oh, it's a temporary bug, but it looks like the automation should work correctly. Let's just see here again, right?
If I assign this, for example, to Jill for a second.
04:23
Um, maybe it just has an issue with um that MCP server. Let's claim that deal.
Yes, now it gets replaced correctly. Right, we move it on to the next stage.
We create a task. That task now will pop up on my what's on my play page, right?
Just sort of to show you how all these things are starting to tie together. We
04:39
have now these new tasks not for today but in our journal right review details for uh prop venture tax and food tech labs and we have yeah this initial review step right of our default manage page already ready with this very simple button click. Now what else do we need
04:55
on here? Well, we definitely want our overall deal pipeline.
So I'm just going to uh again create a new H2 toggle heading. Um this time we will call this our deal pipeline.
And here I'm going to add right again /ra link viewp database
05:12
searching for deals going to add that and I'm going to load in our pre-created pipeline board view that we already have right from uh our back end we can then hide the database title here and then we have you know pretty much across the board right like this these are the deals that we're currently working on in
05:27
our firm with just one click away from additional information where we could show other stuff we could add filters but I think this is pretty good here I want to really see all the deals uh at like a you know a global view. We also might want to have just a table of them right that that's also fine.
We could
05:43
just this what what we have here for the newly sourced deals. We could repeat this either for all deals or for like other snapshots right in our task elements.
The world is really your oyster right this is where you can think about okay this is how I need to see the information but one thing that we definitely want to do here is my see my
06:00
deal related tasks. So again I'm going to create a toggle heading right and call this deal tasks and you see where the strength of notion comes in now right this is a view is mostly built around deals but we can still pull in information from our other databases on the same page if they have any relevance
06:17
in this context and this is also the big advantage of using dashboards over just you know working directly in the deals database because you can show all these things in context. So let's create a new link view of database.
Let's pull in our VC tasks. Perfect.
Let's pull in my
06:33
tasks to start with. And then after we've hidden this, I want to take it now one step further and I want to say, okay, here on this filter, I only want to show things that have a deal, right?
So, where deal is not empty. So, it doesn't show me all the tasks, but just
06:48
my task, right, that have specifically to do with the deal workflows. And we see, right, our two newly created tasks, they pop up here immediately, but I can check them off.
We can do the trick again where we maybe want to show this as a checkbox at the very front of the database to make it look more like a to-do list. And we have now this very
07:05
quick way right on my dealflow management page to sort of like claim new deals. Right.
Let's also say I want to work on this one. It will disappear here.
It will create a new task for me down here. I can check off these tasks and start you know managing my workflow like this.
One more example. We might also want to see our deal related
07:21
meetings here. So again let's type /h2 toggle heading right meetings in this case create a linked view uh of our VC uh meetings probably yes VC meetings yes pull that in see what we want to see
07:38
maybe want to see here only my meetings or actually all probably in this case now all meetings right and then we can hide this database title I don't think we have a relation here actually to meetings yet yes and we only have it to projects and here we can also quickly swap this out for the correct icon. But
07:53
again, no worries, right? Whenever we notice that our database back end that we built is not complete yet, we can simply update it.
So, let's hide this here for a moment. Click on plus, add this new relation.
And again, very important concept. If you add new properties, right, even if you do it through a link view, it will also appear
08:09
in the main database. It will appear everywhere.
So, we can just go in here say okay, give me a relation to deals, right? Two way relation meetings.
Perfect. add this relation.
Make sure we have this correctly assigned with the rocket. And then here can add our filter
08:26
right add and show me only entries where deals again um is not empty. Now we have in here right our um entries.
We could also, if we wanted to, right, uh, adjust our automation here for this MUN source
08:41
deals. So it doesn't just create um a task for us, right, to review this.
But we could also maybe already have it add a meeting, right, maybe a week from now for us to go in and talk about this. Let me show you how this would work, right?
Let's go to newly sourced deals. Let's
08:57
update our button here. go to the automation and say okay after we've added this task let's also add a page to VC meetings um the name it's like um you know review for and then again we type
09:12
add right and we say okay let's review um the page um where it triggered from in terms of the properties let's make sure attendees uh the external ones um we don't need there but the internal one that's the one I wanted let's make sure we add um the person who clicked right
09:30
to this meeting and the other ones can be done manually invited. But of course, if you always want to invite the same people to your meetings, you can do that.
And then what we also want to do is we want to make sure the meeting date is sort of like x days in the future. We can do this by clicking on here say custom formula and then we can say okay date triggered.
We can say date add. And
09:48
let's say we want to have this 7 days after we initially look at it, right? So 7 days.
You can always reschedu it but we have sort of something already in the calendar. Click on save.
Click on save. Ah, and of course we need to make sure we connect it to the deal.
So deals connected to this page. Perfect.
And
10:03
right then if we would practice this again, we click on here for another one. Claim this deal.
We see now that we also set up a meeting besides having this automated task and it's in there. And then if we wanted to have this as a calendar, right?
We can just click in there and show display this instead on
10:18
our calendar view so we know when each meeting is coming up. Our front end is taking shape.
But now there's just one last thing that I want to walk you through before we go to the automation part of this video and that is building a simple company wiki. Now we're just going to follow our pattern here, right?
10:34
So we're going to get another line uh add it here and add another page and we're going to call this our company wiki and then we're going to build this out. Now the biggest mistake that people uh make when uh using notion for the first time and building out these sort of knowledge bases is what Benovski
10:50
likes to call the Craigslist effect where you basically just go ahead and you create a bunch of pages here, right? So you might have your your mission, you might have your handbook, you might have to you know like your vacation policy and so on and so on all these different entries.
you turn them into pages and then you kind of call it a day and uh
11:08
this is okay if you want to use notebook just as a notebook but you're missing out on so much of the power of it. uh instead what you want to do right instead of just creating them as nested pages is you want to go ahead and do what we did in the beginning of this video right in our back end set up a database for your documents and then
11:25
whenever you create any kind of uh page you know that contains knowledge it should live in this docs database right so for example mystery right expense policies everything should be in here because that way you can have an owner right clear person who's responsible for it you can have a type you can have a
11:41
status you can have sort of a verification when was this last reviewed and so on and so on, right? All the things that databases allow you to do, which is what sets notion really apart from the rest.
But of course, this is not the best way to then go through documents and read them. So, you can
11:57
combine the best of both worlds though by having them stored here and then on your company um page, right? This is then where you can go ahead and say, "Okay, here's how I want to design this um so for for easy access." There are a bunch of ways to do this, right?
So one
12:12
thing that we could do is we can just start with the call out you know uh on this page uh you will find find the most important document um for you know our VC firm uh something like
12:27
this right just like a small intro paragraph and then what typically looks good is if you add like a a two column layout there and then you could uh start mentioning your documents. Now this is true for sort of like uh everything that you want to have shown there always.
Right? When it comes to wiki pages, I
12:43
like to distinguish between static content and dynamic one. Static one is the one that you want to always show.
So for example, right, we could say um uh something like you know our firms and then there might be another heading in this other column, right? Uh sort of like operational
12:59
guides. Uh and then below that we can if you wanted to right we could add a little bit of dividers just for some nice visual clarity.
And then here by pressing the add key we can now reference the documents that we have in our other database. So right our firm
13:14
mission statement. Let's see um what I'm not entirely sure what the name for that is mission and values.
Yep. Something there.
Perfect. Um here firm mission uh statement and core values.
Right. We can link to that.
We could um link to our uh investment um thesis and strategy
13:31
framework can link to pretty much the premise. All the documents that we have in our database, they can be linked here just the same way.
And uh except for like this tiny little error, right? Everything works the same just that the click into this document brings you actually right into the correct document
13:47
in the database. Uh need to add navigation here as well, right?
So that we can quickly jump back to uh our company wiki page. But you get the gist.
And the same for operational guides right. So after here right our employee handbook um can be added there employee
14:02
handbook we have a lot of employee handbook let's just think any of the uh our investment uh process all the documents that we've created here. Uh and that way right you can sort of like control okay these are the documents that I always want to show there for people and then if you want to go to the next line right um we can continue doing
14:20
this. One one tip is that even better if you have this two column layout and these these categories is to instead of just keep writing within the same column to then uh take a line right and wait for it to be blue along the whole line and then here right uh if we just like add would add the divider we see again
14:35
we're in a full line space. So what we want to do then is add here another two columns right for sort of like the next thing might maybe legal and compliance and then on the other side we could add um like templates and resources and so
14:51
on and so on right you you get the gist um and then add the documents I'm going to add the other ones in a second but before I do that I just want to uh compare this static approach to dynamic approach that I just mentioned dynamic means that instead of like mentioning these pages just individually. We're
15:08
getting always the latest documents directly from the database. Let me show you what I mean.
Let's say we type here / link view of database and we get our VC docs database. This is now our database here, right?
And we can hide a title as usually. And now what we could say, so for example, let's say we always
15:24
want to see uh our latest due diligence documents, right? Um what we can do is we can now add a filter advanced filter say um sorry where the type I think this right is um due diligence then we can add another sort and say okay please do
15:41
this based on date created right or last edited for date created we of course need to still add it to this database so click on plus um search for created time right hide in the view we don't need to see it and then add our sort here to this to make sure we always have the
15:56
latest due diligence documents at the top. For a very clean view, you can then swap this to a list view right through the layout section.
And then in the list view, right, what we could then do is also sort of like just uh you want to uh remove this, right? Just have our list here maybe like with uh the arrow
16:11
pointing down. Um we can also then hide the section if we want to.
And then we have this like very clean uh rundown of our latest due diligence. And we can show more information if you want to, right?
We could go on settings and for example say okay please show me right when if it's a due diligence that the
16:27
deal that belongs to we don't have the link set up yet right we would set it up just the same way that we link it to project otherwise otherwise we could also show for example the owner right whatever information it is that we're going to display here we can still have it here and the beauty of this approach is now right that this updates automatically right so unlike these
16:44
documents so we need to sort of whenever there's a new one that we're going to add to this list we need to add this through the add key here it will always show us our um latest uh due diligence list. And that's how you want to think about these knowledge pages, right?
You want to think about, okay, what is the
17:01
core information that we need to sort of pin, right? And they have front and center on this page like our mission state, right?
Or the employee handbook. Those pages won't change all the time.
But then what are documents that we sort of like just churn out and produce a lot of and we want to always see sort of the
17:16
latest there. And that's where then want to use the database view.
And by combining both of these things, right, you get the best of both worlds. You can build these static company wiki pages that point people to whatever they need and at the same time make sure that the most recent information automatically
17:31
flows in it. All right, with a notion setup out of the way, let's take a look now at how we can use smart automations to supercharge your work.
If we zoom out a bit, what we've basically done so far is help you organize the meter work in your VC phone. Meta work is everything,
17:49
right? that happens so that you can actually do your job.
It's the project management part, right? It's the coordination in a team.
And the well-designed notion system is really, really good at helping make this meter work easier. But one thing that notion on its own can't do is help you with
18:05
your actual work, right? Actually taking items off your to-do list and doing them for you.
This is where we need to add automations. So, the good notion system, that's our foundation to help with meter work.
And then automations on top of that actually free you up from certain
18:23
tasks on your to-do list. Here's a look of two of my favorite workflows for PCs.
There are two workflows that I want to take a look at for this automation section. One of them has to do with sort of how does information get into notion in the beginning on autopilot, right?
uh
18:39
assuming you will get a lot of emails right with pitches. Let's make sure that whenever a pitch comes in we extract the data from that and we automatically add that to notion as you know an opportunity with all the information that we have from them plus add that then to our you know workflow page that
18:55
we had for the deep flow management so that then people can claim it right and continue working with it. That's number one that looks at this external how to get data into notion.
And then the second workflow exemplifies how we can uh automate information flow within notion. Right?
Let's say something starts as a company entry in our CRM and
19:13
at some point we want to transform it into a deal and then if the deal closes ideally it would transform into a portfolio company. All of these things should not require you to you know copy paste information from left to right.
So those are the two workflows that we will take a look at here. Let's start with the second one actually because it's a
19:29
bit easier to visualize and to set it up. Uh I just created a workflow demo page, right?
And on this page I pulled in linked views of the three databases that we work with, right? Through which the data is supposed to flow just to make it a bit easier to follow along.
19:46
Starting on companies, right, what is the quickest way to turn our company into a deal? Of course, we could go in, right, and we could say new page, right?
And then link it to there. But again that is manual work that really doesn't have to happen.
Instead let's add a button here right and let's call
20:03
this um transform to deal right or 2D whatever it is that you want and then let's make this a button. Now when we click this button what we want to happen right is let's go and edit automation and then here on the click we want to create a new record in
20:19
deals. So first action add page two and then look for our deals database.
In terms of the name, we don't want this untitled, right? We want this to be the same name as the company name.
So, what we're going to do is we can click into this formula option, right? And then map it.
Or we can simply type at and that
20:36
also gives us the option to, you know, pull from the page that we mentioned. And we don't want to pull the link, right?
So, if you do this one, we would actually link to the entry, but we just want the text from it. So, we go on this page at the top and then we're going to pull in the name.
Perfect. Um, then
20:52
next, what else do we need to add it? Now we need to make sure that we automatically connect this to the company right we want to have the company connected as well.
So let's click on company and here let's say okay from company I want to set this to the page on which we clicked right making
21:07
sure that the deal is linked there and you can see right if there's any other information that you want to carry over but for the most part that won't be the case probably because right the way our databases are built is that they have different kinds of information the company database has the general information about company the deal one
21:23
the deal specific so most of the information we won't need to actually carry over through that But of course we can take a look right one one other example if you wanted to link contacts individually um to a deal as well then we could do that we could carry over just the contacts from the other one
21:38
might also be interesting right maybe sometimes the contacts for the company in general are different than the contacts for uh the deal but we can sort of start with that and the way we would do this is simply say okay on contact um what I want to carry over is this time a custom formula from the let me move
21:55
myself out of the way from the page where we clicked, right? We want to get the contacts and that together, right?
And then we can uh flatten this if we want and we can click on save. And this will now move over the contacts from one
22:11
entry to another. That's pretty much it in this case.
We can still think about whether we want to open it in the site. Again, I would recommend that this is sort of like your default when creating new entries just so that people get uh a little bit of a feedback, right, for the actions.
So, let's say okay, open page.
22:28
Um, make sure we open our newly added page in site peak. And last but not least, if you don't want people to accidentally click this button, right?
What you can do is actually add a confirmation step. So, we can add this.
You want to drag it to the very top, right? So, that triggers first.
And then
22:44
we can just say um you are about to create a deal for this company. Then continue or cancel, right?
And we can click on save. And now if I hit this button, right, it asks me, well, do I want to do this?
I will say yes. Then you see in a second we have our new deal
23:01
for Apple Ink popping up here, right? The owner is already set for me.
It's linked to the company. It will pull over the the contacts that we have from the other one, right?
And opens it here the side for me to fill out any other information that I would want about that deal. And the same would be true, right?
If we then want to build a system to
23:18
make sure that when the deal is closed one, it is added to the portfolio. In this case, we can actually have a different trigger if we want to.
We could, of course, use a button to say, okay, if I click on here, set this deal to one and move it over. But I just want to show you a different approach.
This time, what we're going to do is we're
23:33
just going to work on this option, right? So, basically, when something is set to closing, we want to add it to our portfolio.
To do that, we're going to click on this flash option, and we're going to say um give this again a name, right? And this name will be um add one
23:50
deal. portfolio.
In this case, we need to define a trigger, right? With button clicks, it's obvious when the button is clicked.
Here, we need to tell notion when should this run. We want to say, please run whenever our status property, where is it?
Deal stage is set to
24:07
closing. When that is the case, what I want you to do is I want you to go in and again add a page to my portfolio to my portfolio database.
I want to carry over the name, right? So for the name, we grab from the trigger page the
24:25
actual D name. I want to add also a few of the other properties, right?
I probably want to make sure the owner gets carried over if we wanted to. So this should be carried over the fund.
We probably want to carry over, right? So let's go to fund.
This is again a relation. So you know the drill of how this works.
We go to custom formula and
24:41
we say trigger page. So the deal where it comes from dot um find and flat and then push that over to our other entry.
Then we can add whatever else we want to carry over as well. Right?
And then when we're ready, we can click on enable. And
24:57
then as soon as we have something here, let's say we have this Apple ink, right? And we can actually link this to a fund.
Maybe we're looking at this for our second fund. And then when we move now the um DSH from sourced to closing in a moment we should be having you know a new entry in our portfolio pop up down
25:14
here. There it is right Apple Inc.
active. It should already be linked to the correct fund.
Perfect. And through this workflow right you can make sure that information flows automatically between your database and no one in the company has to copy paste something ever again.
For the second automation, we
25:29
need to actually venture outside of notion because we need the help of a third-party automation tool to really nail this. The one that I'm going to use here is called Relay.app, which is an amazing uh automation tool that makes it really, really easy to build powerful workflows together with AI.
Uh I've link
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for that down below in the description, but you can of course also use any other typical tool, right? Nadn, make.com, they will all work for this approach.
Now if you create a new uh relay account and then create a new scenario this is what you will see it's your workflow builder h and the first thing you will
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of course do is give this a name right so let's uh say extract deal data from pitches something like this could also give this an icon right uh maybe a mega phone because it's pitch perfect and then can click out of this
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the first thing we then need to do is to decide when should this workflow run right when do you need to extract data and probably you will get a lot of emails, right? A lot of inbound messages uh around all the cool things that you uh might want to have a look at.
So, what we're going to do here is we're
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going to add a trigger and your two options are pretty much either a mailbook or connecting Gmail directly. Now, you can connect Gmail directly if you either have a specific inbox, right, where you say, "Okay, we sort of have pictures at BC and everyone uh sends
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messages there or if you have set up specific rules." However, in the beginning, I think it's probably easiest for you to also keep a bit more control over the process to use the mail hook step. Basically, what this does is it will give you a unique email address
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that you can forward any pitch to and then basically everything that gets forwarded to this address will be processed by this automation. Again, you can later write uh create a bit more of an elegant solution, but it's a great starting point.
So, let's do this here. Let's select main hook.
And you see that
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relay gives us this uh unique address. I'm going to copy this uh in a second.
Right, I click on done for a moment and then I will actually send a test email with some sample data to this address just so we can have something to work with. Next, it's time to process that
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email. So, we're going to click on bus and we're going to ask AI to analyze the information here, right?
So we will use the AI step and here you see you have a bunch of um you know sort of pre uh classified prompts and one of them is extract right get structured data from
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email transcripts and more. This is probably the easiest one to go for but of course you can also just uh write your own custom prompt and instruct it what to do.
But in this case extract is exactly what we want to do. So we're going to go with that option.
It asks us what do we want to extract from from that email that we forwarded. Right.
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That's perfect. Then we can click on next.
And here we see we have already this prompt sort of like precreated for us with please extract the following details from the attached email right and of course invoice due date amount and vendor name is not what we're looking for but we now just think about okay what is the key information we need
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probably the key information right that we track in our notion database that we want from here so what we want from here right is the the deal name we want the um the target uh investment we want um the um revenue view. Uh what else do we
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have? We want the the industry, the uh business model.
Um and then sort of like um maybe just like what else? Let's let's start with that, right?
You can of course adjust it to what you need. But pretty good stuff.
And you see on the
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side here, right? Um uh the AI from Relay will automatically figure out, okay, these are sort of the the fields I'm supposed to extract.
And you could click on them, right? You can change them.
You can also like turn this off and uh define the output yourself. But usually this is a pretty good starting point.
One thing to note is if you can
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you can click on any right and you can sort of like mark it as required. Uh that's kind sometimes quite helpful.
You can also click on it to say okay this actually should be not you know like text but a number output but in this case right let's actually start with something like this. I think in our notion system we have it also formatted
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as text. Let me just quickly double check.
Right here's our thing. Actually don't know the target investment and revenue both would also be numbers.
So we need to make sure that that is clear in the system. So let's click on revenue right and make sure that this is actually a number uh save and also for target
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investment this is also a number and click on save and yeah that looks good right text this is all uh pretty decent. So let's click on the test this step oper now test uh currently we need to set values above to uh do this uh yeah
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we have our email in here we need to like have it run once from the sample one and then we can see how the sample response would look like in order to test this we would usually start test run but with main hooks they work a bit differently currently in relay when you watch it might be different so you can click it right to see whether it works
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uh for me it tells me I just need to turn it on so that's exactly what I'm going to do I'm going to turned on. I'm going to see start manually, right?
So, same message. We need to just wait for something to arrive.
So, I'm going to go off quickly, send myself an email, and then we should be able in the runs tab, right, to see what's happening. And then
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after a few moments, right, we see this first run appearing. We can just investigate and see what happened.
So, we got an email, right? And we can sort of just see um what the uh the text was if we care about it.
Um and then we can check our AR output, right? See okay what was extracted deal name series B
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investment opportunity curs AI okay nice curs pitching us perfect title investment revenue both extracted as numbers right we have the industry we have the business model and yeah that's pretty much what we're looking for right of course now at this point if there's something where that we want to modify
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we can right we can go back into our prompt and make sure it is adjusted so for example currently I feel like in my deal database I just want the actual company name as a deal name so let's go back to to the AI, right? Explain that to it.
But otherwise, you get the gist, right, of how this works. So, uh let's
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give some additional instructions for the real deal name. Make sure to only extract the uh target company name.
Don't add any other qualifiers like series A or similar. Right?
And of
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course, right, that that information that is a series B opportunity, we would also want to extract this. We want to have our specific properties for that in notion but the process would be exactly the same as for the other properties.
So probably no need to specifically walk through there. Just one last note you can always swap out uh the model that uh
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you use right that's one of the nice things about relay. You notice I didn't have to set up an API key here.
So by default you get access to a bunch of different uh models here right and you can so for example say okay actually this is a very simple one right. So Gemini flash is probably more than enough.
So I'm actually going to swap to
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this just to make it a bit cheaper to run these workflows and then I'm going to click on done. Now the next step that has to happen after that of course is we need to add that information to notion right so let's click on plus and let's search for notion and then add the option here right add page to database
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here we're going to select then our um database from the deals we need to make sure it is shared with relay right if you sign up for with relay for the first time it will ask you okay what database should have access to you see I have a bunch of it shared already but if your specific database isn't shared yet we
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need to make sure that it is so I'm going to click into deals right on my deals database and then here I will go on the three dots on the top right corner connections and then here I will add now a relay this should be our correct one right we have a bunch of connections as you can
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see and then if I head back over here and wait a moment we should be able to see these yeah there they are they pop up perfect and now we can map whatever information we want from um this database right to uh sorry from our previous step to the database
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So what I want to say is right I want to click on add a field and I want to say okay h in terms of deals name I would like to map the value from the previous AI step the deal name in terms of revenue I would like to again right extract with AI the revenue in terms of
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the target investment I would like to map the target investment in terms of what else do we have the I think we had did we have the industry let's see uh in terms of the industry do we have no we do actually have the industry and tells me now that um there might be an error the type right because
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in notion industry is a select property not um a pure text one but it's fine um the system will be able to properly match this so you can uh ignore this at this point and write any other properties that we would want to map over would work the same we could even
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upload files if we wanted to write if we get attachments from our emails we could go over those attachments and also upload them but for now let's just uh see whether uh this whole workflow looks like right I think we can't test it here. Yeah, because of the main loop limitation.
But so I'm just going to click on done instead. Going to click on
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publish. Then I'm going to send myself another email right to see whether it ends up in notion.
And we see our next run was successful as well. If we go then over to notion, right, to our detail management page where this whole workflow plugs in.
Now we see also under newly sourced deals, we have now cursor,
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right? We see the industry, we see the revenue h and we have then if you have mapped other fields like the business model, right?
That would come in as well. If you would explain to the AI in our promp, right?
What is our thesis and please select the correct one. It could do that just as well.
Uh and you see now
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how these things tie together. I have it now here, right?
I could start to claim this deal, right? Add it to my uh workflow, create some default tasks.
We could even take it one step further, right? Uh you could have a whole list of tasks that always need to happen, right?
when a new deal comes in and you could
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say, "Okay, when this deal is created, right, please also create these seven tasks and add them to the to-do list, you could uh create a contact automatically and connect it here, right? Anything is possible from this position where you have your structure data in Ocean and then you layer these
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kinds of automations on top that help you take that information and add it directly to the system. So yeah, you don't have to do this manually anymore.
Congratulations, you're now at a point where you've built a fully functioning operating system in Notion and layered some really cool automations on top.
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Again, if you need help with any of this or with taking it now to the next level, you know where to find me. And the same goes, of course, if you would like to roll out these kind of systems for your portfolio companies and help them achieve operational excellence.
And if you want to continue now your notion
35:58
journey and really bring things to the next level, well, then check this video out next. It's a complete notion formula and automation masterass that will really help you master the advanced nuances of the system.
Just click here and I will see you in a few seconds.