So that was the ‘aha’ moment,” he says.Ĭoda wanted to switch from a what Mehrotra calls a “flow-based” editor, akin to Microsoft Word and Google Docs, to a “block-based” editor where everything can be arranged in columns, similar to a website. Blossom’s Coda Pack allows companies to automatically pull in videos and metadata from Zoom, combine it with data from other platforms, and create charts that other team members can edit or comment on.īlossom’s Coda Pack for organizing user research “I realized I could build 80% of my product over the weekend in Coda and, more importantly, I could build almost 100% of competitors’ products probably in a month. He then pivoted to building Blossom around Coda when he realized that one of his customers, Figma, was already using the software extensively. Veale had originally intended to build Blossom as a stand-alone app for analyzing the interviews that companies were conducting with customers over Zoom. “It sort of changes their expectations of what a doc can do.” The “aha” momentĪs an example, the company referred me to Aaron Veale, cofounder of a user research startup called Blossom. “What people end up doing with Packs often ends up fundamentally changing the use cases for them,” Mehrotra says. Instead, they can pull in information from services such as Google Docs or Zoom, and can use Coda to trigger tasks in other services as well. Now that anyone can create a Pack, users are no longer confined to whatever data they put into a document themselves. Like Coda, Notion has also been quietly ironing out the kinks in its editor, and has leaned into extending the software through Templates, which can transform documents into ready-made tools for project management, habit tracking, and more.Ĭoda, however, seems to be moving a bit faster in making its Packs feel more like full-blown apps. Multicolumn layouts in Coda’s new editor Still, both companies are moving in the same general direction with their products. Mehrotra says tens of thousands of teams use Coda today. Those who only edit and view existing documents don’t have to pay. While its free tier is more restrictive-each document is capped at 50 “objects” (such as pages and tables) and 1,000 rows-it charges teams only for users who create new documents. Coda will offer a marketplace in which Packs creators keep 70% of the revenue, and creators who bring in new Coda customers will keep 20% of any revenue generated in the customer’s first year.Ĭoda CEO and cofounder Shishir Mehrotra says the update aims to expand what’s possible for power users while also making the editor more hospitable for casual use.īy comparison, Coda has focused more on large teams. Users can now create “Packs” that tie into third-party services-for instance, with a page that updates Shopify listings remotely or automates sending Slack messages-and can sell those Packs to other users. The overhaul lets users more easily select text from across an entire document, drag elements around the page or into a dual-column view, and edit the same part of a document that a team member is already working on without conflicts.Īt the same time, Coda is taking a major step toward its vision of making documents feel more like apps. With Coda, users can create free-flowing pages full of tables, planning boards, and other interactive elements, but that complexity has sometimes hindered the core editing experience.