Show HN: We reverse engineered Notion’s API and built 30 automations

3 points by simoelalj 5y ago ↗ HN

I’m using Notion to organize all my personal and professional life, especially after migrating from Evernote. The amazing thing about notion, is the flexibility of the Views (Table, Kanban, Calendar…).

However, Notion is slow. And is lacking this long waited API to connect it with other tools. Just search “Notion API” on Twitter and you will see +20 tweets per day asking their support about the API ETA.

So, I was so IMPATIENT that I reverse engineered their private API, to be able to read/update/delete any page/view – and then connect it with other tools using Zapier.

Today, I’m launching with my friend Shubham a tool with: - Zapier private connector - API documentation to hack around it - 30+ zaps ready to clone

One use case that motivated building this: Create automatically a note page for every Google calendar event that has a Zoom or Google Meet link. So that I can gather all meeting notes on a Calendar View on Notion :)

We’ll be here all day answering any question you may have!

https://notion-automations.com

2 comments

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sandoche 5y ago ↗

Sounds nice, how did you proceed to reverse engineering Notion?

simoelalj 5y ago ↗

We combined different approaches to make it work:

First, inspecting all network requests that are happening on the web client. That helped to inspect all requests made to read a page and edit content (a lot of data is transiting, maybe that's why it's slow on the startup...).

And then I realized there were few existing open-source projects that already done that (https://github.com/kjk/notionapi and https://github.com/jamalex/notion-py), but there were lacking an HTTP API endpoint so that we can easily plug them that to Zapier/Integromat or a Webhook.

These two repo didn't had a way to convert a Markdown to a Notion content - which would make it complicated to know every type of blocks that makes a Notion page.

Finally you needed to be tech-savvy to be able to deploy the open-source projects and there wasn't any simple integration SaaS out there – so it was limiting a large section of people who use Notion extensively, and are familiar with automation tools.