Tidepool Review: An AI Analytics Tool Acquired by Notion?

Alright, let's talk. Every so often, a tool pops up on my radar that makes me sit up and say, “Finally! Someone gets it.” We’re all swimming in a sea of AI, building chatbots, and launching LLM-powered features. But understanding what users are actually saying and doing inside those text interfaces? That’s the wild west. It's a mess of unstructured, chaotic, wonderful human language. And most analytics platforms just aren't built for it.

So, when I first stumbled upon Tidepool by a company called Aquarium, I got genuinely excited. The promise was simple but powerful: product analytics specifically for AI text interfaces. A tool to find the hidden patterns in the flood of user conversations. A way to turn chatbot gibberish into product gold.

But then, plot twist. As I was digging in, ready to sing its praises, the news broke. Aquarium is joining Notion. And as part of the deal, they’re winding down their products. Including Tidepool. So this isn't your typical tool review. It’s more of an analysis of a great idea, a look at what could have been, and a discussion about the massive gap in the market it tried to fill.

What Exactly Was Tidepool Supposed to Be?

Imagine you have a support chatbot. It handles thousands of queries a day. Your standard analytics can tell you how many queries, session length, and maybe if a user clicked a final “yes, this helped” button. But it can’t tell you that 30% of your users are asking about a specific feature you don't have, or that they're getting frustrated with a particular part of the conversation flow. That's a black box.

Tidepool was designed to be the key to that black box. It was built to be a sort of data archaeologist for your user's text. Instead of just counting events, it dug into the unstructured text itself to figure out what people were talking about, how they were talking about it, and what trends were emerging over time. It’s the difference between knowing people are visiting your library and knowing which books they're actually reading, which pages they're dog-earing, and what notes they're scribbling in the margins.

Unpacking the Features That Caught Our Eye

What made Tidepool so promising wasn't just the idea, but the execution they were aiming for. It wasn’t just another dashboard; it was a set of smart tools designed for a specific, gnarly problem.

Automated Insights and The Magic of Embeddings

This was the secret sauce. Tidepool used embeddings to automatically group similar user interactions. If you're not a data science nerd, don't sweat it. Think of it like this: the tool gives every phrase or sentence a unique address on a giant map. Phrases with similar meanings, like “How do I reset my password?” and “I forgot my login info,” would get plotted close together. This means you, the product manager, dont have to manually read thousands of lines of text. The machine does the initial clustering for you. It's a game-changer for spotting issues at scale.

A Visual-First Approach to Data

Data is useless if you can't understand it. Tidepool’s team knew this. They focused on an intuitive visual interface where you could see these clusters of user interactions. You could click in, explore the topics, and see how big each one was. This visual exploration is so much more effective than trying to find insights in a massive spreadsheet or a SQL database. It makes the data approachable.

From Chaos to Categories

Building on the embeddings, the platform could automatically categorize user interactions and track them over time. Are more people suddenly asking about pricing? Is a new bug causing a spike in complaints? This feature promised to turn the daily firehose of text into a manageable, trend-spotted report. It's the kind of automation that frees up teams to work on solutions instead of just identifying problems.

Visit Tidepool

The Big News: Aquarium Joins Notion

So, with all this potential, why shut it down? The announcement that Aquarium was acquired by and joining Notion tells a very interesting story about the tech industry right now. Notion, the all-in-one productivity workspace, has been making huge strides with Notion AI. Bringing the Aquarium team in-house is a massive talent acquisition.

My take? Notion isn't just buying a product; they're buying brains. The Aquarium team has deep expertise in building user-friendly systems on top of complex AI and ML models. It's a perfect fit for Notion's goal of making AI a “ubiquitous and useful part of everyday life.” They likely want this team to apply their knowledge to the Notion ecosystem, potentially improving Notion's own AI features and maybe even building internal tools to understand how their own 100+ million users are interacting with AI. It’s a strategic move, but a bittersweet one for anyone who was hoping to use Tidepool.

The Good, The Bad, and The "What Could Have Been"

What really excited me about Tidepool's approach was its directness. It tackled the messy, unstructured part of the data head-on, something most product analytics tools shy away from. It automated the most painful part of the process—finding the patterns—and integrated with your existing data stack. The goal was to help teams make smarter product decisions, and it was on exactly the right track.

Of course, no tool is perfect, and Tidepool would have faced some hurdles. For one, its effectiveness was entirely dependent on the quality and volume of your text data. If you only had a few dozen interactions a day, the patterns would be hard to spot. It also required a proper integration with your data infrastructure, which can be a roadblock for smaller teams without dedicated engineering resources. There would have been an initial setup cost, both in time and potentially engineering effort. These are standard challenges for any serious B2B analytics tool, but they're still barriers to entry.

So, Where Do We Go From Here? The Hunt for a Tidepool Alternative

The death of Tidepool leaves a void. So, if you're a product manager or developer reading this and thinking, “Yes! That's exactly what I need!”, what are your options? The space is still young, but there are a few avenues to explore.

You can look into more specialized 'conversational analytics' platforms. Tools like HumanFirst or Dashbot play in a similar space, focusing on optimizing chatbot performance and understanding conversational data. They might be the closest you can get to a dedicated solution right now. Alternatively, some of the big CRM and customer service platforms, like HubSpot and Intercom, are building more sophisticated conversation intelligence features into their products. They might not be as focused as Tidepool was, but the capabilities are growing.

A Word on Pricing (Or the Lack Thereof)

The team at Aquarium was pretty tight-lipped about Tidepool's pricing, which is fairly typical for an early-stage B2B SaaS tool aiming for enterprise clients. There was no public pricing page, and the model was almost certainly a “contact us for a demo” situation. This usually means custom quotes based on data volume, features, and the level of support required. Since the product is now sunsetted, the point is moot, but it’s a good indicator of the kind of market they were targeting—companies with significant AI interaction volume and the budget to analyze it properly.

Frequently Asked Questions about Tidepool

What was Tidepool?

Tidepool was a product analytics platform created by Aquarium, specifically designed to analyze and find patterns in unstructured text data from AI interfaces like chatbots and LLM-powered applications.

Is Tidepool still available?

No. The company behind Tidepool, Aquarium, was acquired by Notion in early 2024. As part of the acquisition, they announced they would be winding down their existing products, including Tidepool, to focus on integrating their team with Notion.

Why did Notion acquire Aquarium (the company behind Tidepool)?

It appears to be a strategic talent acquisition. The Aquarium team has deep expertise in building AI/ML systems, which is highly valuable for Notion as they expand their own Notion AI capabilities. They bought the team, not just the product.

What was the main benefit of using a tool like Tidepool?

The primary benefit was gaining a deep understanding of user behavior within text-based interfaces. It automated the process of discovering topics, trends, and pain points from thousands of user conversations, which is nearly impossible to do manually or with traditional analytics tools.

What are some alternatives to Tidepool for AI text analytics?

While there's no perfect one-to-one replacement, businesses can look into conversational analytics platforms like HumanFirst or Dashbot. Additionally, larger customer service suites like Intercom are developing more robust analytics for their chat products.

Did Tidepool have a free trial?

There was no public information about a free trial. Given its enterprise focus and the need for data integration, it's more likely they offered personalized demos and pilot programs for potential customers rather than a self-serve trial.

A Great Idea, A Different Ending

It's always a little sad to see a promising tool get absorbed and dissolved before it hits its full stride. Tidepool was tackling a real, growing problem that every company investing in AI chat will eventually face. The fact that a giant like Notion saw enough value in the team to acquire them is a huge validation of their vision.

While we won't get to use Tidepool, its brief existence shines a light on the future of product analytics. The need to understand our users' words, not just their clicks, is only going to grow. For now, we'll have to keep searching for the right tools to do it. It was a great idea, and I can't wait to see what the Aquarium team builds next inside Notion.

Reference and Sources

• Aquarium Announcement: An archived version of Aquarium's statement on joining Notion.
• Notion AI: https://www.notion.so/product/ai
• Conversational Analytics Platforms: HumanFirst.ai and Dashbot.io