Who is Francesco D'Alessio?
Software reviewer and founder of Tool Finder. Known for reviewing productivity software on YouTube for well over a decade, and for covering Notion closely from the year it was still an unknown.
This page recognises Francesco D'Alessio for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“I keep seeing his Notion videos in search results and I want to know whether he is a reliable place to learn from before I spend hours on his back catalogue.”
This page covers where his channel came from, how he ended up covering Notion in 2017, the Notion course he taught, and what he publishes now that the channel is called Tool Finder. It does not review his videos for you or rank him against other Notion teachers. It also does not cover pricing for anything he sells, because those change often and none of it was verifiable first-party.
On 14 December 2017, Francesco D'Alessio published a post titled Why Notion is the App to Watch in 2018. At that point Notion had spent the year as a beta project that most people had never heard of. He described it as "one of the most flexible experiences I've ever seen" and noted that a full review was already sitting on his YouTube channel. The prediction in the headline turned out to be a conservative one.
He had been on YouTube a long time by then. The channel now called Tool Finder was created on 22 December 2011, and Tool Finder dates its reviewing back to 2012. But the show itself came later. "We started Keep Productive in late 2017, after 3 previous years on YouTube," he told Chuck Frey in a 2019 interview, "and a lot of tinkering with how we should host a show like this." The format he settled on was simple: pick a productivity tool, use it properly, then tell people who it is actually for.
That format held for years. The channel has since passed 450,000 subscribers and around 55 million lifetime views, and the site around it tests what it calls 1,000+ tools with roughly 2 million visitors a year. In 2023 he retired the Keep Productive name and rebuilt the whole thing as Tool Finder, a review site with a YouTube channel attached. keepproductive.com still redirects there.
A lunch conversation, then three months of testing before he said anything
His route into Notion was a single question from someone else. "I learned about Notion over lunch with Alex Ikonn," he said in 2019. "We were chatting about software and he asked, Have you heard of these guys, Notion?" He had caught a sneak peek of their work and little else. He spent the following week putting together a feature on the tool, and it impressed him enough that he then used it himself for three months, slowly, before committing the channel to covering it properly. That gap between finding a tool and recommending it became the thing his reviews are built on. He was also honest about where it left him: "Notion has a special place in my heart of course, and sometimes you can see my bias come across. But I try and cover all the tools in the space as equally as I can."
He taught Notion back when there was no manual to point people at
In April 2019 he launched Notion Made Simple, an eight-module course produced with DottoTech, running from the basics through databases, task management, note-taking, project management and sharing, with advanced lessons contributed by Jonathan Stewart. This was a year and a half before Notion had a public API and long before the official template gallery, when most people meeting Notion for the first time bounced off it. His channel filled the same gap in shorter form: a beginner's guide for a first-ever session, a full workshop on running GTD inside Notion, walkthroughs of buttons, integrations, recurring templates and peek mode, and a blunt "Is Notion Right for Me?" that was willing to answer no. He also called the roadmap correctly. Asked in 2019 what kept him interested, he said: "The next big move is the Notion API." It shipped publicly in 2021.
The rebrand admitted what the channel had actually become
On 22 May 2023 he published a post explaining why Keep Productive was becoming Tool Finder. The reasoning was that the project had spent eleven years as a blog, a podcast and a YouTube channel without ever shipping a product of its own. "We now have that," he wrote. "Tool Finder. A brain for finding productivity tools in a fun, easy and consumable manner." He set out plans for tool pages, better search, expert lists and news coverage, then added the line that dated the whole thing: "What you see today is really 5% of the vision." The site that came out of it publishes its method openly. Every tool gets hands-on use, not a demo, and each review answers four questions: is it safe, is it suitable, is it reliable, and who is it actually for. He notes that the answer to the last one is sometimes almost nobody, and that affiliate deals have not stopped him giving bad reviews to tools he earns from.
These days the reviews are mostly about AI, and Notion still shows up
His recent uploads read like a log of what changed in the category: using Claude as a control panel for a productivity stack, AI meeting notes replacing written ones, tests of nine AI email assistants, Gemini agents, and the state of calendar apps in 2026. Notion has stayed in the mix throughout, from Notion Calendar tutorials and first impressions of Notion Mail through to coverage of Notion 3.0. Alongside the reviewing he ships software of his own: Bento, launched in 2022, is an iOS focus timer that caps you at three tasks per focus box and sells itself on "Do Less. Finish More." He also advises and invests in tools he rates, naming Mem, Phase and Blockit on his own about page.
Why Francesco D'Alessio is on this list
When Notion was new, the hard part was not the software, it was that nobody could explain it. Francesco was one of the first reviewers with real reach to sit with Notion long enough to teach it, and he did it in 2017 and 2018 when there was no payoff in it for him. Notion Made Simple gave beginners eight structured modules at a point when the alternative was working it out alone, and his channel gave the Notion community something rarer than enthusiasm: a reviewer who covered Notion next to Evernote, Trello and everything else, told people plainly when it was the wrong tool for them, and said out loud that he was biased toward it.
We wrote this from public sources and we would rather get it right than get it first. If you are Francesco D'Alessio and something here is wrong, missing, or you would prefer this page did not exist, tell us and we will fix or remove it.
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