"People don't want to eat the broccoli but people like sugar — give them the sugar then hide the broccoli inside of it."
Notion's real vision: everyone builds their own software (no-code power for all)
The sugar: familiar productivity tool people already understand and need daily
Took 2+ years to realise the world needed sugar first, broccoli second
The deeper you use Notion, the more you discover the hidden broccoli inside
Framework
Notion's Lego Model: Bricks → Boxes → Solutions
4
lost years before PMF
2×
full code rewrites
$10B+
valuation reached
Bricks: flexible primitives — database blocks, page nesting, relations — the underlying no-code power most users never see
Boxes: pre-assembled Lego sets for a specific use case — wiki, project management, CRM — what most users actually buy
Solutions: named enterprise offerings that sit on a P&L — what enterprise buyers require before they sign
B2C2B flywheel: personal users adopt bricks → discover power → bring Notion to work → enterprise buys boxes
AI unlocks the original dream: AI agents can now assemble Lego bricks into any custom software for any user — fulfilling Ivan's 2013 vision without requiring users to code
Ivan's hard-won lesson
Hardcore Lego fans love bricks. Most people want the Lego box. Ivan stayed in brick-first mode too long. The strategic shift: keep building bricks, but sell boxes — and now, let AI assemble the bricks for everyone.
Playbook
Surviving the Lost Years & Staying Lean
How to stick with a hard idea
Reset freely: Notion scrapped its entire code base twice. Better abstractions compound faster than grinding on a bad foundation — you can catch up all the progress you lost, quickly
Beware false momentum: momentum will carry you in the wrong direction the same way it carries an LLM that can't back-track from a wrong token — chain-of-thought models are better at resetting; so should you
Two energy sources: building for business (score-card, competition) vs. building for value (what you want to exist). Both are real. The durable one is value — it kept Ivan going through four lost years
Change the scenery: Ivan and Simon laid off everyone, subleased the SF apartment and office, and coded 18 hrs/day in Japan. The physical reset unlocked the product reset
Daily personal reset: "I just go to sleep — next day I'm reset." High is never too high, low never too low. Equanimity is a founder super-power
Small bus, talent density
The small bus metaphor
A smaller bus turns corners faster, accelerates harder, and is easier to steer. You choose who sits next to you — that determines speed more than headcount. Notion tracks revenue-per-employee, not total headcount.
No salespeople until $10M+ ARR
Ivan, Simon, and Akshay could each design, code, market, and close deals. When founders cover multiple functions, the headcount stays low by default — and the internal communication overhead stays manageable.
Craft is the company philosophy
Conference rooms named after timeless tools — rice cookers, Lamy pens, original Macs. The goal: build software that lasts decades, not 18-month product cycles. "Craft = applying your values to your technical know-how to make clever trade-offs."
Tactics
Building Horizontal & the $10B Near-Death
Anchor to a billion-user wedge: Notes and docs have 1B+ daily users — that gave Notion its top-of-funnel. Calendar is next (another 1B+ category); email is in progress
Build to your values or face organ rejection: When Notion hard-coded "sprints" instead of composing them from Lego blocks, engineers, customers, and the code base all pushed back. Took 9–12 months to unwind
Don't go too late on infra: Notion ran on one Postgres instance until COVID. Usage exploded — weeks away from total outage. Sharding saved the company. "Don't do premature optimisation — but plan ahead a little"
AI rewards horizontal data: The more information lives in one place, the better AI can reason across it. Bundled tools + AI = compounding advantage over fragmented SaaS stacks
Steal from outside tech: Romance of Three Kingdoms, complex-systems biology, 1970s Engelbart papers — patterns from other domains surface trade-offs competitors miss entirely
The COVID doomsday clock
One Postgres instance. Weeks of runway before total data loss. All engineers halted features, shipped sharding under pressure. The lesson: avoid premature optimisation — but don't let urgency become crisis.
Contrarian
Myths About Building Enduring Products
✗Build exactly what users ask forINSTEAD →✓ Balance personal taste with market signal. Too much of yourself = research project; too much market = commodity. The sweet spot is authentic craft that also happens to be useful for others.
✗Product-market fit hits you like a thunderboltINSTEAD →✓ For Notion it was a gradual brightening — the PMF signal was VCs sending dog treats to a private office address. "Oh, good — people care now." No binary pop, no milestone celebration. Just a slow, steady ramp.
✗More engineers = faster productINSTEAD →✓ Internal communication overhead grows super-linearly with headcount. A small, talent-dense bus outpaces a large, misaligned one. Notion was profitable and growing with fewer engineers than most competitors had in PM roles alone.
✗Horizontal platforms always lose to point solutionsINSTEAD →✓ The bundling/unbundling cycle is eternal — Romance of Three Kingdoms: "long united, must divide; long divided, must unite." We're at the tail end of SaaS fragmentation. AI rewards horizontal data unification. Notion is #2 in project management and #3 in CRM without intentionally building either.