Notion Doesn't Sell Lego Bricks, It Sells Pre-Built Boxes

Deep Thoughts on AI and Aspirations —— ByteDance Deep Thinking Circle

Notion’s founder once said something worth noting down for anyone building products: making a product requires users and revenue, which is about business; at the same time you have taste and aesthetics, which is about values. These two energies must be balanced. Too self-absorbed without users makes it an art project; too commercialized and you’ve just made a commodity.

The company’s first product was that art project. The original vision was for everyone to build their own software without coding, assembling tools like stacking Lego. Reality hit hard. Among three options—“don’t use it, use existing solutions, build it yourself”—most people chose the first two. The founder’s summary was spot on: only hardcore Lego fans care about the bricks themselves. Most people care about the finished product on the box. They open the box hoping that thing is already assembled.

The first version died, and the company pivoted to notes and documents. This seemingly compromising choice actually straightened out the relationship between Lego and boxes: taste goes into making the bricks, growth comes from selling boxes.

Blank Pages Are the First Killer, Templates Are the Cure

The notes and documents space isn’t short on products, it’s short on products that are both useful and tasteful. Notion’s block editor plus relational database offers extreme flexibility, at the cost of a high barrier to entry. A new user after signing up faces a blank page, unsure where to start. Blank pages are the number one reason for churn in this type of product.

The cure is templates. Boxes assembled by others: weekly plans, content calendars, kanban boards, habit trackers. Click to apply and the blank page instantly becomes a ready-made scenario. Once templates multiplied, a chemical reaction happened. On Etsy and YouTube overseas, and Xiaohongshu domestically, numerous content creators package their expertise into Notion templates for sale. Some have built businesses with annual sales exceeding a million RMB.

The brilliance of this move lies in the flow of money. Traditional companies spend money on marketing. Notion lets users make money through its product. For template authors to sell more, they need to make templates beautiful and promote them vigorously, which amounts to endorsing the product and acquiring customers for it, while keeping the revenue for themselves. Marketing budget becomes someone else’s income, with the incentive to spread built into the revenue-sharing structure. The result: Notion had zero sales staff before annual revenue exceeded ten million dollars.

B2C2B: Individuals Adopt First, Companies Pay Later

After building a thick C-side funnel, enterprise business grows organically rather than being fought for. Most of Notion’s enterprise customers initially used it as individuals for note-taking and documentation. Once comfortable, they brought in colleagues to collaborate. In the corporate environment, one day the procurement department discovers the entire team is using it, and the contract naturally follows.

This is the exact opposite of traditional enterprise software:

Notion judges whether a user might convert to an enterprise customer by looking at specific behavioral signals: registered with a company email; created two or more documents on day one; invited others to collaborate in the first week. These signals are more honest than any survey.

But B2C2B has an often-overlooked prerequisite: the same product must work across both personal life and work. Notes and documents naturally span both contexts. Recording travel plans at home and writing weekly reports at the office use the same blocks and templates, with zero migration cost. For most tools, personal and enterprise scenarios are disconnected. Copying this funnel is fatal. Before copying, ask: is your product the same thing in users’ personal lives and work?

Let Go of the Steering Wheel to Borrow Others’ Voices

At the scale-up stage, Notion didn’t pour money into ads but cast the net toward creators. Over eighty thousand videos about it on TikTok, with cumulative views reaching a billion. For office software, this number is abnormal.

The principle for operating this system comes from their social media lead: for an influencer strategy to work, you must let go of the steering wheel. Accept that creators won’t speak according to your official talking points, and may even say things you disagree with. Product information presented through others’ voices gains an extra layer of credibility. Influencer selection is also counterintuitive: don’t chase generic large accounts, focus on niche, high-engagement micro and mid-tier creators. Follower quality ranks ahead of follower count. Execution is anything but romantic. They use their own database to profile each collaborating creator, track posts and conversions, visualize each collaboration’s effectiveness with dashboards, and use data to secure budgets.

The community piece also started with one user. Notion’s first community lead was originally a rabid fan: spontaneously building a template site, buying up all related domain names, creating Facebook groups, proactively helping strangers configure workspaces. This dedication got him hired, and he built what remains an important template library. The later ambassador program institutionalized this path, helping loyal fans earn money and expand influence in exchange for advocating for the product.

How Taste Doesn’t Get Diluted by Growth

Back to that opening statement about two energies. Most people read it as an attitude issue, as if balance depends on founder resolve. My take is that at Notion it’s been made into a mechanism issue: taste lives in the bricks, growth happens in the boxes, and the template marketplace is the wholesale link between them. The essence of taste gets compressed into replicable boxes. Creators take revenue, the company gets distribution, and no one needs to convince anyone.

Two risks need to be put on the table. First, the template ecosystem is double-edged. The more users rely on ready-made boxes, the less they assemble themselves. The product’s flexibility shifts from selling point to decoration, and deep usage gets capped by templates. Second, more fundamentally: AI is directly generating boxes. When users describe “I want a content calendar” and get a finished product, this middle layer of templates gets compressed. Notion’s historically most successful move happens to be the layer AI can most easily consume. Whether it can migrate taste to a new carrier determines if this company gets trapped by its own success path or turns another page.

For product builders, two self-check questions suffice. First, when your new users open the product, do they see a blank page or a ready-made box? Second, do your most active users have a path to making money within your product? The first question governs retention, the second governs growth. If both answers are no, no matter how good the taste, it’s just an art project.

Key Points: Bricks are taste, templates are boxes, user monetization mechanisms replace marketing budgets; B2C2B works when personal and enterprise scenarios are the same product; conversion signals look at behavior not surveys; borrowing creators’ voices requires letting go of the steering wheel while managing with data; template ecosystems cap deep usage and are being compressed by AI directly generating finished products; blank pages and user monetization paths are two self-checkable criteria.