How Notion sees itself

Last summer, when I was working at Notion, I felt really viscerally that Notion sees itself as a tool for making software.

It’s something that they rarely articulate. Their marketing often puts it in more enterprise-y terms: “the AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together.”

Notion started its life as a web app builder, but Ivan realized over time that his vision had to be hidden inside a piece of software that people understand and enjoy: note-taking software!

However, Notion is different from most note-taking software — because it’s actually a tool for making software in disguise.

Notion has few opinionated workflows. Instead, it provides building blocks that let you build your own extensive workflows on top of them. You can replicate many types of software inside of Notion.

And when Notion expands their surface area, they do so by providing new building blocks. (For example: AI Meeting Notes is just another block in a document, and you can build your own Linear using Notion’s databases.)

On the other hand, the expansions that Notion regrets are mostly the ones where they rushed to launch something that embodied a single workflow, rather than a building block that could be built upon by its users. (I’m looking at you, Tasks & Sprints and Wikis. You’ll notice that both of these spawned regrettable special cases: the concept of a “task database” and the idea of “turning a page into a wiki.”)