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 every product maker should write down: Building a product requires users and revenue—that’s business. At the same time, you have taste and aesthetics—that’s values. These two forces must balance. Too self-indulgent without users, and it’s an art project. Too commercial, and you’ve merely made a commodity.

The company’s first version was exactly that art project. The original vision was that anyone could build their own software without writing code, assembling tools like stacking Lego blocks. Reality quickly proved otherwise. Among three options—“don’t use it,” “use something ready-made,” or “build it yourself”—the vast majority chose the first two. The founder’s summary hit the nail on the head: only hardcore Lego fans care about the bricks themselves. Most people care about the finished model on the box. They open the box hoping that thing is already assembled.

The first version died. The company pivoted to notes and documents. This seemingly compromising choice actually straightened out the relationship between Lego and boxes: taste builds the bricks, growth sells the boxes.

The Blank Page Is the Primary Killer, Templates Are the Cure

The notes and documents space doesn’t lack products—it lacks ones that are both usable and tasteful. Notion’s block editor combined with a relational database offers extreme flexibility, at the cost of a high barrier to entry. A new user finishes registration and faces a blank page, unsure where to start. The blank page is 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 proliferated, a chemical reaction occurred. On Etsy and YouTube overseas, and Xiaohongshu domestically, numerous creators packaged their professional knowledge into Notion templates for sale. Some built businesses with annual sales exceeding one million RMB from this.

The brilliance of this move lies in where the money flows. Traditional companies spend money on marketing. Notion lets users make money from its product. Template authors who want to sell more must make their templates attractive and promote them vigorously—essentially endorsing the product and acquiring customers for it, while keeping the revenue themselves. Marketing budget becomes someone else’s income, and the incentive to promote is built into the revenue-sharing structure. The result: Notion had zero sales staff before reaching over ten million dollars in annual revenue.

B2C2B: Individuals Use It First, Companies Pay Later

Once the consumer funnel thickens, enterprise business grows organically rather than being fought for. Most of Notion’s enterprise customers initially were individual users taking notes and writing documents. Once comfortable with it, they pulled in colleagues to collaborate. Inside the company environment, one day the procurement department discovers the entire team is using it, and contracts naturally follow.

This is the exact opposite of traditional enterprise software paths:

When Notion judges whether a user might convert to enterprise customer, the behavioral signals it watches are very specific: registered with a company email; created two or more documents on day one; invited others to collaborate within the first week. These signals are more honest than any questionnaire.

But B2C2B has a commonly overlooked prerequisite: the same product must span both personal life and work. Notes and documents naturally work in both contexts—recording travel plans at home and writing weekly reports at the office use the same blocks and templates, with zero migration cost. Most tools have split personal and enterprise scenarios. Copying this funnel blindly is fatal. Before copying, ask: is your product the same thing in users’ lives and work?

Let Go of the Steering Wheel to Borrow Others’ Voices

At the scale-up stage, Notion didn’t pour money into paid advertising. Instead, it cast its net toward creators. Over 80,000 videos about it on TikTok, with cumulative views reaching the billion scale—for office software, this number is abnormal.

The principle behind operating this system comes from their social media lead: for 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. Talent selection is also counterintuitive: don’t chase big accounts with broad reach, specifically pick small to mid-sized creators in niche verticals with high engagement rates—follower quality ranks ahead of follower count. Execution is completely unromantic. They use their own database to create profiles for each partner creator, track posts and conversions, use dashboards to visualize each collaboration’s effectiveness, and use data to secure budget.

The community side also started with one user. Notion’s first community lead was originally a fanatical fan: spontaneously built a template site, bought up all related domains, created Facebook groups, proactively helped strangers configure workspaces. This dedication got him recruited into the company, where he built what remains an important template library. The later ambassador program institutionalized this path, helping devoted fans make money and expand influence, on the condition they speak for the product.

How Taste Avoids Being Diluted by Growth

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

Two risks must also be put on the table. First, the template ecosystem cuts both ways. 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 a user describes “I want a content calendar” and gets a finished product, templates as a middle layer get compressed. The move that was historically Notion’s most successful is exactly the layer AI can most easily consume. Whether it can migrate its taste to a new carrier determines whether this company gets trapped by its own success path or turns another page.

For product makers, 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 make 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 still just an art project.

Key points: Bricks are taste, templates are boxes, user monetization mechanisms replace marketing budget. B2C2B works only if personal and enterprise scenarios are the same product. Look at behavior signals for conversion, not questionnaires. Borrowing creators’ voices requires letting go of the steering wheel, but managing that loose grip with data. Template ecosystems cap deep usage and are being compressed by AI’s trend of directly generating finished products. Blank pages and user monetization paths are two self-checkable judgments.