This article was originally published in 2023, looking back at Notion's decade-long journey from founding to growth. Some content may have been updated since then, but the core narrative remains a valuable reference.
Foreword
This article is the first piece in my paid Notion course, but in truth, this topic had been on my mind long before the course was even conceived — I simply had to write it. Even with thorough preparation, revisions took nearly an entire month. Notion's sheer scale far exceeded my expectations. So if there are any errors or omissions in this article, please don't hesitate to leave a comment and correct me.
The reason I was so determined to write content seemingly unrelated to the tutorial is that I believe only by understanding where a product comes from can we know where it's heading. Only then can our assessments of its philosophy, feature breakdowns, or current analysis truly align with Notion's real purpose, philosophy, goals, or anything that can be summed up as its "original mission."
So before you place too many expectations on Notion, take a moment to understand the stance and mission with which Notion was born into this world. Its beliefs and vision allow you to judge beyond the scale of time whether this software is truly worth investing your energy and money to study and use.
This article will attempt to answer three key questions:
- What has Notion accomplished over the past 10 years, and how did it become popular?
- A brief review of Notion's 2023 features — what can Notion do after 10 years?
- What might the future of Notion look like?
Additionally, this article will outline three visions for Notion:
- Breaking free from software silos
- Creating more efficient collaboration tools in the post-Office era
- Designing and creating tools that augment human intelligence
Whether these three visions can truly be realized — by the end of this article, I believe you'll have your answer.
Notion's Ultimate Goal
In 1987, Notion's founder Ivan Zhao was born in China, and his family later immigrated to Canada. From a young age, he was exposed to Chinese watercolor painting and programming, and he majored in cognitive science in college — all of which would become the perfect foundation for Notion years later.
He told many people about his dream, but very few could understand what "enabling everyone to create their own tools" would actually look like. This is a concept far higher and more ambitious than what most people understand as "Notion is an online note-taking app."
Unlike the universally learnable skill of "making fire by rubbing sticks," coding has become one of the most important tools for creating (and shaping) the modern world, yet among nearly 8 billion people, those who can code are few and far between, and those who can build applications are even rarer.
To meet various needs, people have no choice but to switch between different apps. That feeling of inconvenience is like having your bedroom and bathroom in houses on different streets.
Most of the time, we can only make do with the tools at hand — if they work, that's good enough.
So how can Notion change this situation?
Other products are more like furnished rental apartments where all you can do is use them within rigid constraints (literally). But Notion's modular functional components give everyone the ability to custom-build tools tailored to themselves, like building with LEGO bricks — you can freely construct a digital castle that's uniquely yours.
But don't worry about having to start from scratch. Just as LEGO has complex, highly integrated components like motors, Notion's modularity works the same way. And its current out-of-the-box "online text editor" is actually just one of the most easily understood and accepted basic forms among all the types of tools it can create.
The romance of Notion lies in the fact that its goal is both simple and grand: guided by the philosophies of Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, and Ted Nelson — three pioneers — Ivan Zhao hopes to create a tool that can augment human intelligence, creativity, and productivity, thereby more efficiently solving problems of extreme complexity.
I believe Notion has already traveled nearly halfway down this path, and it is not far-fetched to place it alongside Office in the category of "great" products it challenges.
So to better answer the question of "How will Ivan Zhao achieve his grand goal," I've divided this article into 3 major chapters, corresponding to the 3 product development stages of Notion's past, present, and future. I will detail the core objectives of each stage and what thinking from Ivan Zhao these objectives reflect.
Borrowing a quote from Alan Kay: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." In today's context, Ivan Zhao may be the best practitioner of this famous saying.
Origin Story | Seeds Planted During Student Years
Notion — which can be translated as "concept, idea, or sudden whim" — was not some stroke of inspiration that came by chance. From his student days, Ivan Zhao had been thinking about how to make "application tools" possess the simple characteristics of pencil and paper, while their creativity and flexibility could ascend to almost infinite heights through the act of writing.
LEGO bricks offer a similar reference, as do the blocks in Minecraft.
Douglas Engelbart (1925–2013), the human-computer interaction pioneer who presented The Mother of All Demos, wrote the paper Augmenting Human Intellect in 1962. It was the core inspiration for Ivan Zhao's thinking.
This 60-year-old paper remains remarkably forward-thinking even today, and its three core ideas form the solid foundation of Notion's product philosophy:
- Through designing tools and methods, individual intellectual capacity can be enhanced
- Through combining tools and methods, individuals can better understand and process complex information
- Through creating knowledge systems with shared consensus, team effectiveness can be improved, and humanity's overall intellectual capacity can be enhanced
Isn't this exactly what the modular Notion is doing?
At the same time, computers have already enabled ordinary people to easily accomplish things that even the smartest humans of a century ago could not. The crystallized wisdom of countless predecessors (such as computers) allows ordinary individuals to easily amplify their own imagination (Alan Kay, 1940–present).
Hypertext links, meanwhile, free our thoughts from the constraints of text as a medium, enabling us to create and browse content in multiple structures from more perspectives (Ted Nelson, 1937–present).
I believe that as long as you have even a passing familiarity with today's Notion, you can immediately perceive that over the past 10 years, every feature of Notion — from its roots to its branches — can be traced back to the philosophical projections of these three great minds.
- Doug Engelbart: Augmenting human intellect → Notion creates tools by combining blocks
- Alan Kay: Individuals amplify their imagination using the collective wisdom → Notion's community resources, templates, and tutorials
- Ted Nelson: Hypertext links → Notion's hyperlinks, block links, synced blocks, and multi-view databases
And Ivan Zhao's artist friends from college were the catalyst that helped this seed sprout faster.
At the time, after Ivan Zhao had built several websites to showcase his friends' work, he realized that "website building" — an extremely niche activity in the 1990s — still required the skills of a very small group of people (such as programmers) to accomplish, even as it had gradually become more popular.
So Ivan Zhao's direct motivation at the time was: "I want to develop the world's best website-building tool so my friends can use it freely."
Website design in the 1990s
Artists and programmers, in most cases, are two groups that are worlds apart.
But what if painters could build their own online galleries, and musicians could build their own online music libraries? What would the world become? When everyone can create their own tools for their own needs without any code, using simple methods — could the complex problems of the human world find better solutions?
These three high-level enlightenment concepts from thought pioneers, combined with a direct catalyst for action, are the reasons why the first version of Notion was developed as a modular website-building tool.
Regardless of how Notion's features and uses have evolved today, you can always glimpse Ivan Zhao's original intention for developing Notion. However, for the then-inexperienced Ivan Zhao, lofty ambitions always come with unpredictable risks, and the cost of entrepreneurship can sometimes be quite severe.
Setback | Misjudged Market Demand
After graduating from college, Ivan Zhao didn't immediately dive into entrepreneurship. Instead, he first interned for a year at a file-sharing startup in San Francisco. After that, he met Simon Last, who shared his interest in "democratizing programming," and Notion was the project they co-founded.
In 2013, through their combined efforts, Notion's first Demo was born. We can see that although Notion from 10 years ago was somewhat rudimentary, we can still find many product feature prototypes within it, including but not limited to:
- A block-based editor with column layouts
- Bi-directionally synced Blocks and Pages (today's Synced Block)
- A database prototype built by combining different Blocks (today's Database)
- The embryonic form of a website-building tool and personal blog publisher
But Ivan Zhao and Simon's misjudgment of user needs quickly burned through the hard-won $2 million angel investment, pushing the entire company to the brink of bankruptcy.
The reason was that Notion's initial positioning as a website builder and its product philosophy dictated that its features had to be implemented in a modular fashion, like LEGO bricks. So in the Demo, we saw "pages," "charts," "counters," as well as "images" and "text" and other basic features packaged into individual modules (Blocks). You needed to drag these modules from the sidebar into the page to combine them and make them work together.
As developers, they could naturally use these modules proficiently to build products, but they didn't realize that the Notion they had built was more like a container of everything thrown together.
It gave you a bag of scrambled LEGO bricks, so you had to painstakingly identify and learn all the different brick types, categorize them, and only then could you begin trying to build your own castle.
This winding path would test even a programmer's patience for learning from scratch, let alone ordinary users with no programming background — they would be driven away before ever reaching the entry level.
Notion's investors also expressed their disappointment after the Demo failed — "It doesn't even look like a real product." And Ivan Zhao candidly reflected in various interviews years later: "We were too focused on what we wanted to bring to the world, without realizing what the world actually wanted from us."
Kyoto Rebuild | Rising from the Ashes
The failure of the Notion Demo dealt a heavy blow to the team. To save on employee expenses and living costs, Ivan Zhao and Simon had to let go of other team members and relocate from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, placing their last hope for saving Notion in their nearly 18-hour daily product rebuild routine.
Although neither of them spoke Japanese, their homebound programming lifestyle was never troubled by the language barrier.
This time, they decided to completely abandon all of Notion's erroneous historical baggage. The first thing to go was the Web Components used to build the product — the frequently crashing tech stack had made Notion stumble along. But this time, they would use React and Redux to build their entirely new product.
They wanted Notion to exist on everyone's phones, computers, and web browsers, but website building was clearly not a need that could squeeze into anyone's daily priority list. So what are the things everyone does as soon as they turn on their computer? Ivan Zhao realized that they needed a wedge to insert themselves into this already somewhat crowded market.
They had to first capture users' higher-frequency use cases before they could have the opportunity to further share his dream with the world. Without a doubt, document editing, personal notes, project management, and document sharing among teams are quite high-frequency and highly related needs, yet these needs were scattered across different products.
At the time, Evernote — focused on personal notes — was at its peak, Asana dominated the task management market, and Confluence represented enterprise knowledge bases. So Notion boldly declared its ambition: "We will use one product to replace all of them." The "All in one" slogan had never been shouted so loudly.
At this point, Notion as a product reached its first historic turning point — from developing a modular website-building tool to developing an all-in-one text editor. This was the core objective of the rebuild phase.
Notion 0.5 | Building the Minimum Viable Product
To achieve this goal, Notion's biggest challenge in the rebuild was first to ensure product stability, then build a real-time text editor that could elegantly handle multi-user editing conflicts and work across all browsers.
Ivan Zhao's early exposure to Chinese watercolor techniques and the artistic atmosphere of his college friends had cultivated Notion's exceptional design aesthetic. Its clean, elegant appearance was destined to leave a lasting impression on everyone in the future.
In September 2015, Notion's EA (Early Access) version officially debuted on Product Hunt. This time, Notion's promotional headline was simple and practical, but the theme was clear and highly attractive: An expressive and collaborative document editor.
They had clearly learned that everything should progress step by step — grand slogans should be kept under wraps until you're confident. This time, what they were making was something everyone could understand — a simple, elegant text editor.
On its Early Access page, we could see features like ToDo, Kanban boards, code blocks, attachments, collaborative comments, and even video conferencing prototypes. Compared to the original Demo, it was more intuitive, easier to use, and better organized.
And most importantly, the concept of a "text editor" was far more approachable and easier to visualize than a "website-building tool."
Before Notion, it seemed no note-taking product possessed such rich modular features. Nor could any product so seamlessly organize document structure, easily creating magazine-quality layouts — a dimensional strike against Evernote at the time.
Notion received near-universal praise from seed users, finishing in the top three on the Product Hunt leaderboard that day.
Through intensive user feedback, Notion successfully validated the minimum viability of its 0.5 rebuild version — this was the first step toward Ivan Zhao realizing his dream.
He hid all those imaginative ideas behind the text input box, and in order to share his grander dream with everyone, the Notion team didn't linger in celebration and quickly moved into the development of version 1.0.
Notion 1.0 | A Stunning Debut — The Challenge to Office Officially Begins
A year later (August 2016), Notion returned to Product Hunt with version 1.0, immediately launching into months of chart-topping dominance, and even earning a nomination for Product Hunt's 2016 Best Desktop Product of the Year.
From near bankruptcy to climbing to the top — Notion's "comeback" story is truly worth savoring.
What did version 1.0 of Notion get right by rebuilding as a text editor?
Notion 1.0 didn't cram in too many miscellaneous feature modules. Its core objective was to integrate real-time collaborative documents, wiki-style document organization, and lightweight task management into one place, then allow this tool to solve virtually all document creation and collaboration needs for individuals and teams in a one-stop fashion.
Achieving this objective relied on the following 3 key functional elements:
1. Modular design with "blocks" as the basic unit
Like LEGO bricks, in Notion, all features are realized through individual blocks, including "pages" themselves. These blocks are organized within Notion's slash command menu /, so you won't feel overwhelmed by the abundance of embedded features — just call them up when you need them.
This way, the entire page stays clean (compared to Word's complex menu bars), while allowing new block types to be flexibly added in future updates.
However, the above description only covers the surface of slash commands. Behind them lies a complete, systematic, and highly user-friendly interaction logic.
Analyzing Notion's UX is an enormously complex topic that I don't have the bandwidth to fully explore here. So I'll just highlight two characteristics I consider most important for new users: the simplest feature decomposition and a consistent interaction experience.
The simplest features:
From heading levels to text colors, from image embedding to web bookmarks, Notion breaks down all functional blocks to their smallest possible units. This makes every feature button clear and intuitive, requiring zero effort to identify or learn.
Consistent interaction:
All feature embedding follows the operational logic of "open the menu → find the feature → embed the feature." Once you learn to embed text, you can learn to embed anything.
All feature editing is done through clicking or selecting. Once you learn to change font color, you can learn every text editing feature.
For a note-taking app, "how to write quickly" and "how to edit conveniently" are often the two most difficult things for beginners. Yet Notion provides an extremely low-cost, smooth learning path that allows every new user to learn to use it in a very short time.
Based on these two characteristics, we can indeed evaluate Notion 1.0 as a "sufficiently simple" text editor. Compared to Markdown, you don't need to learn any markup syntax; compared to Word, you won't get lost in a maze of complex feature menus.
Flexible, elegant, beautiful, simple — these four keywords form what I consider a very subjective yet very accurate assessment.
2. Powerful column layout (mixed text and image) capabilities
Notion's editor flexibility is built on its column mode. It is one of the foundations for all of Notion's advanced uses in the future, allowing you to achieve extremely flexible layouts. If you're writing an article, it can look like a magazine; if you're building a blog, it can look like a portal website.
Column layout skills are an essential part of advancing to Notion's more sophisticated uses, and they're very helpful when building Dashboards later on. However, everyday article formatting usually doesn't need to be this complex — Notion can be used just as simply.
You can think of a Notion page as a minimalist white wall, and your document as a book. By simply using left-right column layouts, you can construct "bookshelves" of different specifications and structures, making your document structure more organized.
In comparison, Evernote at the time still used a traditional top-to-bottom writing mode, while OneNote's freely movable note layout meant users lacked the sense of order that Notion's fixed columns provide when editing, easily turning note content into a mess on the page — at least that was the biggest reason I personally gave up OneNote.
3. Simple task management combining ToDo and Kanban
During this period, Notion's task management (before the database was launched) consisted of Kanban boards composed of simple column structures and larger headings. By dragging blocks, you could quickly adjust the workflow or status of specific tasks — a more efficient task management approach compared to list-style task checklists or checkboxes.
And in Notion, since "pages" are also a type of Block, you can drag "documents" around like tasks, which is very convenient. For a significant portion of users, Trello's advanced features aren't necessary — the Kanban effect achievable in Notion is more than sufficient.
Ivan Zhao had considerable confidence in Notion at this point. He believed that within ten years, all software companies could potentially view Notion as a competitor, because Notion holds the ability to create any tool and has the openness to integrate any tool into itself.
He knew very clearly that what Notion truly wants to accomplish is just getting started here.
Notion 2.0 | Opening the Door to a $10 Billion Valuation with Databases
In March 2018, Notion released version 2.0. From today's perspective, this would be Notion's most significant update in the span of a decade. The Database introduced in this update elevated Notion to unprecedented heights and truly gave it the ability to create "application tools."
But don't worry about powerful features crowding your brain — 2.0 is built entirely on the foundation of 1.0. As long as you don't use the /database command, Notion remains a pure, simple text editor.
Understanding Databases
A database resembles a spreadsheet. Each row is a data entry, each column is a field, and each field can be configured with different properties (you can initially think of field properties as tags). These fields can then be used to filter or sort the table.
Let's use schools and classes as an example. Suppose the image below shows a Notion database for managing all teachers and students in a school. Each row is a class, and while each class is different, they all share the same field properties, such as class size, Chinese teacher, Math teacher, etc.:
Up to this point, traditional spreadsheets can achieve the same effect:
But the biggest difference with Notion's database is that each data entry here can be expanded into a standalone page. So you can also think of it this way: a database is a way to package and encapsulate different pages.
How Databases Empower Notion to Create Tools
An app is like a display window, and behind it is a storeroom that provides content and serves as a resource hub. Items displayed in the window need to be retrieved from the storeroom and returned after use. Without a storeroom to provide content, the window would be empty. Without a storeroom to store content, the window would immediately be cluttered with miscellaneous items.
The role a database plays is to become the "data storeroom" for the applications you build.
Version 1.0 of Notion admirably fulfilled its mission of "being a beautiful display window." It allowed your content to be freely presented across all browsers, and the window's structure was flexible enough because all features were modular, and column mode allowed these modules to be freely arranged within note pages.
From the perspective of creating applications, Notion 1.0's text editor was like a flexible graphical user interface editor.
Notion 2.0's database then built a storeroom for this display window — one that's simple to use yet capable of accommodating virtually all data types.
The most basic table database is like shelves in the storeroom — it makes notes and data controllable and easier to manage.
Different database views (Table, List, Kanban, Calendar, Gallery, Timeline) provide different perspectives for observing data, as well as a more flexible ability to interact with data.
If Table is the shelf, List is the inventory checklist, Gallery is the product poster wall, Calendar is the restocking schedule, Kanban is the categorized promotional bundles, and Timeline is the holiday promotion staffing schedule.
With this, a "small shop App" that can interact with people in multiple ways has been built. Shifting your thinking, this shop could also be a newsstand, an online gallery, a task management hub, or virtually any type of tool you can imagine for interacting with rich text and multimedia information — all achievable through databases.
So from 2.0 onward, we can gradually observe various users building all kinds of project management tools, CRM systems, personal knowledge base systems, time management tools, or recruitment management systems through Notion's databases.
Each template type can essentially serve as a simple replacement for a SaaS company built to address that specific need. As Notion's product value becomes increasingly recognized by users, its market value naturally rises — Notion's $10 billion valuation was built on this solid foundation.
However, like LEGO, Notion is easy to start, hard to master. For most people, the description above is actually more of an ideal state — most users initially get just a feeling of "putting documents and spreadsheets on the same page."
The learning curve of databases caused many people to give up before experiencing Notion's capabilities. So next, Notion did three things that gave it explosive user growth in just two years, along with extremely high user retention.
Targeting Competitors, Ambassador Programs, and the Template Marketplace
Regarding Notion's explosive user growth, we can start with three simple conclusions: targeting competitors quickly explained its positioning, while the Ambassador Program and template marketplace powerfully drove the user growth flywheel.
As currently one of the most outstanding cases of Community-Led Growth (CLG), its internal growth loop is well worth studying:
- The emergence of databases sparked users' creativity
- The template marketplace allowed users' creativity to be freely shared
- Different levels of creativity distinguished regular and advanced users
- Advanced users gained influence by sharing templates
- The company supported advanced users in monetizing their influence
- The company certified advanced users and provided community privileges such as early access to new versions
- Personal revenue and community privileges further incentivized advanced users to share more templates and tips
- Better templates and tutorials attracted more new users
- Better templates provided better onboarding guidance, improving user retention
- New users continued to grow into advanced users, forming a virtuous cycle
Now let's look at specifically how Notion did it.
1. Letting Competitors Become Notion's User Manual
The fastest way to get the public to know and understand your product is to tell them who — someone they're already familiar with — you can replace. So starting in 2019, Notion boldly posted its confident invitation on its homepage for all users to see:
- Document creation: Notion can replace Evernote and Google Docs
- Team wiki: Notion can replace Confluence and GitHub Wiki
- Project management: Notion can replace Trello, Asana, and Jira
This strategy was quite successful. It clearly communicated Notion's multi-functional characteristics while increasing user experience adaptability (choose feature modules as needed). Casting a wide net while catering to individual interests — who wouldn't call this a masterclass?
When new users were attracted to Notion, it immediately provided an extremely smooth onboarding experience, ensuring everyone could quickly find the template set most suitable for them and experience Notion's value as fast as possible.
2. The Notion Template Marketplace | Wildly Growing User Creativity
In April 2019, Notion launched its official template library and began allowing public pages to be duplicated as templates. From then on, these highly personalized templates could be copied into anyone's own Notion workspace through public links.
As shown in the image above, from 2019 to the first half of 2020, the Google search popularity for Notion, OneNote, and Evernote combined with "template" was roughly neck and neck. But from the second half of 2021, searches for "Notion template" rose significantly and gradually pulled far ahead of the other two.
Clearly, Notion's template marketplace had gradually evolved into a public, massive "app store", where everyone could find the tool (template) that solves their specific need.
So what exactly can Notion templates do, and what makes them different from templates in other note-taking apps?
Traditional note-taking apps' built-in templates (such as meeting notes, morning journals, etc.) can only reduce repetitive work when creating new notes by using preset headings and listing items in forms (as paragraphs, lists, or tables).
Limited by the note-taking software itself, they have difficulty innovating in terms of interaction methods or personalized expression.
Notion templates, however, start where traditional note-taking software ends. Any note template based on documents or spreadsheets can be easily handled by Notion, usually looking even better.
As users deepened their exploration of Notion, they began to realize that Notion templates' capabilities extend far beyond just creating documents or filling out spreadsheets.
If we categorize Notion templates by the data types they use, we can roughly identify the following six categories of template (tool) types and what products they can respectively replace.
| No. | Template Type | Description | Notion Block Elements | Replaceable Tools | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Text-based | Mainly contains text data, such as article drafts, meeting notes, etc. | Headings, paragraphs, lists, tables | Evernote, Confluence, Word, Typora | Quickly creating and organizing information |
| 2 | Numerical | Involves numerical data, such as financial management, project budgets, etc. | Tables, databases, formulas, calculations | Airtable, Excel, Google Sheets | Processing and displaying numerical information |
| 3 | Event-based | Focuses on time and event data, such as scheduling, task management, etc. | Dates, events, calendars, reminders | Apple Calendar, Todoist, Outlook | Organizing and tracking events |
| 4 | Relational | Involves data associations and connections, such as project overviews, knowledge bases, etc. | Databases, relations, links | Salesforce | Building and displaying relationships between data |
| 5 | Multimedia | Contains multimedia data, such as image galleries, video tutorials, etc. | Images, videos, audio | Google Photos, Apple Photos, Pinterest | Displaying multimedia content |
Six tool types
We often say, if something looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and tastes like a duck, then it's a duck. So when Notion templates look like these tools and function like these tools, we can indeed say that Notion templates can truly replace these tools. At this point, the consensus within the productivity software community was that Notion possesses the ability to "create applications."
The old "all in one" meant storing all types of information in one place. But the "all in one" that began with Notion takes it a step further: not only can I store all types of information from all sources, but I can also create all types of tools within a single application.
3. Official Endorsement and Proactive Amplification of Creator Influence
Notion's perfect community atmosphere of templates and tutorials wouldn't exist without the official team's measured support.
In 2019, Notion launched the Notion Ambassador Program, which went live almost simultaneously with the template marketplace. From that point on, the more influential voices in the community received further backing from the official team. And Notion never intervened in the operations of communities in different countries — they simply let communities grow naturally.
In the Notion template marketplace, every KOL (Key Opinion Leader) can become an "application developer" without needing to learn code. Not only does Notion not charge the listing fees and advertising fees common in app stores, but it frequently uses its official position to amplify and endorse these "developers."
Notion founder Ivan Zhao once retweeted and praised YouTube creator Marie Poulin as a "world-class expert and an exceptional teacher." On Notion's official website, you can often see the team embedding positive Twitter feedback directly into their promotional pages.
The team enthusiastically and proactively amplified positive community feedback, bringing tremendous benefits to both sides.
As Notion's user base grew, the influence these opinion leaders had accumulated yielded increasingly lucrative monetization results. Solely from selling Notion templates and expertise, YouTube creator Thomas Frank earned over $1 million in revenue in 2022 alone — more effective than any advertising or marketing campaign.
| Person | Year | Total Revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Ben Issen | 2020 | $16,000 |
| Marie Poulin | 2020 | $25,000 |
| Easlo | 2022 | $200,000 |
| Thomas Frank | 2022 | $1,000,000 |
Through these three initiatives, we can outline a simple model for building user growth:
Attract users → Activate users → Amplify voices → Build community → Attract users
- Attract users: Draw new users to Notion through promotional messaging and template use cases
- Activate users: Build excellent onboarding flows using different templates so users can feel the product's value as quickly as possible
- Amplify voices: Let advanced users voluntarily create templates and tutorials out of passion
- Build community: Community is a critical component that complements product strength, greatly enhancing user stickiness and confidence
At this point, Notion's growth model was essentially established.
Through the text editor released in 1.0, Notion attracted all new or beginner users with needs for personal notes, online documents, and office collaboration. Then through the database released in 2.0, it built a fully functional, logically consistent personal tool-building platform, attracting advanced users with needs for sophisticated specialized tools while further consolidating the retention of 1.0 users.
The next development strategy was to further enhance its application-building capabilities with API and AI.
Notion 3.0 | Future Vision
Notion's Current State
In this interview from last October, Ivan Zhao stated that Notion is still at a very early stage, and its future goal is to become "a global front-end infrastructure." This seems to be a guiding summary of Notion's future development direction. How should we understand this?
Put bluntly, Notion wants to become the next-generation "Office." Whether in terms of feature implementation or influence coverage, benchmarking against Office is the most accurate comparison, even though the two are admittedly not yet on the same level.
I believe that any tool or platform worthy of being called front-end infrastructure must possess the following 6 characteristics:
| No. | Characteristic | Explanation | Does Notion Meet It? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Foundational | Can at least fulfill basic functions like recording, storage, search, and data flow | Mostly meets |
| 2 | Multi-platform | Supports desktop, mobile, and cloud platforms, providing service in any scenario | Mostly meets |
| 3 | Multi-language | Speakers of any native language can smoothly identify and use all features | Does not meet |
| 4 | Ease of Use | Easy to get started and operate, able to quickly deliver value | Mostly meets |
| 5 | Versatility | Can be applied across different fields and industries | Mostly meets |
| 6 | Extensibility | Supports feature customization and extension, can integrate with other systems or platforms | Mostly meets |
Regarding these 6 characteristics, my assessment is that Notion still has quite a road ahead, but on the path of "all in one," it has already pulled far ahead of other competitors by several lengths.
Notion 1.0, as a cross-platform text editor, performed very well in basic functionality, multi-platform support, and ease of use. At this stage, we can build Notion into our own content creation and information storage platform.
With the release of databases in Notion 2.0, its versatility and extensibility were further enhanced. We began to use databases to better encapsulate our existing note content and build a wide variety of personalized tools.
In the journey toward 3.0, Notion introduced its API (2022.03.03). The more powerful interface allows developers to more conveniently and proactively build third-party applications for Notion. Notion also acquired calendar app Cron and automation platform Automate.io, continuously absorbing various third-party tools and platforms into its slash command system.
But Notion's feature updates have always followed one principle: unless you actively invoke them, new features will have virtually no impact on you. This is the freedom that slash commands provide.
Honestly, Notion's update frequency over the past year has made my course creation truly difficult. Every small new feature immediately spawns a wave of new use cases. On one hand, I worry about whether I have the ability to create the course; on the other hand, I can't wait to tell everyone about how wonderful Notion is — it's both painful and delightful.
So let me briefly review all the major new features Notion launched in the past year (2022.06–2023.06), which should give us a glimpse into future update trends.
| Update Date | Version | Main Update Content | Update Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022.06.29 | 2.17 | Allow syncing Jira projects to Notion databases | Enhanced Database |
| 2022.08.29 | 2.18 | Launched Teamspaces | Enhanced Team Collaboration |
| 2022.11.08 | 2.18 | Allow setting recurring schedules for database templates | Enhanced Automation |
| 2022.11.17 | 2.18 | Launched Notion AI beta | Enhanced Global |
| 2022.12.15 | 2.19 | Launched sub-items and Timeline Dependencies | Enhanced Database |
| 2023.02.19 | 2.20 | Launched page Analytics | Enhanced Page Features |
| 2023.02.22 | 2.21 | Launched Notion AI official version | Enhanced Global |
| 2023.03.23 | 2.22 | Removed page templates, launched Button | Enhanced Automation |
| 2023.04.27 | 2.23 | Launched database and Slack automation integration | Enhanced Automation |
| 2023.05.31 | 2.30 | Launched Project system, integrated GitHub PRs into databases | Enhanced Database |
From the timeline above, we can see that during the 2.0 phase, Notion never made sweeping fundamental changes. Instead, it continuously strengthened the detailed features of databases and pages, while gradually laying the groundwork for comprehensive Automation. AI served to lubricate and enhance the entire system holistically.
In this way, Notion systematically built a workflow that connects Notion's internal and external environments. All of this both expanded Notion's feature list and built an increasingly high barrier against future challengers.
So if we imagine Notion as a large shopping mall under construction:
- Notion's native features are the mall's self-operated stores, and databases are the warehouses for operating those stores
- Third-party tools are merchants that move into the mall, and APIs are the transportation routes between the mall and merchants, between merchants, and between merchants and customers
- A mall's thriving operation is inevitably the result of all these elements organically co-building and mutually benefiting
So Notion will become an infrastructure-like massive entry point. Everyone comes to Notion first, then freely connects to other scenarios from Notion, but ultimately returns to Notion — much like the feeling that "all digital office work leads to Excel," except that on some future timeline, Excel might just be replaced by Notion.
Notion Projects, launched on the last day of May this year, attracted a lot of attention and brought some confusion. It still looked like a regular database layout, without any flashy new features — seemingly just different combinations of database views. And that was "basically" the case, yet Notion promoted it with unusual fanfare through pop-up windows.
I believe that starting from this version, Notion will begin to more boldly showcase its grand ambition — to build a super ecosystem for "team collaboration and project management" with Notion as the hub. While this had already been a consensus in the past, as similar Notion project management templates were already abundant on the market, and Notion could embed dozens of third-party applications.
However, in the past, this consensus was mostly shaped through the community, through opinion leaders big and small, and through the "product impression" passed among users by word of mouth.
But this time, Notion officially — in a rare move — used authoritative, guidance-oriented language and pop-up window promotions to emphasize its ability to "handle team project management." And its project management isn't based on proprietary data or working in isolation. Instead, it finds all the strong partners it can ally with and provides them a grand stage to fully demonstrate their capabilities.
The image below is the ecosystem integration map Notion posted on Twitter on June 1st. Nearly all the integrated tools and platforms are internationally renowned heavyweights. Before anyone noticed, Notion had grown from a purely elegant text editor to this "mighty" form. While it may not have the highest valuation, Notion is certainly the freest and most malleable one in the ecosystem.
But have you noticed that not a single Microsoft Office product appears in the image above? Even cloud storage has Google Drive and Dropbox, but OneDrive — which Notion already supports for link previews (embed) — isn't included. This is rather thought-provoking, and it can't help but remind one of Microsoft Loop's underwhelming launch with all bark and no bite.
PS: Three months later, logging into Loop again reveals still no substantive changes — one can only send their best wishes.
From integrating its first third-party tool, Slack, in 2016, Notion has upheld one principle: embracing third-party applications with sufficient openness, not wasting too much effort on "reinventing the wheel." So it proactively embraced third-party tools and opened up its API.
And now, Notion has finally shown its hand. It's beginning to more proactively showcase its all-encompassing ecosystem. From the past "I can replace them all" all-in-one, to the present "I can embrace them all" all-in-one — reducing aggressiveness while opening its arms wide to welcome talent.
So with this in mind, how should we imagine what Notion will become in the future? Why is Notion emphasizing its team project management capabilities? Will it still be suitable for individual users? Will it become increasingly complex? Could it even "lose its original mission"?
Possible Future
1. Continue Enhancing Databases and Maintaining Ecosystem Openness
At its commercial core, Notion is a B2B product. So continuously developing features that benefit teams and enterprises is an inevitable trend — hence Teamspaces and Notion Projects.
The current Projects template includes an agile project management feature called Sprint, which for now only works within specific templates. But it will inevitably be made available in regular databases in the future. This template also serves as an official "demonstration" — not meant to be copied verbatim, but rather to spark curiosity and guide you to experiment.
Building on the Projects template, Notion will certainly accelerate direct integration between third-party platforms and its own databases. For example, it already allows you to pull in GitHub PRs.
We can also directly preview Figma project images within databases — much more convenient compared to the previous embed link previews.
As more third-party applications are integrated, Notion's project management capabilities will undoubtedly reach the next level.
There's an even greater possibility that by the time this article is published, Notion will have already launched more new features and use cases. So if this article feels dated, I hope readers will understand.
The only regret here, I think, is that Notion has yet to develop the Chinese market. For Chinese-speaking users, it's not just about whether there's a localized interface — the entire domestic Notion ecosystem, to put it diplomatically, still has enormous room for growth.
2. Full Launch of AI-Powered Database Automation
Notion's database Automation has already entered its testing phase. The previously launched Slack notification integration was a prelude to the full rollout of automation. The recently launched Projects even directly highlighted this feature on the official website, showing that Notion has fully absorbed the technical assets from acquiring Automate.io.
It can enable Notion databases to achieve effects similar to automation tools like IFTTT and Zapier. For Chinese users, it's comparable to Microsoft's Power Automate or Feishu's multi-dimensional table automation.
Automation means that when a database's tag fields meet certain conditions (create, delete, modify, etc.), the database will automatically execute a specific action.
For example, when a deadline approaches, automatically send a reminder notification to team members. When a Select field is marked as submitted, automatically reassign the document's owner (Person field) to the next employee. When a Checkbox is checked, automatically write the task's completion time into the date field (Date).
Especially now that Notion AI supports databases, the imaginative possibilities here are truly immense.
A single database is a complete production workflow. A single AI field is a set of highly customized Prompts for that production workflow. Combined with the Triggers provided by automation, the only product that can currently make AI this closely integrated with text and project data is probably Notion.
I can already imagine that after Automation is fully launched, Notion templates will see another wave of explosive growth — this is definitely a business opportunity.
With Notion already possessing the foundation of structured content management through databases, perhaps we can imagine another scenario: using databases paired with AI to automatically combine and render data and text from different fields into articles, then using AI to "transcode" the created articles into different lengths, different styles, and content adapted to different platforms.
Text editors like Ulysses or MWeb have the ability to manually publish articles to other platforms. But Notion could potentially go a step further — through API interfaces and automation features, unattended publishing of all transcoded articles to WordPress, Ghost, Medium, or even Twitter.
If Notion's China localization is done well enough in the future, one-click (or automatic) article publishing to Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, WeChat Official Accounts, or Sspai would also be an imaginable scenario.
Ulysses
3. Becoming a True Second Brain with AI Assistance
Regarding AI, there's a current trend of feeding your notes, chat records, and all personal language data to AI, letting AI learn and fine-tune through various models, then creating a digital version of yourself. Similar use cases can be found in the already-launched Character.AI or the open-source project quivr.
If one day Notion's product capabilities allow us to envision such possibilities, it will surely become another explosive trigger for paid subscriptions.
Admittedly, this step still seems quite far off, as business models and personal privacy security need careful consideration. But with AI developing at breakneck speed, I'm willing to use the wildest imagination to envision what Notion might look like in the future.
From the cover of Time magazine
Even if Notion continues its traditionally cautious development approach, we should at least be able to get more accurate search results through AI. Sometimes we can't remember where that document we want to use actually is. At such times, if AI could precisely locate that document from your vague description, and even offer more suggestions based on your "prompts" and your document content, wouldn't that be wonderful?
If you're willing to believe in such a future, it means the more notes you take in Notion now, the more information and data about you it can store. As AI continues to develop, Notion will become your true external brain.
Some of the predictions above have high probability, while others are more like imaginative brainstorming. But the magic of Notion lies in the fact that all your imaginations about it seem natural and without any sense of incongruity. Notion allows someone like me — an ordinary person with zero programming experience — to freely fantasize about what kind of personalized tools I could build in the future. This is an experience that other tools simply can't provide.
Afterword
After reading this entire article, I hope you can recall the 3 visions mentioned at the beginning that Notion aspires to achieve:
- Breaking free from software silos
- Creating more efficient knowledge production tools in the post-Office era
- Creating tools that augment human intelligence
Now, do you think Notion could one day approach these three goals — or even fully accomplish them? These are three visions that are difficult to quantify, but I believe that every step of Notion's execution has been firmly advancing toward the ultimate goal set when the product was first created. Over these ten years, there has never been any wavering — each step has brought Notion a little closer to that goal.
Finally, a decade-long development journey makes it truly difficult for me to provide a fitting summary for Notion. As an author who is about to sell a paid Notion course, you should also be wary that I'm a stakeholder in this. "Stay true to your own needs and maintain independent thinking" is an important part of using note-taking and productivity tools. So if I've made any errors in understanding or expression, please don't hesitate to critique and correct me.
For a product that has already achieved success, every development stage seems to have something worth savoring and revisiting, and the founder's various behind-the-scenes stories suddenly become fascinating. I just worry whether this creates a sense of reverse-engineering causes from results — after all, history is always written by the victors. I'll leave that for readers to judge.
But what I can say for certain is that the imagination Notion enables far exceeds what this article describes. Its development journey has only just begun. With its feature richness and flexibility, even if development were to stop immediately right now, other products might not catch up in 3 years. If one day in the future it becomes a hundred-billion-dollar giant, today's steps will have been merely its small beginning.
So I hope that once you finally "weather" that rather challenging initial learning curve, you'll truly use Notion to create something you enjoy — whether it's everyday routines, complex work documents, project management, or life planning. Notion's true value lies in the fact that it always lets you find the most personalized implementation method in a relatively convenient (no-code) way. Whether simple or complex, everything can be defined by you.
References
- https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba8b46c
- https://www.producthunt.com/products/notion
- https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/notion-spotlight/
- https://nira.com/notion-history/
- https://foundationinc.co/lab/notion-strategy
- https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/cJW4FSg19O-WnFykoo_X_A
- https://sspai.com/post/61000
- https://www.producthunt.com/stories/notion-the-all-in-one-productivity-tool
- https://nesslabs.com/notion-featured-tool
📘 FLO.W — Notion Personal Management System
FLO.W is a Notion-based personal management template that integrates tasks, notes, projects, habits, and more, complete with comprehensive tutorials.
