Notion: How it Became the Productivity App of Choice
Notion seems like a right smashing software that can turn you from a lazy sod to a productivity God. All the influencers and productivity gurus are raving about it like it’s the bee’s knees.
“Completely supercharged my productivity,” they say.
“One tool at the center of it all,” they proclaim.
“Notion is basically my second brain,” they boast.
I’ve never seen a piece of software gather such a following that almost looks like a cult.
How did this happen?
I looked under the curtain and let me tell you, it’s all about the psychology behind Notion’s design and their bloody brilliant strategy.
How did they start?
Notion Labs Inc was started in 2013. Initial release was in 2016 and now it’s a note-taking app, a to-do list, a CRM to save your customers info, a project management tool, a collaboration space, personal knowledge management system and a whole bunch of other stuff.
But let’s be honest, it’s not particularly great at any of those things.
Now, one of the first rules when building a startup is to conquer one specific niche and expand from there, unless you have more money than the Queen. But for the founders of Notion, they wanted to create something for everyone. And you know what? It bloody well worked!
They locked themselves in a room and got to work. They took existing apps like MS Word, Evernote, Asana, and so on, distilled a few key things that were absolutely needed, and scraped everything else.
For example, there aren’t many page sizes while writing. And only a few colour and font options are available. By distilling such key things, they made a simple app, and that’s how they launched Notion 1.0.
Notion is so many things in one. There are ambassadors that brag about their productivity setups and people who organize a bunch of meetups about their note-taking app.
But why are so many people obsessed with it? Well, it’s all thanks to three psychological principles: the IKEA effect, Maslow’s hammer, and the Metagame.
The IKEA effect
You know how when you buy something from IKEA and put it together yourself, you attribute a disproportionately higher value to it? The same thing happens with Notion. We spend hours building our perfect templates to track to-do lists, notes, and literally every aspect of our lives. And since we built it ourselves, we attribute a higher value to it. It’s like playing with LEGO.
It’s fun, but it’s also a paradox, really — we end up spending more time tweaking the system to make it more efficient when we could just be cracking on with the job at hand.
But they’ve made it so bloomin’ simple and satisfying to use that we get a real kick out of tinkering around with our templates and getting everything just right.
Maslow’s hammer
It’s a cognitive bias where once you have a tool that you’re familiar with, you want to use it for everything, even if it’s not the best tool for the job. It’s like that one screwdriver that you use for everything, including opening a beer bottle.
Metagame
The bonkers bit that’s contributed to Notion’s staggering $10 billion valuation is the metagame. The Metagame, you see, is the game about the game.
For example, if Call of Duty is the game, then everything else around it like YouTube channels, merchandise, events, and all the other bits make up the metagame. Notion is one of the few startups that have managed to nail the metagame.
There are hundreds of YouTube channels dedicated to showcasing how to build the perfect system, thousands of people peddling templates, and there are even companies that exist entirely because of Notion. It’s like people are doing Notion’s marketing for free!
How does Notion make money?
From small startups to big companies, there’s a crafty technique Notion is using to get its foot in the door and convince them to pay for its software.
This is known as Product led growth.
Rather than employing a team to approach companies and attempt to sell their product, Notion allows individuals to use it for free. When these individuals establish a startup or become part of one, they prefer to use the same app they use to manage their daily lives rather than a random app. And there you have it, sold!
And that’s how Notion managed to become the ultimate productivity space.
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