Notion
All-in-One WorkspaceNotion is an all-in-one workspace that combines documents, databases, wikis, project management, and note-taking into a single, endlessly customizable application. Its fundamental building block is the "block", everything in Notion is a block, whether it is a paragraph of text, an image, a to-do item, a code snippet, an embedded video, or an entire database. Blocks can be nested, rearranged, and transformed, which gives Notion a LEGO-like quality where you can build almost anything from simple components. For custom web application development, Notion is relevant in multiple ways. Many startups and small businesses use Notion as their entire operational system, their knowledge base, CRM, project tracker, meeting notes, and hiring pipeline all live in Notion databases. This means custom applications frequently need to integrate with Notion's API to read or write data. Notion is also increasingly used as a lightweight CMS (content management system), where non-technical team members manage content in Notion and a custom-built application pulls it in via the API for display on a website or app.
From Zero to Standard
Notion was founded by Ivan Zhao and Simon Last in 2013 in San Francisco. Zhao, who studied cognitive science and computer science, had a vision of creating a tool that would let anyone build the software tools they needed without writing code, a kind of "software for software." The founding story includes a near-death experience that is rare in startup lore. After their first attempt at the product did not gain traction, Notion was running out of money. In 2015, Zhao and a tiny team of about four people relocated from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, where the cost of living was dramatically lower. They spent over a year in Kyoto rebuilding the product from scratch, working out of cheap apartments and coffee shops. The Japan period is now part of Notion's mythology, the team credits the focused, distraction-free environment of Kyoto with allowing them to rethink the product fundamentally. They relaunched Notion 2.0 in 2018, and it caught fire with the tech community almost immediately. By 2020, Notion had become one of the most talked-about productivity tools in the world, valued at $2 billion. A 2021 funding round pushed the valuation to $10 billion, making it one of the most valuable productivity companies ever built.
The Technical Edge
Notion has one of the most passionate and creative user communities in all of software. Users have built and shared thousands of Notion templates for everything from personal finance trackers to full company operating systems, and an entire cottage industry of "Notion consultants" and template creators has emerged, with some individuals earning six figures selling Notion templates online. The template economy around Notion is so robust that the company eventually launched a built-in template marketplace. Perhaps more surprisingly, Notion's design philosophy was heavily influenced by tools from the 1960s and 1970s. Ivan Zhao has repeatedly cited Douglas Engelbart (the inventor of the computer mouse who gave the famous "Mother of All Demos" in 1968) and Alan Kay (who pioneered object-oriented programming and the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC) as primary inspirations. Zhao's vision of blocks as universal building blocks is a direct descendant of Kay's concept of objects, self-contained units that can be composed into larger systems. The most Notion-coded detail of all: when the Kyoto rebuild was happening in 2015-2016, the team was so small and so focused that they did not have a website. Notion, the company that would become valued at $10 billion, literally had no web presence for months while they were rebuilding the product.
Visit: notion.so