How Do You Compete with Free? Notion: the embattled artist

This Ecosystem of Rivals strategy is ultimately about replicating the capabilities/data that Microsoft has in their platform with linked individual tools.

The knowledge worker’s productivity stack is increasingly fragmented. The familiar story of all data infrastructure companies, “Your data is everywhere, get easy access to it all in one place with our tool” holds additional weight for Notion. Notion is essentially a highly abstracted no-code tool. It has created a series of highly artistic, unusual... See more

When I talk to people who have been building software since the 90s their biggest surprise about the B2B software market is just how big it has become. This is the difference in the Netscape versus Notion story. The internet was so much smaller in the 90s that there was just only so much room to run. Notion will not face that problem. In my opinion... See more

Microsoft has 300M+ active Office 365 subscriptions where Loop would be included in that bundle. At an ARR per User of ~96 dollars, you are looking at a product that pumps out around $28.8B in high margin revenue a year. The division that houses Office 365 did $53B last year and 365 likely makes a higher portion than 54% of that total revenue so my... See more

Notion’s challenge is that they have to simultaneously convince people to spend money on something that is “free” from Microsoft and isn’t as deeply integrated into many businesses' existing workflows and documents. And they have to do it in comparison with the essentially $0 CAC that Microsoft will enjoy—not easy.

Note: The prototypical startup advice of ignoring the competitive threat of Big Tech is overrated in my opinion. Unless that company is Google, the other Big Tech companies have shown their ability to ruthlessly copy and destroy startups over the last two decades. The era of Big Tech being unable to execute is over—they are hungry for blood and new... See more

Notion is a productivity tool that allows teams to collaborate, store knowledge, and run processes. ... Microsoft’s clone, Loop, looks….the exact same.

Eventually Bill realized that feature wars were stupid, made Internet Explorer the free, default browser for all Windows users, and won the market. Thus, a lesson was learned: when apps compete with the platforms they live on, the platform usually wins.

Notion users can either manually enter it in or find some sort of transfer tool. This transfer of outside data is the second avenue of attack that Notion is employing. In September of this year, they announced the acquisition of automate.io (a Zapier competitor), which allows customers to set up data transfers between disparate system with no API a... See more

I think this ultimately ends up being a yes/and scenario. Microsoft is going to do Microsoft and will capture large swaths of the market simply by copying Notion’s brilliance. Notion will have a strong bottom’s up and community driven sales motion that enables them to grow for a long, long time.