The first time I used Notion, I had one of those rare moments where a product genuinely shifts how you think about what software can be. It was the feeling of “this is the hub,” this is where a company lives. People used to call that concept the intranet back in the early 2000s, and there were plenty of attempts to build it, but Notion was the first product that delivered on that promise in a way that felt modern, alive, and like something you actually wanted to open every morning. The ability to tie all your data together in one place was powerful in a way that's hard to overstate.
What I Admire
Notion wasn't the only company chasing this idea. Quip and Coda were working on similar concepts around the same time, but Notion is the one that made it big, and the reasons why are worth understanding. Part of it is structural: Marc Benioff acquired Quip for $750 million and it became part of Salesforce, so it stopped evolving as an independent product. Coda tried to unify too many concepts at once. Imagine a mobility device that's simultaneously a scooter, a car, and an airplane. At some point, too much concept unification stops being clever and starts being confusing. Notion stayed focused, built a clean interface, and circa 2020, when I tried everything on the market, it was simply a better product than the alternatives. Everything was slow in that era, the at-mentions, the databases, but Notion was cleaner and more intentional, and that feeling of care in the product made the difference.
They also defined the visual language for an entire category. Superhuman has Command-K. Notion invented the at-mention pattern and that clean markdown editing interface that an entire generation of productivity tools now echoes. If something looks like that today, people say “that looks like Notion.” There's a Sequoia piece from around 2022 describing their approach as “Lego for software,” which is an analogy I love. Pre-AI, if you wanted to give users the flexibility to build what they need in their workspace, you had to provide modular blocks. You can't hand someone raw aluminum ore and a soldering iron and expect them to fabricate their own tools. Notion nailed that modular philosophy for its era.
But the deepest thing they accomplished was scratching at something most software never even attempts: people's desire for seamless computing. That feeling of a workspace where you stop thinking about apps and start thinking about your work, like the Iron Man movie, where Jarvis is just there, everything flows, and you do what you need to do. Notion hinted at that future, even if the technology of the time couldn't fully deliver on it.
Their origin story resonates with me personally, too. They were several years in, still figuring out what they wanted to be. They went to Japan, rebuilt the entire product from scratch, and made it work. For someone who's rebuilt Macro, the brand, the positioning, the technology, more times than I can count, that kind of persistence is deeply inspiring, especially in an era when every other startup seems to claim they hit $100 million in revenue a week after launching. Steve Jobs wanted the Apple computer to be a bicycle for the mind, and among the productivity tools I've used, Notion comes closest to that ideal. When I was in Notion writing a document, it felt like I was doing my best thinking.
Where We're Going Further
Notion's brand identity is, in a sense, also its ceiling. The name is associated with notes, and no matter how much the company's ambitions expand beyond that, the association constrains where the product can credibly go. You can see this playing out in real time: Notion Mail is a separate application, the calendar is a separate application, and the reason they're separate is that you don't risk the core product by overloading it with unrelated functionality. The people who use Notion for notes, and there are many of them, across many different personas, don't want it to become something entirely different, and Notion is right to respect that. But it also means that true, deep integration across the full workflow is structurally unavailable when you're building outward from a notes-first foundation.
There's also a cope factor that I think is worth naming honestly. For the period when Notion worked for us, four, five people, it was everything. The tool you opened in the morning, the place where your whole company lived. But it started to strain at seven people, strained more when we brought on a sales team, and eventually the engineering team wanted to move to something purpose-built. Throughout that whole arc, there was this interesting dynamic where, because you build your own workflows in Notion's blocks, your own project management setup, your own CRM-like views, you have no vendor to blame when things don't hold up. You just think “I must have designed this wrong” or “a couple more tweaks and it'll click.” With purpose-built software, you hold the tool to a higher standard, and that higher standard is often what drives real improvement. And looking back honestly: was our Notion setup actually faster or more effective than using separate tools? No, because we ended up using separate tools anyway.
The underlying substrate is also shifting in ways that change what's possible. Pre-AI, Lego blocks were the right unit of modularity for giving users flexibility. But now that AI can write code competently, and that capability is accelerating rapidly, the right atom for building software might not be visual blocks at all. It might be something closer to code itself, which represents a fundamentally different approach to what modularity means and what users can create.
This is the opportunity we're building into with Macro. Nobody has seriously attempted to rebuild computing from scratch, email, chat, docs, tasks, CRM as one unified system, and actually followed through, because before AI it was genuinely too ambitious for a startup to attempt at this scope. Now it's tractable. In Macro, everything lives in a single unified inbox: emails, messages, tasks, docs, all triaged together by priority rather than scattered across six different applications demanding your attention separately. AI has complete context across everything you're working on because it all shares one database, one memory, one search index. Instead of fighting your tools or context-switching all day, you get something much closer to that seamless computing experience Notion always hinted at but couldn't fully realize from within the constraints of a notes-first product.
We wouldn't be building Macro without Notion. It inspired so much of how I think about what software should feel like, and it proved that productivity tools can be a righteous discipline, that you can build something with a soul and a genuine reason for existence. When I was writing in Notion, it felt like I was doing my best thinking. We're building Macro to feel like that too, but for everything, not just notes.