Hello readers 👋🏾. While we work on the next growth case study, I’ll be writing a few mini-case studies like the one below - they’ll be studies on concepts, ideas and a few opinions. Today’s mini case study is on Notion’s product roadmap and how it hopes to spark a workplace revolution.

In October this year, workplace productivity app Notion announced its email product, following an acquisition of email service Skiff in February. Prior to Skiff’s acquisition, Notion acquired Cron in 2022 and launched its calendar features shortly after. While Notion’s email app isn’t available to the public yet, it’s only rational that Notion is expanding its feature set with these products. I’ll explain why Notion needs calendar and email features to scale its workplace and personal productivity platform. 

What is Notion?

Notion is a work productivity tool. Yes, you could use it for personal stuff, too, but Notion is designed and built with a unique work philosophy - the company believes that modern, digital documents should be composable and interactive like Lego blocks. Notion has done this by introducing ‘blocks’ - a block in a Notion document could be any element and link to or embed another element easily. This element could also be a separate document. 

This Lego philosophy drives Notion; its users love it, and it’s the most unique and significant change to digital documents since Google Docs launched in 2006.

Notion believes that work should be like Legos. 

Notion is growing fast!

Notion’s user growth was initially slow until a breakout hit in 2020 (when it surpassed 1 million users), and it has soared since then. In September 2024, Founder and CEO Ivan Zhao announced that the company had reached 100 million users. Its user numbers have grown 100X in 4 years and is incredible.

He said:

Coming off that announcement, we see that Notion’s vision to redefine work is bold and disruptive. Competitors like Google Workspace (formerly called Google Suite) and Microsoft Office are not composable - the documents do not act like legos. Composability is why Notion users love it, and investors have driven it to a $10BN valuation. 

A disruptive feature like composability is disruptive to the workspace market, but it’s not enough to tackle the incumbents. Notion must grow revenue to defend its $10bn valuation by making itself the centre of all work.

The Centre of Work

The Internet has completely changed how we work. Work is more collaborative than ever, with many more tools and options. What’s clear to industry players and to me is that email and calendar are the centre of modern work.

Take my workday as an example. I start my regular day every morning by checking my email and calendar. Checking these helps me think of tasks I need to complete and plan the day. When I reach my desk and turn on my work computer, I check three tools: email, calendar, and Slack. These three apps set the tone for my entire workday. Let’s take a deeper look at why email is core to work. 

• Email is an identity vector. 

  Email is the identity vector of the internet. Every app, website, newsletter, or product I’ve ever signed up for has my email address. It is how I log in to the internet. Every internet user needs an email address, and every company employee needs an email address to access work tools. When I receive any email, the domain confirms whether the email is real or fake. 

• Email is a communication vector. 

  Companies email me whenever I interact with them. Whether I sign up, purchase a product or use a service. These emails could be shipping notifications, order completion notifications, JIRA ticket notifications, newsletters, or discount codes; email is where all the comms go. 

• Email is a collaborative vector. 

  When I click “share” or “invite” on any modern work tool, an email address is required to share documents, videos, and boards with friends and colleagues. Of course, I could always create a link, but an email address is how friends sign up for referrals to get their juicy discounts. 

• Email is the external thing.
  An email address is the sure thing you know an external partner would have. They might not use the same task management tool or have Slack or Teams, but they’d have an email address. So you can communicate with vendors, merchants, agencies, and suppliers. Whatever external party you need to work with, an email address is often where the conversation starts and ends - email is where you sign a contract. 

These email features are why Slack tried to replace email and become the centre of work. 

The Calendar is also important.

Now, let’s take a quick look at why the calendar is important.

For anyone who’s worked in the last 10 years, digital calls are a crucial driver of work efficiency. Calendars mean I do not need to travel thousands of miles (except where necessary) to have a call and discuss important work things with somebody else.  Whether this is a meeting with an external partner or a meeting with a colleague in Pacific time, tools like Zoom and Teams enable us to do this. Here’s the caveat: because so many meetings could happen on any given workday, workers need to plan meetings, and you can only set the time if multiple parties have a calendar tool. In addition to helping plan meetings, calendar tools help modern workers plan their day, allocate time to tasks and communicate their availability to meet with others. 

Putting all this together….

Notion hopes that by bringing these features into its work tool, it can attract new users - who might not care for composability and Lego, retain its existing users - who are paying for other email tools and grow its revenue to tackle Google Workspace and Microsoft Office. 

While we don’t know how many active users Notion has, we can see from Microsoft and Google numbers that the market is huge. 

Google Workspace has 3 billion active monthly users and 6 million paying businesses. On the other hand, Microsoft announced in January 2024 that it had 400 million paid seats for Office 365. Both companies control over 90% of the office productivity software market. Notion is chasing huge ambitions here and remains a small player when all things are considered - 100 million total users is barely a dent in Microsoft and Google’s numbers. 

What’s Notion trying to achieve? 

One word: growth. Notion is trying to grow, and these features help it do two things:

1. Increased retention: By introducing Mail and Calendar, Notion’s users can bring more of their work to the app and spend more time using it. 

2. Increased revenue: Notion could increase its revenue by charging for these features as add-ons or onboarding new customers who don’t want the rest of Notion but would like email and a calendar.

Where have we seen this attempt before? 

Notion isn’t the first startup to tackle the Microsoft and Google duopoly of workplace tools. Dropbox attempted this a few years ago and is still on the journey to dethrone the duopoly. In 2013, Dropbox acquired the email app Mailbox for $100M, shut it down after 2 years and launched its collaborative document-editor Paper. It also acquired other companies - a photo organiser called Snapjoy, a music app Audiogalaxy and more recently, a calendar app Reclaim AI. 

Reading Dropbox’s financial statements, the company has about 18 million paid users out of 700 million registered users. This is a massive gap between Google and Microsoft’s billions of users.

What is the future of Notion?

Notion could build presentation features like Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint; graphic design features like Canva and Figma; online video conferencing like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams; chat like Slack and Microsoft Teams; and CRM like Salesforce and Hubspot. There’s an existing playbook for centre-of-work tools, and Notion could follow this roadmap as it takes on Microsoft Office and Google Workspace to be the ultimate workspace app.

The company is just getting started on its path to dominating and changing digital work, and its journey would be interesting to watch.

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