Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder)

1. Hide Vision in User Needs

When building a product, hide your long-term vision (the ‘broccoli’) within a form factor people already care about and use daily (the ‘sugar’), like productivity software, to gain initial adoption. People don’t care about your grand vision directly; they care about solving immediate problems.

2. Balance Vision and Users

Strive for a balance between building for your personal values and taste (‘your project’) and building purely for business/users (‘commodity’). Too much self-focus leads to no users, while too much business focus results in a generic product.

3. Build for Lasting Value

Focus on building something authentic to your values that you want the world to have, and that is also useful for others. This provides a more durable and fulfilling energy source to sustain you through difficult periods.

4. Reset for Better Abstractions

Don’t be afraid to reset your approach or even throw away existing work, as finding better abstractions can lead to faster progress and quickly recover sunk costs. Momentum can often lead you down paths that don’t matter, so courageously reset when needed.

5. Maintain Talent Density

Keep your company small and ’talent dense’ to reduce internal communication overhead, increase agility, and foster an environment where talented people want to work with other talented people. This allows for faster maneuvering and acceleration, like a ‘small bus’.

6. Adhere to Core Values

Build products and businesses strictly according to your core values; deviating for competitive or revenue reasons can lead to ‘organ rejection’ from employees and customers, as seen when Notion introduced non-Lego-like features.

7. Master Craft & Trade-offs

Treat product and business building as a craft, applying your values and technical know-how to make clever trade-offs to create something new and useful. Recognize that there are no free lunches, and success involves strategically deciding what to give up based on market needs.

8. Segment with ‘Lego Boxes’

For horizontal products, understand that while you build ‘Lego bricks’ (core components), most users, especially enterprise customers, need ‘Lego boxes’ (ready-made solutions). Segment your offerings and go-to-market strategy to provide these solutions, even if the underlying product is modular.

9. B2C2B Growth Strategy

Identify a broad, horizontal use case (like notes/docs) with a large top-of-funnel to attract individual users (B2C). These users, once familiar with the product’s capabilities, will then bring it into their workplaces, fueling B2B growth.

10. Bundle for AI Leverage

Recognize that AI excels at reasoning, understanding, and searching when all information is together. Therefore, building bundled or horizontal tools that centralize data provides a significant advantage for leveraging AI capabilities.

11. AI for Product Assembly

Leverage AI coding agents to assemble existing ‘Lego blocks’ or primitives within your product, enabling the creation of customized software or agents for diverse vertical use cases, overcoming the challenge of users piecing things together themselves.

12. Understand Bundling Cycles

Understand that markets operate in cycles of bundling and unbundling, similar to historical empires. Recognize whether the current market trend favors vertical (unbundled) or horizontal (bundled) solutions to strategically position your product.

13. Steal Ideas Beyond Tech

Look beyond the immediate tech and business domains to history and other industries for patterns, shapes, and trade-offs. Stealing good ideas from diverse fields can make your current problems and solutions much more interesting and innovative.

14. Amplify Positive Human Nature

When building tools, consider whether you are extending and amplifying the ‘good part’ of human nature, such as creativity and beauty, rather than more negative or zero-sum aspects. Aligning with positive values can shape users and the market for the better.

15. Plan Infrastructure Scaling

While avoiding premature optimization, plan ahead for infrastructure scaling to prevent critical issues like running out of database space, which can halt all feature development and threaten the company’s existence.

16. Optimize Office for Creativity

Design your office space to be cozy and feel like an artist studio or home, avoiding harsh elements like top lighting and pale colors. A pleasant environment encourages more time spent, creativity, and ease.

17. Learn from Timeless Tools

Draw inspiration from timeless tools across history, like the Toshiba rice cooker or Sony transistor radio, to inspire your team to create software products that last for decades rather than just short cycles.

18. Adapt to Market Shifts

Continuously monitor and adapt to the market’s changing ‘optimized function’ and emerging technologies (like AI), as these shifts require making new trade-offs in product and business strategy.

19. Lead with Direct Communication

Adopt a more direct communication style, similar to an ‘East Coast ethos,’ to foster clarity and truthfulness in interactions, rather than always saying things are ‘wonderful’ when they are not.

20. Master One-to-Many Storytelling

As your company grows, develop the craft of one-to-many storytelling to effectively communicate vision and influence the company’s direction, even if it doesn’t come naturally.

21. Sleep for Mental Reset

When feeling down or overwhelmed, prioritize sleep as a simple, daily physical and mental reset to approach the next day with renewed perspective.