—
Super lackluster release
That’s what a disappointed Notion user commented about their long-waiting, super-hyped app – Notion Calendar.
Many share the consensus that the new Notion Calendar falls short for current users, lacking features compared to Google Calendar, no support for Android & iPad, and requiring the use of two apps simultaneously.
From a feature standpoint, it seems like a weak attempt to enhance Notion as an ecosystem.
However, if we consider the growth, business, and product perspectives, I think this is a brilliant move, with only a slight bit of a caveat.
Before we dive in, some context
Notion is popular, no doubt.
Since 2018, it’s amassed 30-35M users globally, equivalent to the entire population of Malaysia or half of Britain. It’s a financial powerhouse, securing nearly $350M across 5 funding rounds and currently boasting a valuation exceeding $10B.
But, Notion is far from devouring a majority of the cake. Evernote, its predecessor, and the most well-known note-taking app, has reached 250M users previously, signaling ample room for growth for Notion.
I believe: Notion Calendar plays a crucial role in Notion’s growth strategies.
Our protagonist: Notion Calendar
In 2022, Notion bought Cron, a Product-Hunt-app-of-the-year Calendar app, in everyone’s extreme amazement.
Speculations spread, expectations raised. Notion must be doing something to their calendar, a critical feature for project management and personal planning.
But not until a week ago that everybody knew what Notion was really trying to do with Cron. It turned Cron into Notion Calendar and integrated it into the current Notion system (still a standalone app).
Feature-wise, Notion Calendar neither introduces an innovative way of managing time nor significantly enhances any particular calendar workflow.
It’s on par with Fantastical, only slightly better than the traditional Google Calendar, and surpasses Apple Calendar by miles. But it’s wishful to think that someone who’s used to the simplicity and ecosystem-integrated of Apple Calendar will switch to Notion Calendar.
This leads me to think that Notion is not trying to compete head-to-head with other Calendar apps. After all, they are not a calendar company. And look at the likes of Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Fantastical, or Calendar 366. They have been around for years!
If standard calendar users aren’t swayed by its features, acquiring new users through paid marketing seems unlikely to be effective.
That means Notion Calendar relies on something else to attract new users.
Leveraging virality as the core growth engine
If I were to write a narrative for Notion Calendar, it’s gonna be something along the lines of:
Notion Calendar does not aim to provide outstanding time-management capability.
Instead, Notion Calendar aims to provide a more holistic experience to the Notion users, who are fed up with the current calendar-view database, and who crave a more unified productivity experience from note taking, to managing projects, to scheduling time with their peers.
In return, these now-turn-crazier Notion users will do free marketing for this new product through their own crazy usage.
Please pay attention to the last line: “free marketing for this new product through their own crazy usage” – Notion has decided to use Virality as their growth engine, rather than Paid or Sticky.
This is where Notion’s Growth team’s brilliance shines. They have nailed the question of what kind of (calendar) features will help (naturally) bring in more new users as the current users continue to use them.
If we look very carefully at the product, we’ll realize that the whole user flow of Notion Calendar is the growth engine itself. Every step in the user flow is elegantly plowed with tactics to raise new users’ awareness and curiosity.
Here are the 3 basic steps in the user flow:
Step 1: Subtle Marketing Symphony
When Notion users share their availability via Notion Calendar for appointments, they inadvertently become ambassadors for free marketing. The invite link prominently features “Notion” and “Calendar,” while the booking screen boldly displays a “next-generation” title and a compelling blue “Sign Up” call-to-action.
This strategic brand placement mirrors successful tactics employed by SaaS giants like Mailchimp (with their chimpanzee’s logo at the end of the free email) or Intercom (with a small line “Powered by Intercom” in the floating chat at the bottom-right corner), utilizing logos and subtle branding for effective promotion.
Step 2: Irresistible Attachments
Notion Calendar has made it (too) easy for its current users to attach documents from Notion’s workspace (similar to how Google allows you to attach a doc/sheet/slide in the invite)
As an invitee, receiving a Google Calendar invite pinned with a charming Notion document creates curiosity. For non-Notion users, the only path to view the attachment is by signing up, resulting in… guess what, more users for the mother Notion.
Step 3: Seamless Conversion
Upon successfully acquiring a user, the transition to Notion’s broader ecosystem is facilitated through a user onboarding checklist.
Although Notion Calendar is fully functional without connecting to a Notion workspace, the team cleverly incorporates it into the onboarding process. Leveraging psychological tendencies to follow instructions, this no-brainer step ensures its new users are creating a Notion workspace and transitioning into becoming dedicated Notion users later on.
The clever plan: winning over both the OG fans and the fresh faces!
This whole Notion-Calendar-to-Notion approach is super effective because it adopts two very classic models: bait-and-hook, and freebies.
For existing Notion users: The classic bait-and-hook, or razor-and-blade, business model
This model operates on the premise that users, having initially purchased the primary product, will continue generating revenue over the long term by acquiring complementary products associated with the original purchase.
Think of Gillette. Men will buy the full set once, then they can keep the handle, and will only buy the razor blades subsequently.
Or the Nespresso machine. Nestle wasn’t afraid of selling the physical machine at a loss (compared to its manufacturing and logistics cost), because they knew in the long-term they would still enjoy the profit from people loyally purchasing coffee capsules.
In a way, Notion, the workspace itself, is Gillette’s handle, or Nespresso’s machine equivalent. Notion Calendar is the blade, or the capsule, because it brings out more values from existing Notion features. Notion Calendar, and by extension Notion itself, achieves maximum impact when managing multiple projects with distinct timelines or when used for daily task management
For new non-Notion but calendar-loving users: The classic freebies marketing
This is when companies use a free product to capture leads, which they will (with an intensive effort of drip marketing), eventually convert to users of other, often paid, products.
I can personally vouch for freebies marketing, especially for startups. This strategy has helped me triple my newsletter subscribers within a month, with a modest investment of a few hours.
Notion Calendar is the freebie in our discussion. It’s free. Zero cost. Nil. Nada. It’s a calendar, period. Everybody is familiar with the concept so people should be able to download and use it straightaway. Notion Calendar will then channel all of its leads through a chain of (highly likely) educational emails, and somewhere along the line, they will nudge you to become a Notion user.
This reminds me of Holistics, a self-service BI platform I worked for years back. They cleverly crafted two freebies, dbdiagram and dbdocs, to snag potential leads. All three tools targeted data analysts, but each addressed a distinct, non-overlapping need.
The concept behind these freebies was twofold:
- Capture data analysts with needs met by both the freebies and Holistics. This is the ideal customer since we can easily nudge them to adopt Holistics.
- Raise awareness among data analysts with simpler needs, anticipating they’d recall Holistics when their analytics needs expanded – either with a larger company or as their current one grew.
Wait ah, why a separate app?
As someone who’s been riding the Notion wave for quite a while and happens to wear the PM hat, three reasons stand out to me why merging Notion Calendar with the original app’s Calendar function might not be the best move: It could mess with the already-overwhelming Notion UX, damage their growth, and the oh-my-god-not-again technical challenges.
Potential harm to Notion UX
Despite their effort over the past few years, Notion is still notorious for the overwhelming feeling it introduces to new users.
It has too many features and concepts to wrap your head around (why is there a “database” in a note-taking app?!)
Now, imagine one single feature, Calendar, has weirdly more features than all other features combined, users will definitely be more stressed.
What’s more, the abstraction level of “Calendar” in Notion workspace is just a view of the database, not a fully functional feature. At the same time, “Notion Calendar” is a fully functional beast by itself. Combining these two is a recipe for confusion . Confusion leads to hesitation to explore which leads to low adoption. Game over for Notion Calendar. This reason alone is enough to not merge the two “things” together.
Potential growth hindrance
The calendar is just one view of the database, and the database is just one feature of the whole app. Existing users will have to go through so many layers to notice these major changes to the Calendar.
New users? Already drowned in the sea of features. Unless someone’s on a mission solely for a better calendar in Notion (er… why not find a good Calendar app in the first place?) chances are they won’t sift through all features to discover the revamped calendar.
So, here’s the game Notion has to play in that scenario: it’s not just about marketing a new product (Notion Calendar), but about schooling users on using Notion proficiently first and then nudging them toward the calendar. I would definitely throw in the towel before reaching the latter step 🙂
In the end, no one is going to make good use of the rather expensive changes in the Calendar (they gotta buy Cron in the first place, innit). Poor ROI. Let’s fire the CEO.
If the two are separate entities, Notion can lure in users solely interested in Calendar-ing, slowly guiding them into more Notion-ing use-cases. It’s the only way Notion Calendar can kickstart the viral growth engine model we discussed earlier in this essay.
Technical challenges
I might not be a developer, but my gut from years of building products strongly suggests that merging Cron into the existing Calendar function within Notion is no joke.
Take storing users’ data as an example. Notion has done an extraordinary technical feat with this, as explained on their engineering blog. I humbly guess that the data structure of a calendar is nowhere near as complicated as Notion’s, so merging these two will definitely introduce some challenges. If we all remember our old friend simple Captcha: it took the founder Luis von Ahn 1 year to integrate its code into the Google ecosystem. Cron and Notion seem much more complicated from a feature-set perspective.
And performance? Picture the already somewhat sluggish Notion app suddenly doubling in weight. An app within an app. This “Russian Doll Code” would undoubtedly slow down page loading times, triggering user hesitations when faced with a behemoth app on the store or their phone.
During my time here in Shopee, I learned that people with slightly lower-end phones tend to open the app directory, sort by descending app size, and remove those that consume the most storage at the top. This could very well be the faith for Notion if it were to make its current calendar view into a fully functional beast.
So, it now makes sense to me why they opted for a separate app but generously allowed users to embed and easily use Notion Calendar within Notion.
Fine, a separate app. But it’s not the main problem.
If you browse through the communities, you’ll most likely come across the stacked disappointment of current Notion users. The most notable of all being Notion Calendar, prefixed with “Notion”, is a separate app instead of a significant upgrade to the Calendar view in Notion.
But that’s not the spark of the fire. And also that’s not what I want to focus on. After all, that’s what the management has done and there’s little we can do about it.
In my opinion, people cannot justify using another separate Notion app for 3 main reasons:
- Undistinguishable from existing Calendar apps on the market
- Little value to the current Calendar-related workflow in Notion
- Lack of features, such as support for Outlook/Apple Email and Android/iPad
But first, let’s talk about the elephant in the room
“All-in-one” is a devil.
Notion users expect to use one app only. That’s Notion’s pitch. They came for it, and lived by it. Now, Notion asks their users to install another app, or go to another website, to use this new “Calendar” thing. That sounds conflicting and gives people a reason to believe that the same thing might happen in the future.
Meta made a similar move in 2014, when they tried to separate Facebook and Messenger into 2 standalone apps, only to come across huge pushbacks from its users, who don’t have enough phone storage for 2 apps and who want a seamless experience of one app only.
6 years later, with true reasons unbeknownst to the public, they merged the two apps again. It might be because Meta wanted to merge Instagram and Messenger chat later on, or they want to compete with TikTok.
I think such a move requires enormous effort, and undoubtedly disturbs a lot of users. I hope the history doesn’t repeat for Notion.
If current users don’t see themselves using the app, it defeats the purpose of Notion Calendar as a growth engine for Notion.
Let’s analyze each reason.
1. Undistinguishable from existing Calendar apps on the market
It’s likely a person who comes to Notion for better productivity would have used some sort of Calendar app before. So it’s natural for them to compare Notion Calendar with its alternatives.
From Notion users’ standpoint, Notion Calendar is not on par with other apps, there’s little motivation for them to switch to using it. Combined with the fact that Notion Calendar is basically piggybacking Google (and potentially Apple and Microsoft later), why not go straight to the source?
Non-Notion users would not, similarly, see the benefits of Notion Calendar because it requires prerequisite knowledge of Notion, which they clearly lack.
2. Little value to the current Calendar-related workflow in Notion
Undeniably, some users greeted Notion Calendar with warmth and joy. Notion Calendar has done a good job of listening to its users, finding their pain points reflected via crazy workarounds, and providing the perfect solution with the speed and ease of a few clicks.
But based on the proportion of their comments against the “haters”, and also based on my intuition, I don’t think this group is large.
Notion Calendar’s target audience is project jugglers, overseeing multiple things in life and at work concurrently. It’s fast and easy to layer different projects/tasks/calendars on top of one single view without having to populate the original view.
Think of this like Photoshop, in which independent layers give ultimate flexibility and creativity to do whatever you want to an image, without actually making permanent changes to it.
However, I believe not many people have so many projects and tasks that they would need to view in the same place, and fewer to view them in combination with their own Google Calendar events, to avoid event clashes. As a result, it might take a toll on the adoption rate of this new app, and subsequently on the growth of Notion.
There’s quite a loud group of users who benefit from the current Calendar view in Notion, and would like to see major improvements. They have a few use-cases inside Notion that Notion Calendar fails to serve inside Notion:
- Timeboxing: In Notion, you can only glimpse tasks for a specific day, lacking the freedom to arrange when and for how long. Notion Calendar can create new tasks for the same database and timebox them, but it falls short in letting you view all tasks under the same database and freely arrange them on the calendar. (Interestingly, Google Calendar also shares this limitation, providing an opportunity for Notion to stand out!)
- Custom view: It’s frustrating not being able to change how many days you can view at the same time. People have been mourning for years, and finally, you can only do it in the new Notion Calendar app. Yet, it requires you to leave Notion.
- Recurring tasks: Recurring database is just a workaround for this use-case since it will duplicate the whole database instead of just a specific task. Neither the Notion calendar view nor the Notion Calendar has managed to solve this problem.
3. Lack of features
Many people feel excluded because Outlook/Apple Email and Android/iPad are not supported on Notion Calendar.
This is the least of my concerns. It’s unlikely Notion users who cannot use the Calendar will be so irritated that they will quit Notion. The internal team needs to launch the app early anyway to collect concrete feedback and sentiments. I’m sure they are fully aware of the current shortcomings feature-wise and have some plans around the corner.
If I were to suggest?
Let me repeat my above assumption: existing Notion users are hesitant to use Notion Calendar unless the following two are changed in the long term: (1) it’s not so different from other calendar apps they are already using and (2) it’s not providing added values to their current workflow inside Notion.
(I assume (3) will be actualized eventually)
So the Notion team faces two choices:
- Develop a uniquely valuable feature exclusive to Notion Calendar, compelling users to adopt it, especially focusing on the Calendar-ing use-case. The primary competitor here is the Market Force – other well-established apps on the market.
- To ensure the new Notion Calendar can serve the most common calendar use-cases of Notion users extremely well, so well that users are persuaded to use it in replacement of the calendar view. This is more geared towards the Notion-ing use-cases. The competitor would be the User Force: Notion’s own users’ expectations.
Assuming that the engineering efforts for these are the same and assuming that the team’s ultimate goal is to onboard more new users to the Notion platform, I think choice #1 is better in terms of impact.
Suppose that the Notion team builds a unique calendar-ing feature that only Notion has, it not only attracts current Notion users, but it also attracts non-Notion users who presumably will see Notion Calendar ads somewhere.
But with the same effort to address current Notion users’ use cases, the best Notion can do is convert its current users to Notion Calendar. Non-Notion users would still have to use the Notion app first to understand why Notion Calendar is useful, which is… quite paradoxical. So they will view Notion Calendar no different from other apps. Huge miss.
What do I think can make Notion Calendar more unique?
Suppose I had a chance to improve the uniqueness of Notion Calendar, I would introduce a year-view planning function.
As a professional who enjoys traveling a few times a year, my ideal use-case is to identify optimal travel days that:
- Minimize the consumption of annual leave, strategically aligning with public holidays.
- Avoid conflicts with significant events like birthdays, weddings, or recurring commitments such as classes and team meetings.
I have tried many popular calendars on the market, and none came close. There’s only one app that was in the right direction – Yearful – but it doesn’t sync my Google account’s events, and doesn’t have Singapore holiday. Syncing everything manually is tedious.
I even went so far as to work around by screenshotting the Google Calendar year view, and then using Excalidraw to plan out this year’s biggest events, lol:
I believe this is not too niche of a use-case, since a lot of websites try to design the best ways for Singaporeans to maximize their rest time. I would even consider subscribing to a calendar app if it has such a feature (wait… why don’t I build this myself? Don’t steal!)
This idea carries the “planning” vibe that Notion users have and can have various applications such as campaign, content, wedding, and trekking planning – all of which require proper preparations.
This post has been long
I’m curious to see what Notion is going to do to their Calendar in the upcoming months. They have already used AI in the main app, so I see no future where Notion Calendar doesn’t become artificially smarter.
As for the Notion Calendar itself, I expect to see more Availability Sharing links from my friends and colleagues, as well as more meeting Notion documents attached to the invites. That will somehow prove my hypothesis that Notion Calendar is not attractive enough for people to use, to be wrong. I’m happy to be wrong, since I’ve got one more chance for my product and user sense to be upgraded.
Thanks for reading, and hope to see you in my next rant.
