“In a wonderful way, Notion has collapsed the concept of a website and a document,”
Hey there,
If you are running a business, you want people to notice you. Fast.
So you write posts on LinkedIn showing why you are the perfect fit for their problems, you send emails hoping they will pay attention to your offer, and you wait.
But even if they love your content, and even if they desperately want to buy from you, there is still one roadblock standing in the way.
It is their ability to do what you are asking them to do.
Notion’s biggest secret is that they obsessed over this exact roadblock. They went all in on making things easy, and it took them to a $10 billion valuation.
Today, I want to show you how to use that exact same secret to grow your own business.
Let’s dig in.
Notion is valued at $10 billion today, but it did not start that way. The team went through 4 painful, failed rebuilds before they finally cracked the code.
Their first version was a complex tool meant to help people build software without code.
But then the founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, learned that people do not wake up in the morning wanting to build software. They just want to do their everyday work.
Notion Founders : Akshay Kothari(COO), Ivan Zhao(CEO), and Simon Last(Core Engineer / Tech Architect)
They want to take notes, track projects, and check off their to-do lists.
So Ivan and Simon unlearned the need to build what they thought the world should want, and built what the world actually needed instead.
Most importantly, they realized that if a tool feels just as complicated as the old way of working, nobody will use it. So they created an all-in-one workspace with the simplest interface possible.
The founders even used the word "dumb" to describe their ultimate product goal. They wanted using Notion to feel as natural and effortless as picking up a pen and writing on a blank piece of paper.
They listened to what the data told them, stripped back every single unnecessary feature, and designed an interface that stays out of your way.
They gave people all the blocks they needed to build whatever they wanted.
A free tier got users in the door, the simple, clean interface kept them there, and a template gallery allowed them to share their setups. This setup let the users do the marketing for them, building an obsessed community that spread the word.
Today, they have over 100 million users.
The Psychology: Easier equals better
According to the Fogg Behavior Model, a specific behavior only happens when three elements come together at the exact same time:
Motivation (They want to do it)
Prompt (They are reminded to do it)
Ability (They can easily do it)
Source Credit: Behavior Design Lab
You can prompt someone to walk 10k steps or just a few steps a day.
If their motivation is high, convincing them to buy a pair of good walking shoes is relatively easy. (We will talk a lot more about motivation and prompts in a later issue.)
But you still cannot skip that third piece: ability. How easy or difficult is it for them to actually perform the action?
Now, take that shoe example. If buying those shoes takes too much of any single resource below, they walk away:
Money: The shoes are $100. They only have $50.
Time: They want to buy now, but your checkout form takes 10 minutes to fill out.
Physical effort: They have to drive across town because you don't ship to them.
Brain power: Your size chart is so confusing they get a headache and give up.
Social comfort: The shoes look so weird they worry their friends will laugh at them.
Routine: You force them to download an app just to complete a simple order.
No matter how motivated a customer is, if you make the task feel like hard work, they simply won't do it.
Notion fixed the brain cycles needed to get the job done. With no coding needed and no messy databases, they just hid all that heavy tech behind a simple '/' command. So, the ability to do the work skyrocketed when they cleared the path.
This is the exact same reason why we saw a sudden explosion of online content when AI tools were first introduced. AI did not increase people's inner motivation to write overnight; rather, it gave them the ability to act instantly. It gave them the ability to turn a blank page into a simple prompt, the ability to bridge language barriers, and the ability to brainstorm fast, eliminating heavy decision-making entirely.
💡The 5-minute practice
Let’s look at your own business. I want you to choose just one customer journey right now—it could be buying your service, signing up for your weekly newsletter, or booking a discovery call.
Write down every single tiny step a customer has to take from start to finish.
Look at the list: What is their scarcest resource here? Is it time? Or is it brain power? Or something else?
Review each step and label it with one of these three actions:
KEEP: They absolutely need this step to get the core value.
REMOVE: You don't actually need this information or action. Cut it out entirely.
SIMPLIFY: They need it, but you are making it harder than it needs to be. How can you reduce the clicks, fields, or text?
Keep trimming away those extra steps until you reach the absolute simplest process possible.
Drop the need to be impressive, drop the need to put all of your offers in one email, drop everything you think you want but your customer does not.
The Genuine Rule: If you want people to actually use your product, make it require less effort. The simpler the process, the faster they adopt it.
If you found this useful, share this with a friend who might need it.
Until next time,
With love ❤️,
Thusharika
1 P.S. Hit "Reply" and let me know: What is one step in your customer journey that feels a little too clumsy or long right now? Reply and tell me—let's simplify it together.
If you found this useful, pass The Genuine Rule to a friend who is still guessing.
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