The Broccoli-Inside-Sugar Product Strategy
Hide your ambitious vision inside a form factor people already want and use daily.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 95%
When you're building something visionary that the market doesn't yet ask for, wrap it inside a familiar, everyday product category people already understand and pay for. The vision (the broccoli) survives, but it ships disguised as something people actively want (the sugar). Notion's underlying vision — letting everyone build their own software — only found adoption once it was packaged as a productivity suite.
Origin
Ivan Zhao's account of pivoting Notion after its first 3-4 'lost years' building a developer tool that nobody wanted; the sugar/broccoli metaphor is his own framing.
Core principles
- 01Most people don't care about your vision — they care about the report due today
- 02A visionary product must enter through a use case the market already values
- 03The vision doesn't change; only the form factor does
- 04Disguise must still be truthful — the broccoli has to actually be inside
How to run it
- 1
Name the vision you actually want in the world
Articulate the deep capability you believe should exist, independent of whether the market currently asks for it. For Notion this was 'everybody can create their own software.'
Pro tip Build this for something you genuinely want to exist, not just for a market — that conviction is the fuel for the lean years.
Watch out If the vision is only about what YOU want and ignores real user jobs, you end up with an art project, not a business.
- 2
Find the everyday form factor people already care about
Identify a high-frequency, widely-understood tool category that people use every day and already pay for. Ask: what do people actually open every morning? For Notion the answer was productivity software.
Pro tip Pick a use case with a billion-plus daily users (notes, docs) so it becomes a large top of funnel.
- 3
Embed the vision inside that form factor
Ship the everyday product on the surface while keeping the visionary capability hidden inside it — Notion looked like a productivity suite but had no-code, build-your-own-software power baked in.
Watch out Don't compromise the underlying architecture to fit the disguise — that reintroduces the 'organ rejection' problem later.
- 4
Let users discover the deeper power over time
Users onboard for the simple, familiar job (note-taking, docs), then gradually discover they can do far more, pulling them deeper into the vision on their own timeline.
Pro tip This staged discovery converts personal users into team/business users organically.
In the wild
Notion spent its first two years building an easy developer tool so 'more people can do' software creation, and learned that most people simply don't care about creating software to optimize their work. The team hid the vision inside a productivity tool — the form factor people use every day — which took over two more years to realize.
→ Notion found product-market fit and grew into a 10-billion-dollar-plus company while preserving its original build-your-own-software vision underneath the productivity-suite surface.
Common mistakes
Shipping the raw vision directly to market
Notion's first version was 'more about what I wanted than what people wanted' — a developer tool that failed to resonate with friends or investors because ordinary people don't want to build software, they want their job done.
Deceiving rather than disguising
The sugar coating must tie back to genuine value; Zhao warns you can 'fool other people once or twice then there's no future' — the broccoli has to actually be inside or the strategy collapses.
Is it for you?
Best for
Visionary founders whose deep-tech or platform idea has no existing market demand and who need a wedge use case to get adoption.
Not ideal for
Founders solving an already-understood, explicitly-demanded pain point where a direct pitch works and disguise only adds friction.
From the transcript
“we call the sugar called the broccoli people don't want to eat the broccoli but people like sugar so give them the sugar”
“let's hide our vision which is everybody can create our software in the form factor that people do care so what kind of tool do…”
“the first version of notion was more about what I wanted than what people wanted”
From the episode
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)