Lego Brick vs Lego Box (Selling Solutions Up-Market)
Sell ready-made solution boxes to move up-market while still building composable bricks behind the scenes.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Horizontal, composable products face a segmentation problem: only power users want raw building blocks (bricks), while most buyers — especially enterprises — want a ready-made solution (a box) that fits a specific job and sits on their P&L. To grow up-market you must package bricks into solution boxes for go-to-market, while making sure you keep building genuine bricks underneath so you don't corner yourself into rigid, non-composable features.
Origin
Ivan Zhao's segmentation lesson from moving Notion up-market into B2B, using his Lego brick/box metaphor.
Core principles
- 01Only hardcore fans want the raw bricks; most people want the finished box
- 02Enterprises buy 'solutions' that sit on a P&L and reduce their risk
- 03A horizontal product has no natural wall — you must build the positioning wall yourself
- 04You must keep building real bricks behind the scenes even while pitching boxes
How to run it
- 1
Segment brick-lovers from box-buyers
Recognize that hardcore users care about composable primitives, but the mass market and enterprise buyers want a pre-assembled set ready for their job. Segment your audience accordingly.
Watch out Staying too long in the 'brick' mindset delays up-market growth — Zhao wishes he'd shifted to the 'box' framing earlier.
- 2
Package bricks into named solution boxes
For up-market and B2B, present ready-made solutions that sit on a specific part of the customer's P&L and reduce their perceived risk, rather than a generic toolkit. 'Solutions' becomes the internal rallying word for sales and product.
Pro tip Use 'solution' language to rally sales and product teams around a clear position in the customer's mind.
- 3
Build the positioning wall yourself
Because a horizontal product goes after the entire software market, there's no natural competitive wall; you must create one by carving a clear spot in customers' minds through positioning and go-to-market.
Watch out Vertical products get their wall for free from their niche — horizontal ones must manufacture it deliberately.
- 4
Keep building genuine bricks underneath
While pitching solution boxes, ensure the product is still assembled from real composable bricks behind the scenes, or you'll hard-code rigid features that fight the system and reject like a foreign organ.
Watch out Hard-coding a solution (e.g. Sprints) instead of composing it from bricks corners you into a 'bad spot' with underpowered, ill-fitting features.
In the wild
To compete on project management, Notion hard-coded a Sprint concept directly into the product instead of composing it from its Lego pieces. Customers found it underpowered versus dedicated tools, it didn't fit the rest of Notion, and engineers had to touch the codebase in a 'weird' way — a value-misaligned, non-Lego piece.
→ Notion spent a year to eighteen months realizing the error and rebuilt the feature the composable 'Lego' way; Zhao now uses this as the cautionary case for pitching boxes while still building bricks.
Common mistakes
Staying in the brick mindset too long
Selling raw composable primitives to enterprises fails because they want ready-made solution boxes that sit on a P&L; Zhao wishes he'd adopted the solution-box framing far earlier when moving up-market.
Hard-coding a solution instead of composing it
Building the Sprint feature as a hard-coded concept rather than from Lego bricks produced an underpowered feature that didn't fit the product, alienated customers, and forced awkward codebase changes — pitching the box without keeping the bricks.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders of horizontal or platform products trying to move up-market into B2B and enterprise sales.
Not ideal for
Vertical, single-purpose products whose niche already provides a natural positioning wall and clear buyer.
From the transcript
“only hardcore Lego fans care about Lego bricks most people care about Lego boxes”
“you need to be a solution for Enterprise customer you need to sit somewhere on a p&l to optimize for their business”
“building horizontal there's no wall at least for in our space we notion go after entire software Market but then you need to create a…”
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)