Notion AI

Assume the Disruptor Is Right

During an existential threat, assume the disruptor is playing an optimal game and respond with overreaction

Marketing3 steps

Be The User Reset (Jobs-to-be-Done)

Zoom out and ask what the user hires your product for — then be that user and ask if you'd even buy what you made.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Community as an Economy

Help your fans make a living from your product and their income becomes your distribution

Concentric Circles Message Propagation

Spread any message outward from your own desk, one audience ring at a time — never skip a circle.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Consumer Subscription Viability Test

Freemium-plus-paid-acquisition consumer subscriptions fail without ~60-70%+ retention or a network effect

Marketing5 steps

Content Market Fit

Treat content like a product: pick an audience, find their pain, and ship a painkiller

Self-Mastery4 steps

Cultivate Agency, Not Skills

When AI hands everyone the skills, agency becomes the only differentiator — and you build it by making things.

Cultural Erogenous Zones

Stop trying to change what people care about; bridge from what they already care about to you.

Productivity3 steps

Demos Not Memos

The first 10% of every project is now free — so build something to react to instead of writing documents.

Innovation3 steps

Design in the Material

PMs and designers should code — not to ship, but to master the material and truly understand what they're designing.

Leadership4 steps

Founder Intuition vs Team Expertise Handoff

Delegate to hires only once they consistently make better calls than you would — and signal in both directions

Mistakes of Commission Over Omission

Doing nothing is the riskiest comms strategy — it hands the win to the status quo by default.

Strategy3 steps

Obviously Good, Then Incremental Correctness

Only make obviously good stuff, ship it in iterations, then reconcile the sprawl back to a naked robotic core.

Marketing6 steps

Pressure = Force ÷ Surface Area

Same effort, narrower target, more impact — shrink your surface area to raise message pressure.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

SaaS-Marketplace Transition Test

A SaaS business can add a marketplace only if it touches its customer's customer and those customers need multiple suppliers

Leadership4 steps

Scenario-Based PM Interviewing

Interview PMs by making them do the real job under real constraints, not recite prepared stories

Productivity3 steps

Ship-to-Learn Research Allocation

Reserve scarce user research for high-uncertainty, high-leverage problems; ship to learn everywhere else

Self-Mastery3 steps

Taste as a Trainable Model

Taste is a virtual machine in your head that predicts whether your in-group will like an idea — built by reps with feedback.

Marketing6 steps

The Ambassador Program Blueprint

Recruit the already-vocal, pay them in access not cash, and grow the cohort deliberately slowly

Marketing4 steps

The Atomic Unit of Sharing Test

Decide whether community-led growth will work for you before spending a dollar on it

The Comms Equation (Goal → People → Action → Belief → Medium)

Back-solve every comms plan from a business goal, never from an impressions target.

The Community Form-Factor Matrix

A two-by-two that tells you which kind of community to build given your PMF and buyer

The Going Direct Playbook

Build one owned channel, voiced by a real human, primed before you ever need it.

Communication6 steps

The Repeatable Idea Test (Put the Pill in the Cheese)

Engineer a message people repeat for their own reasons — memorable, effortless, and never an inside joke.

The Three Network Effects (and Why Social Products Must Evolve)

Classify defensibility as direct, cross-side, or data network effects — and know social products must add the latter two

Innovation3 steps

The Tiny Core Principle

Every enduring product has one tiny thing that is a superpower — find it, protect it, and stop bolting on features.