Why did Notion launch yet another Calendar app in 2024?

The earliest calendar dates back to 2100 BC, which roughly maps to a ~4000 years old product. Notion took a big bet last month in a space that has existed for the longest time known to humankind by launching its standalone calendar app.

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Raphael Schaad, who heads Notion Calendar, describes the solution as “a new way to manage your most precious resource, - Time.”

Why build another calendar app in an already saturated market? What are the gaps in existing solutions? Why is Notion uniquely positioned for this? Why now? Let’s find out..

Notion states that the overall vision here is to bring a “time layer” to every aspect of life. They aspire to be the layer that helps you understand, visualize and comprehend your relationship with time. What is this “time layer” and what is so unique about this? Before we dive into the specifics and strategy, let’s understand Notion a little bit in depth and some history. 

What should you know about Notion that you don’t already know?

Notion’s has been in the business of redefining productivity with their versatile all-in-one workspace integrating note-taking, project management, and collaboration features with an extremely well defined set of community developed integrations.

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Notion's success is rooted on two primary fronts: 1. Strong Community + Network Effects and 2. Minimalist yet powerful Design.

Notion actively cultivates community champions through programs like Notion Pros and Ambassadors. These power users create tutorials, templates and integrations that assist fellow users. Additionally, Notion maintains an active presence across over 150 online communities on platforms like Reddit and Facebook. These allow users to exchange tips, share experiences, and foster connections.  A thriving community promotes loyalty, and now with over 20 million users, Notion is valued at $10 billion!

A dive into History: The acquisition of Cron

Cron is the backbone behind “Notion’s Calendar App”. Notion acquired Cron in June 2022. Cron, which was part of Y Combinator's winter batch of 2020 had raised a $3.5 million seed round in March 2020 with notable investors like Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, Elad Gil, Figma founder Dylan Field, former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and Sunrise co-founder Jeremy Le Van.

Cron addressed some of the most basic time interaction needs of the market -  Time zone conversions. Multiple accounts. A cleaner, faster interface, and ofcourse, dark mode! Cron was making waves and applauds in the industry.

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Cron for iOS was named Mobile App of the Year 2022! Cron was also recognized for Best Design in a Calendar App in 2022 and was awarded Productivity App of the Year in 2021. 

This caught Ivan’s (Notion’s co-founder) eye.

Where is the Gap? What Metrics are they behind? 

It seems that Notion is optimising for “Time Spent in Managing Time”. For example, checking the time of an upcoming meeting may feel harmless, but this context-switching can be detrimental to productivity (it takes up to 23 minutes to regain focus).

Notion’s approach to user-centered design enables it to imagine a world where time is seamlessly integrated into our lives. Productivity solutions today are very disjoint in nature in their interaction with time and exist in disconnected environments. If you paint the landscape of all the places we interact with time today on the back of a napkin, here’s what it looks like: 

App

Interaction with Time

Time Units

Google/ Outlook/etc Calendar

Scheduling Meetings/ Time Blocks/ OOF Tracker

Days/ Hours/ Minutes

Personal Calendar

Vacation Bookings, Party Invites, Personal Events - Gym Time, School Events etc.

Days/ Hours/ Minutes

iMessage/ Whatsapp

“See you at 7pm!” 

Days/ Hours/ Minutes

Calendly

Time availability for “others”

Hours/ Chunks

JIRA / Asana

Project Timelines, Roadmaps, Sprint Cycles

Weeks/ Sprints

Trello

Task Management, Timeline Management, Status Reporting

State - Doing, Done,ToDo

Slack/ Teams

Real time updates and Deadlines

EOD? Hours? Minutes?

Notion/ Microsoft Loop/ One Note

Embedded Dates inside a table?

Any shape or form

Google/ Word Doc

Embedded Dates inside a paragraph?

Any shape or form

Zoom/ Teams

Your PM randomly states “End of Week”

LITERALLY any shape or form.

Clearly, there is a huge cognitive overload in managing time across our lives and it seems that Notion sensed a unique opportunity to build a layer that wraps across multiple dimensions of managing time. 

Why now and Why Notion? 

It seems that Notion is not trying to compete head-to-head with other Calendar apps. Their core focus is not to provide a better time-management capability but instead interleave time as the connective tissue across calendar, tasks, documents, work/personal profiles and timezones. 

You might not be very impressed with the feature set of the Calendar App launched today but the beauty lies in bringing the product to the community (and not necessarily the market) and leveraging Notion’s strong distribution effects. By providing a robust set of integration points, Notion will leverage the power of the community to build workflows and models that help solve time-based use cases at scale. It's smart how Notion did not wait to build the perfect product before launching, but instead is building with the community that’s invested in it’s success.

Power of Community Driven Marketing

Getting to Launch

While Notion does have a good number of loyal users and a strong foothold in the community, the Notion Calendar is launched as a standalone product. Notion still needs to have differentiating features from the other calendar apps and that’s where it doubles down on its strength in simplistic design. 

Notion has kept it’s focus on seven core scenarios:

  1. Minimise Distractions.
  2. Built-in scheduling and availability sharing capabilities.
  3. Thoughtful coordination across multiple time-zones..
  4. Out of box support for 12+ Languages.
  5. End-to-end integration with Notion workplace - across Documents, Project Timelines, Quarterly Planning, Personal commitments etc. 
  6. Two way sync across multiple calendars + Zoom/ Meet Integrations.
  7. Out of the box iOS application.

Explore more here: https://www.notion.so/product/calendar

The Vicious Circle of Uncovering Product Value

One of the best known ways to get user commitment and loyalty is to get their skin in the game by having them invest the time and effort to uncover product value. IKEA and Costco are both notoriously famous for doing that. Notion does that too and super well at scale. Infact, it does not employ a huge workforce of Solution Architects/ Professional Services to help achieve this at enterprises, it very much relies on community driven marketing and product led growth! 

Now because Notion has done this before, it knows how to do it again. They likely will have users go through the value curve until enough use cases have been built or discovered that the product starts to differentiate itself. Today, they’re kicking off with a very familiar calendar look-a-like which doesn’t seem very different from a traditional calendar app (think GCal + Calendly+ Cron combined) but the future does seem ambitious! 

If it’s free, how will it generate Revenue? 

This is Notion's classic entry into the untapped “Time Management” market. It is operating on the classic model of lowering costs and barriers to get users addicted. The fact that it is launched as a standalone app signals that users need not be actively using the Notion platform but also hints at the potential that is waiting to be unlocked if they were to be on it. Then follows the Domino effect. 

Let’s say, I try Notion Calendar to manage my personal life and let’s say sharing my availability for mentorship sessions -> I then uncover more templates or use cases powered by the community and understand powerful Notion integrations -> I get hooked on to Notion and leverage further nuanced scenarios for School, Fitness, Diet, Date Nights etc. -> I share my templates with my friends, workout group, partner and even children!

I won't stop there. Next time I see a similar problem at my work-place -> I know exactly the kind of Notion solutions that are built to solve this and a push for a sale purchase order is made. The Domino Effect continues. 

Will this be a breakthrough product? 

Addressing the Elephant in the room. Will this be a breakthrough innovation? 

Maybe. In the future. If the vision is followed through. For now, it seems as though: 

  1. Indistinguishable from existing Calendar apps on the market.
  2. Next to none out of the box integrations/ workflows/ templates offered.
  3. Lack of features, such as support for Outlook/Apple Email and Android/iPad.

Notion has a very strong “distribution network” and has the “flywheels" in effect to empower the community to build more. It is in a unique position to create these effects without necessarily being open-source.

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Sometimes getting things out in the market and letting systemic effects do its magic is a stronger move, than to perfect a product offering and then release it.

I’m sure nothing in 2024 will go without the use of the word “AI”. I am curious to see where this lands and how the offerings evolve. Until then, subscribe for more such product deep-dives.