Make with Notion 2024: Product Launch Keynote (Ivan Zhao)

Please welcome Ivan Zhao.

Good morning and welcome to Make with Notion. This is our very first in-person conference as a company. There's a lot to share, a lot to demo, and a lot to celebrate today. So let's get started. Speaking of celebration, I just got married last month. And the wedding planning process finally gave me an opportunity to convince my wife to to try Notion databases. Like this wedding registry we built, which we published through Notion Sites. But more importantly, the wedding itself was a magical experience. It brought together so many dear people to the same place at the same time. And today and this week, it feels the same to me, but for our Notion community. You know, we counted last night. There are people from 45 different countries in attendance today. That's a quarter of the United Nations right here, right? So thank you for traveling to San Francisco and to watch this keynote online, to be with us here today. We're very grateful. Notion started 10 years ago in this very city, San Francisco. Here's a photo of us back then in our very first office. My hair's longer now. My team told me I had a pretty good glow up. You know, at the time, Notion was just an idea. No, we did not have a product. Definitely don't have a business model. But we had this hunch that software should be creative and software should be more beautiful. This is our first prototype. You can see that there's some hints of the Notion editor today. There's drag and drop and there are the blocks on the left. In the past 10 years, we worked really hard on this idea. And you know, now we finally shipped charts this year. So good thing takes time. Thank you for your patience. And in the past year, we have grown a lot. Right before COVID we crossed 1 million users globally. And last quarter, we passed 100 million users. It's a huge milestone. But it's never just about the numbers. Never about the numbers. What am I most proud of? It's always the people. And you all know this, right? Today, Notion has some of the most passionate communities around the world. From Brazil— thank you— to Japan, to Nigeria, and this is from Dublin last month. Okay, and this is from Dublin last month. In so many ways, Notion no longer belongs to us, but it belongs to you. You shape it. You make Notion your own. That's why on our billboard we have this tagline, think it, make it. And that's why we make this very conference Make with Notion, because we want you to make Notion your own. I'll share a couple of my favorite examples from our community and how people are making Notion their own. Earlier this month, these 2 gentlemen visited our office and they told us they're from Thailand and they're part of a monastery. And they run everything on Notion. From their meditation schedule to manage their chores, to publish their writings online with Notion Sites. Notion is everything, the everything tool for them. So if you had told me years ago that one day Notion will help monks run a monastery in Thailand using AI, I would think, oh, you're crazy. Here's another example. We all know Toyota is the number one car manufacturer in the world, right, by volume and sales. And they're known for their durable quality thanks to the production method they invented back then called Kanban. And today, Toyota is a Notion customer, and they store their knowledge base on Notion, and their research team use Notion Kanban board to manage the projects. So we're pretty proud to provide Kanban boards to the inventor of Kanban. So not too shabby. Of course, Notion's not just for monks, not just for enterprise customers like Toyota. Today we power many of the fastest growing companies in tech and AI, like Figma and OpenAI. We also love that so many founders trust Notion and start their companies on Notion, like nearly half the Y Combinator companies. And this is my favorite. In the past year, some creators in our community are now making over $1 million a year each selling Notion templates or doing Notion consultancy. It's truly a testament of our product, and of our community here. But in our heart, Notion really hasn't changed. This is our first investor pitch deck. And on the COVID I borrowed a quote from Marshall McLuhan. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. It's still our point of view today. We draw our inspiration from pioneers in our field. Back in the 1970s, these computing pioneers imagined a world where software can augment human intellect, where people can modify the tool, modify the software they use, just like bicycle for our minds. I still remember during college reading papers published by those computing pioneers and feeling their sense of optimism and empowerment. I still believe then, I still believe now, this is the most important thing I can work on as a software programmer, is to give other people the creative freedom to shape their own tools. But somewhere along the way, as computers become more commonplace in the '80s and '90s, the world forgot the vision from those computing pioneers. Software become more rigid, something that only programmers can modify. And as software move on to the cloud in the past 15 years, things got worse. There are even more tools, more silos, more rigidity and sprawling. So today, if you're an average company, you have to use more than 88 tools to run your business. It's hard to find anything. Your team wastes so much time context switching, right? And the cost from those tools add up quickly. And with more AI tools coming onto the market, it's getting even more confusing and more expensive. At Notion, this is exactly the problem we want to solve. And we take it very personally because we believe software should be creative. Software should be beautiful. Software should be soft, malleable, and adaptable to how you think, not the other way around. So how do we solve this problem of the software sprawling problem for you all today? Well, our insight lies in our favorite toy growing up, Legos.

No?

Raise your hand if you played Legos growing up.

Wow.

Okay. So you all know what you are— what they are. Our insight is most software is made from the same common building blocks. Now they all have text, text editing. They all have databases. They all have views, have charts, automation. So why don't we just deconstruct software back to those common building blocks, make them as friendly as Legos, so our end users can build whatever tools they want without needing to code? Because our end users tend to be the domain experts, they usually can create better tools than we can. And Lego did exactly this in the toy industry. On one end, LEGO can be your toy carts, and on the other end, LEGOs can be your Barbie dolls. All share the same bricks, and because they all share the same bricks, they're all connected by default. No silos, and they can grow with you and offer great value for your money. But most importantly, Legos are creative. Legos are beautiful because they are yours. You make them your own. They can be as unique as your personality, as complex as your business needs. And when your tools are tailor-made and all connected in one place, they will help you move faster, think better, and unlock your potential for whatever you So I hope this gives you a sense of our mission at Notion and why we exist as a company, because we want to help you to build beautiful tools for your life's work. We want the world to know that Notion is first and foremost for people who build, for people who care. For the entrepreneurs and the leaders who want to make changes in their organizations, and for creators like you in the audience today. So with this frame of mind, let me introduce my co-founder Akshay to talk about the new building blocks we're launching today. Here's Akshay.

Thank you, Ivan, and so wonderful to be here with all of you today.

Thank you.

I'm Akshay Kothari, and I have the honor of supporting our product teams here at Notion. We have some really exciting new things to share with you today. And a lot of what I'm going to be talking about and what we're going to be releasing today is very much inspired by your feedback and your requests. So thank you for all of that. We're going to be covering these 3 areas in product. We're going to be releasing brand-new building blocks that you get to play with. We'll introduce new workflows that you get to build with these blocks. And then finally, we'll introduce new ways to share your creations with the rest of the world. And to make things exciting, we're going to walk through all of these through live demos. But let me set the stage with a problem that we are facing as a company today. Notion today is 800 people across 7 different offices around the world. And every month, we have some new employees who join us. And as is normal, these new folks have simple questions. Someone is having a Wi-Fi issue, someone needs an urgent legal review of a contract, or someone just has a simple question of benefits. So, like every other company, what we did is we spun up a bunch of Slack channels. We asked people to ask questions, and they do, as you can see from this screenshot. But if I'm being honest, it feels a bit chaotic. It feels very unorganized. So, what we're gonna do today is on stage here with all of you, we're gonna use our building blocks, then we're gonna create a Notino help desk. That is not a typo. Notino is what we use as a word for Notion employees. And we're going to use Notion to build a help desk so that Notinos can ask questions and the teams that get these questions can see it in an organized way. Sounds fun?

Yeah.

All right. So, to build this help desk, We are currently— today's Notion is missing a fundamental building block. Any guesses what that might be? It's been in the making for so long, and I'm so excited to share that we're launching Forms today. And to tell you more, here's Sachi.

Thank you, Ivan.

Hi everybody.

I'm Sachi and I'm on the Forums team. We've been hard at work these last few months and I'm so excited to share more about what we're launching today. Notion is already a great place to organize your information and share it with others, but there's a pretty important piece of this workflow that's been missing, and that's collecting information, which is pretty manual and tedious in Notion today. Many other apps and workarounds have sprung up to fill this need, Everything from third-party form integrations and CSV exports to some people resorting to just manually copying and pasting their data in order to get it into Notion. So we set out to build a better experience with forms, one that makes it super easy to create and share a form to collect the information that you need. And then when you have that information in Notion, you can filter, sort, analyze, and take action on it all from one place. Here are a few examples of what you might use forms in Notion for. At work, forms are a great way to standardize requests for your internal teams, like this social request form made by our social media team. Or for your next project, you can send out a form to collect user feedback and then take action on it right from a Notion database. Say you're having a Halloween party. You could already plan your event in Notion. Now you can even send out a form to collect RSVPs. Don't ghost your friends. Let's take a deeper dive and check out Forms together. Like Akshay introduced, today we're going to be building Notion's brand new help desk where employees can receive support, something a bit more organized than just shouting into the Slack void and hoping that you get a response. Our help desk is going to use a form to submit tickets, which can then be triaged by our internal teams. I've already taken a first pass at creating our form, but let's add some final touches together. Here's where we can modify our questions. We support question types like text, multiple choice, images, but if you're adding the form to an existing database, it'll automatically suggest questions based on your database's properties. Let's add a question for what office an employee is working from. And we can see that all of the options get prepopulated right from that property. And these are actually all of Notion's offices worldwide. You can also click on a question in order to customize it. For this first, what do you need help with question, I'll make this required so that people have to answer this before they're able to submit the form. The rest of my questions look pretty good. We ask about how urgent their request is. We give them space to upload any attachments. But then for our final notes question, I can add a helpful description and provide support for longer answers here. Currently, our help desk form is only shared internally with members of this workspace, which works perfectly for this use case. If I wanted to though, I could actually publish this to the web so that anyone in the world was able to submit. I can also preview what my form is going to look like for those submitting. And that looks pretty good. You can see that we're automatically collecting who is submitting our form here, which also works great for our help desk. If I needed to though, I could also make the form anonymous. This looks pretty good, so I think we can share it out. Once we share out our form and we start receiving submissions, you can see all of the tickets that are getting created right here in this database itself. So employees have already been submitting a bunch of tickets. Some of them, you know, facilities is going to look at, IT, HR. It looks like we had this pretty unfortunate ticket that just got created by Larry. It seems like their dog used their laptop as a chew toy. Hopefully we can get this resolved for Larry today. This seems kind of urgent. Here we have the full power of Notion databases. I can filter down my data. I can set up an automation to receive a notification when someone creates a new ticket. And I can visualize my data with a chart. So I just created this super basic chart to see the spread of tickets across all of our internal teams. But the possibilities here are pretty endless. So that's our help desk, and it's all made possible by Forms. I'm super excited to see what you all do with Forms next. They're fully integrated with the rest of Notion, which means your workflows require one fewer tool. They're super easy to build and easy to share. I do think our help desk could be a little bit more beautiful and maybe more customized for our use case, and I think Tyler can help us with that. Here he is to tell you more.

Hey everyone, I'm Tyler from the design team, and I'm super excited to share with you something we've been working on this year, layouts. With layouts, you can take customization to a new level in Notion. We think that it's going to be able to give you so many more opportunities to use Notion for whatever different use case you have. Now, here's an example from one of our internal task databases. This is a task page that started off just by tracking a few properties. But, and I'm sure this has happened to a lot of you, things got a little overwhelming. Here's another example from my personal Notion. This is a recipe from a cookbook database I use to organize all of my recipes. Recently, I've been using AI properties to estimate prep time, baking time, and even generate a grocery list for me automatically. It's been working pretty well, but there are some things I wish I could change, like being able to see these photos in a bit greater detail. Now, there's better ways to present all this information, but the tricky part is tasks and recipes are very different things, and there's no one-size-fits-all layout that's going to work equally well for both of these and the thousands of other use cases. So to solve this, we're going to give you the ability to customize your page layouts to however you want, any way that you use Notion. Let's see how that could work for these 2 examples. So for my recipe page, maybe I care most about that prep time and baking time and the actual recipe instructions that are pushed off the page here. So I can transform my layout to accommodate this use case. So now I have those properties pinned under the page title, and everything else I've moved to the side of the page. I've made those photos nice and big so I can get that babka braid just right. Now, let's look at that engineering task example. Here, I might want to transform it a little bit of a different way. So I care most about that status, assignee, due date, and those icons that need to be updated. Everything else I've organized into groups, one for tracking, one for QA, and one for the edit history of the task. Now, it only takes a couple of minutes for you to customize your pages just like this. Let me show you how it works. All right, so we're back in that Otino help desk example that Satya shared earlier. And we can click into any of these pages and see kind of the default layout that we're working with here. As you can see, there's a lot of properties to contend with, some that were submitted via Satya's form, as well as some additional ones we use to track things internally. Now, let's see if we can customize this layout to better solve for our use case. Now, when you hover over a page title, you'll see this new button that says Customize Layout. And when I click it, I'm brought into this new layout builder interface. So any changes I make here to the page layout will apply not just to this page, but all of the pages in the database at the same time. So if I select this heading module here on the right, I can configure how it looks and what I want to focus on. So in a help desk ticket example, I care most about maybe who submitted this, maybe when they need it by, how urgent it is, and what the status of that ticket is. So now I've pinned those 4 properties under the page title. The rest of the properties aren't quite as important to me, so I'm going to drag them over to the right side of the page. And now I have some space on the page to focus on what I do care about. If I click this plus button here, now you can see additional elements I can add to this page. You can create a new property. Here are some of the ones we focused on for launch, but you can expect more to come soon. Or you can highlight an existing property. In this case, I'm going to highlight the attachments and notes that were submitted via that form. So there are those attachments and those notes. And now I have a much better idea of what went wrong here. Now, I still have a lot of properties here. I think it'd be nice if you could organize them a little bit. So, I'm going to create a new section for the less important properties that we really only use for auditing purposes and call that Paper Trail. And I'll create another one that's for triage. And so, now I can just drag and drop those properties into those appropriate sections, and you'll see them reflected on the page. Okay, so this is looking pretty close to how I want it. We've also given you some visual preferences like how you want your comments to appear, as well as whether or not you want to include those property icons. I'm going to toggle them off because I think it makes my layout look a little bit cleaner. And now I'm ready to apply this to all the pages in my database. And here's that customized layout. We have those properties pinned under the title, the attachments and notes that I chose to focus on, as well as everything else in this collapsible sidebar on the right. Now, there's one last thing I want to do that I think you guys are really going to like in the spirit of customization. We all know how to add an icon to our Notion pages. Of course, you can choose from any of the emoji we have here, but you'll notice something new in our emoji picker, and that's these little category tabs on the bottom. The last tab here is for custom emoji, which—

A lot of them to load here.

So we've made it super easy for you to upload and share custom emoji with everyone in your workspace. I'm going to choose one that I made previously here, which is the culprit in question, Miles. And of course, you can use them not just in your page icons, but also anywhere you type. So if I type in Miles, I get him here, right? And you can use them in your comments, in your buttons like this one. And so we hope you really have some fun with it. All right. So that's layouts. We hope you really use it to unlock your creativity in Notion to help make your pages more organized and more beautiful. We can't wait to see what you come up with. To share some more, I'll pass it off to Akshay.

All right.

Give it up for Tyler and Sachi. So we've been working on forms and layouts and custom emojis for such a long time that we had to ask ourselves, how do we price these? So we looked at a bunch of products in the market. There's a lot of forms products out there. that let you build a form, but soon you hit the rate limits. So here's what we decided— unlimited forms, unlimited layouts, and it's free for everyone. We can't wait to see what you build with it, and we will continue to invest in both of these areas. The one thing that I'm really excited about is the team is already starting to build conditional logic in Forms. Sounds like we should be building that. And please continue to share feedback. These products will be rolling out today to all of you, and that will help shape the future of these products. Okay, so we're going to go back to Legos for a second. My wife and I have 2 young kids, so as you can imagine, my home is filled with Legos. In fact, here's a photo of my 3-year-old son, Raghav. He's obsessed with Duplos. Whereas my daughter, who's a few years older, she's graduated to some pretty cool LEGO sets like this one. She built this botanical garden all by herself just by following the booklet that came with it. And as a parent, it's really fun to see that even after she's finished building this garden, The play continues. She really puts the creations to work. So like the little minifigures are coming out, they're hanging out. One minifigure goes up to the flower pot and is watering the garden. You can actually see one of them here hanging out on the porch enjoying a drink. Software is similar. You know, we just used Notion's new building blocks to create a help desk, but how will it be used inside a company? How do we make sure that every question that people are asking is getting answered on time? And most importantly, how do we make sure that the repetitive questions that are coming in can be answered in a way that we can really save time? This is where new workflows come in. Workflows help you work faster and smarter. And we have a couple new powerful workflows that we'd love to show you today, starting with automations. And for that, let me invite Manny on stage.

Thanks, Akshay. Hey, everyone, I'm Manny. I'm on the automations team, and I'm so excited to show you what we've been building the past few months. Automations are like a superpower. They make everything faster and let you focus on the things that matter most, like building and creativity. So we've been adding more automation capabilities right inside Notion. And how do automations work in Notion? Well, all you have to do is set a trigger and an action that you want to take. Simply put, when this happens, do that. And to start building automations, all you have to do is click the little lightning bolt icon at the top of any of your databases. Automations have been in Notion for a while, but we've only scratched the surface of what you can do with them. And today, I'm excited to announce that we're shipping your 2 top-requested automation features, Gmail notifications and formulas. These new actions are really flexible and powerful. Here's a few examples of what you can automate with these new capabilities. First, you could send an email follow-up as soon as a project is marked ready for review to get eyes on it as quickly as possible. Or if you want to perform more granular actions and automations, you can use formulas to keep all parts of your project and goal tracking up to date. For example, when a project status changes to delayed, then also update the associated goal and mark it as at risk. And when you combine Gmail and formulas, It gets even more powerful. Let me show you how it works. All right, so we're back in the help desk database. Although we already have a form to collect the responses and an AI property to automatically categorize them, there's still a few manual steps left in the process when you're responsible for closing them out. We can see the ticket for Larry's sad laptop at the top of our queue. So let's make sure this gets assigned to the right person with an automation. To add an automation, just click the lightning bolt icon at the top of your database. As you can see, we already have some automations created. So let's start with this one that automatically assigns tickets to the right person. In the help desk database, there are a few teams that are responsible for managing the queue. This automation uses a formula to identify who's currently on call, and it will automatically assign any tickets that are set to to-do to that individual. And if you're interested in learning how to build powerful formulas like this, We have a bunch of helpful resources at notion.com/help, and we also have many templates already available for you with automations prebuilt in. And just to show the flexibility that formulas enable, we can take this one step further and use formulas and buttons to automatically escalate any ticket that's critical to the team's manager. Now, this ticket seems urgent since Larry isn't able to get any work done with his laptop. So let's escalate it to make sure it gets resolved ASAP. And finally, let's make sure that Larry is notified as soon as the ticket's resolved so he can get his replacement laptop. We can do that with another automation. Now, this workflow sends an automated email as soon as the ticket status property is set to complete. With the new email action, you can send emails using your connected Gmail account. The subject and body of the email are both very customizable. And you can even use the @mention key to quickly reference things like the database properties, other Notion pages or people, or even dynamic variables like the date the automation was triggered. For this email, we'll reference both the name of the ticket as well as the date the ticket was resolved. And now when this ticket or any other ticket's resolved, the user that submitted the issue will receive an automated email letting them know about it. And that's automations. Rather than rely on third-party automation tools, we've been gradually bringing more of them into Notion to save you more time and allow you to focus on the things that matter most. But there's another workflow that can give us even more building superpowers, and here's Lauren to tell you more about it.

Great.

Hi everyone, my name's Lauren and I work on the AI team here at Notion. A few weeks ago, we reintroduced Notion AI. You might have noticed its inquisitive little face in the bottom corner of your screen winking at you. We built Notion AI to be an all-in-one tool. There are already so many AI tools out there, You got your chatbots, your search engines, your writing assistants. So we aim to ambitiously build one tool that can do it all— chat, search, analyze, and write. So let me highlight some of my new favorite features. Notion isn't the only tool that you use for work, so expanded Notion AI's capabilities to search across connected apps like Slack and Google Drive, with GitHub and Jira coming soon. We gave Notion AI some eyes. Now Notion AI can analyze your attachments. Turn your chaotic whiteboarding session into organized and structured meeting notes. And of course, Notion AI can still generate text for you. But unlike generic AI writing tools, we know you exist in the context of all in which you work and what came before you. So you can reference other pages in your prompts to get more helpful and tailored outputs. So let me show you how we can use Notion AI to help resolve some of our help desk tickets. We are back in the Notino help desk. Before I even get started, I do want to highlight that we're already using AI to help triage. You'll notice we have this team property, which is an AI autofill property. What that just means is that when a new ticket comes in, AI is analyzing the context of the ticket and it's assigning which team it thinks should, it should be best routed to. So in this case, I'm going to help out the IT team today with this, my dog used my laptop as a chew toy ticket. So let's take a look. Unfortunately, this laptop did take some damage, but I mean, look at this little guy. Who can blame them? One of my first questions I have if I'm trying to resolve this ticket is, do our benefits include a pet insurance policy? Like, do we have any insurance to help cover this laptop replacement? So, I asked AI, do our benefits include a pet insurance policy? And what it did is it searched our workspace and it gave us an answer. I can even click on this little citation here, which even navigates us right to the exact block that it got that answer from. So, in this case, we do have one, and there's even a PDF here which has a bit more details. If I were to open up that PDF, we'd know that it's about 4 pages long. It's a little dense, and I'm not 100% sure if this is exactly what I need to help resolve this ticket. So what I can do is I can click on this Ask AI button, and that's going to automatically upload the PDF to chat. And then I'm going to go ahead and ask, will the damage described in this ticket be covered by our policy? What AI is doing right now is it's reading the ticket behind the chat, it's reading our PDF, that's giving me an answer. In this case, yes, there's a maximum coverage that even gives me instructions on how we can resolve this. And so in this case, to file a claim, Larry should do this. So I'm going to go ahead and help Larry. I'm going to file the claim. I'm going to get his laptop replacement right away. And we're going to go ahead and assume I'm going to mark this as complete, which is going to fire off Manny's automation, which will let Larry know this has been resolved. I'm going to take it one step further, which is, you know, as much as we love this little guy and his passion for technology, maybe there's a better place where he can do his life's work. I'm going to just ask into the void, what dog daycares do people recommend? So AI is going to go ahead, it's going to search our workspace, but you'll notice that the citation here looks slightly different. That's because it's actually a Slack citation. So in this case, Notion searched not only our workspace, it also searched our connected apps like Slack, and it decided that this was the best answer. So I have these recommendations. I could copy these answers to my clipboard. I could also attempt to share it. And in this case, what I'll do, I can copy that image of this, answer to my clipboard. But I think I want to do one, one more step, one more step forward here, which is that I think this could be helpful for not just Larry, but other Notinos in my workspace. So I'm going to have it draft a document for me, which AI can do. It can write a document, and it just put all those recommendations in one doc for me. This is a pretty good first draft. I'm going to go ahead and save it to our docs database. But I have one more trick up my sleeve, which is that it doesn't look very enticing. I'm going to go ahead and select all this text. I'm going to open AI and use one of my favorited prompts, which is update this doc based on our internal comms guide. Our internal comms guide, if it all goes well, I want color, I want emojis, and I want tables. It's doing a great job. It's doing a great job. Very good AI. Good job. So this looks good. I feel more comfortable sharing this version with my teammates. And that's Notion AI. So let's talk about what's next. Yeah, you can clap. Okay. We're constantly improving Notion AI to make it smarter and faster. And we know that it's not so great right now at answering questions about your database, which we are working to improve. So it'll be better at answering questions about your database and helping you file tasks more automatically. And of course, we're going to be adding those new connectors like GitHub and Jira, and we'll keep adding more. So please do let us know which apps you want to search with. And that's Notion AI. It can chat, search, analyze, and write all in one. And there's a lot more to explore. So if you want to see more, please join us on stage 2 later today. So that's all for me. Back to you, Akshay.

Nice work. Give it up for Lauren and Manny. So, automations and AI are both available today, and we can't wait to see what you build with it. And for both of these, we will continue to invest in these areas. So, besides what Lauren just shared, the one that I'm super excited about is that we're going to soon support— automations will soon support custom web requests. with partners like Zapier. So, stay tuned for that. Some takers for that.

That's good.

So, here we are. Just in a few minutes with a few demos, we were able to build this incredible Notino help desk. We can now use forms to collect questions. We can organize our tasks with custom layouts. We can update status on these tasks with automations. And finally, we can use Notion AI as our perfect memory for every query. And if you zoom out a bit, all the building blocks that we use to build this help desk are the same building blocks that you can use to build any workflow for your life or for your work. In fact, you can use Notion to build practically anything. But the one thing that I'm super excited about is that you don't have to start from scratch anymore. You have thousands of templates built by the Notion community, all of you, that you can choose from, that you can start with. And to tell you more about this incredible community of creators and what they're building, here's Erica.

Okay, thank you, Akshay. Hi everyone, I am Erica Anderson and I support our global go-to-market teams here at Notion. Part of what I love about my job is that I get to spend time every day with our customers and see the amazing things that you use Notion for. And today we're excited to bring you a place where everyone can share what they've built, a place that we hope feels a little like The Lego store, a place where you can get inspired by what's possible with all of these building blocks. Now today, Notion's Lego store is the template gallery. It's a one-stop shop where you can browse thousands of templates and with one easy click, add them to your workspace. And these templates are being duplicated almost 3 million times per month. That's triple what this number was at the same time last year. What a massive opportunity for creators. And I'm always blown away by the diversity of templates that you think to create. Everything from a business hub where you can track every facet of your creative studio's business, like this one created by Naudibly Studio, to handbooks for employees like Figma's FigManual, Or even this book tracker created by Jason Chin, or you may know as Easlow. Easlow, at 22 years old, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling templates just like this one. But there are a few things missing from the template gallery to truly run your business, which means many creators have had to resort to other platforms like Etsy. Now, don't get me wrong, Etsy is great for many things. I recently bought a pair of bell bottoms for my Halloween costume on Etsy, but that told us that the template gallery wasn't truly solving for all of your needs. We know running a business isn't easy. You need to collect payments, you need to provision access, you wanna see how many times a template's being used, the analytics. We want to make it easier. So today I'm incredibly excited to introduce the next evolution of our template gallery, and we call it Marketplace. Marketplace offers a whole new set of tools to help you share templates, make money, start that side hustle, or run a full-time business. And there's no one better to show you a little bit more about Marketplace than Sam Catania. He went from a template builder as a student to an intern to a full-time team member here at Notion. So take it away, Sam.

Thanks, Erica. When I started using Notion, I remember exploring the template gallery to see everything it could offer. I learned about Notion through templates, and eventually I created my first template that you see here. I was working at a student newspaper at the time. That's me. And we needed to solve our problem of managing thousands of stories from pitch to publication. I created a system in Notion that did exactly that and shared it with editors of other student newspapers all across the country. And I think that ultimately, this is what templates are all about. You know the problems you're trying to solve best, better than anyone else. And with Notion, you can create a system, a template that solves that problem and share it with people all around the world to help them solve theirs. So I'm excited to share more about Marketplace today, starting with payments. As a template creator, you'll now be able to collect trusted payments directly through Notion, and you'll be able to collect email addresses from your customers, making it easy to build informal relationships. And your customers can leave ratings and reviews on your templates. There are a lot of templates in the template gallery, and we think this will help the best ones rise to the top. For our creators, especially those crafting more advanced templates, we understand that protecting your work is critical. With Marketplace, you'll now have the ability to prevent unauthorized redistribution of your templates. And that means while buyers can use the templates freely, if they attempt to share them with others, those people will be redirected back to your listing to purchase it from you, supporting your business.

Thank you.

We're also implementing a fair refund policy. Everyone can get their money back within 2 weeks, but unlike today, the template will be removed from a workspace after a refund, and we think this experience will be a lot more fair for everyone involved. Yeah, thank you. And finally, as you grow your business on Marketplace, you'll get access to detailed analytics to help you understand what's resonating most with your customers. All of this is coming with a fresh redesigned look. It's easy to find what you're looking for, whether that's for work, life, or school at notion.com/templates or right in the sidebar of your workspace. You'll also find this new Blocks on the Block template collection where you can try out all of the new features we've talked about today. That's forms, layouts, automations, and AI. And of course, you'll find the help desk that we built today Thank you, and back to Erica.

Yes.

All right, thank you, Sam. Now, Marketplace was included in Ivan's original Notion pitch deck almost a decade ago. We originally told investors it would be ready in 1 year, but as we all know, good things take time. So we're so excited to finally realize this vision and to see all the incredible ways that it fosters and supports your growing businesses. One of our primary goals when we've set out to create Marketplace was to have the most trustworthy platform to do business and to reach the widest audience possible. In that spirit, we're excited to announce that creators will keep 90% of the revenue that they sell through our platform. Marketplace is available in over 100 countries, and you can apply to sell starting today. Anyone can become a creator on the Marketplace, and we cannot wait to see what you create. We gave a few folks a sneak peek of Marketplace and the other features we introduced today earlier, And we're going to see what they had to say.

Notion is just a beautiful tool.

Every minute that I spend in Notion, like, reduces friction elsewhere.

It's just freaking awesome and fast and intuitive.

It's been a game changer for me.

Everything was able to be done in one tool. That's something that didn't exist before, and I was hooked from that point on.

It just has so many possibilities. I have I've needed forms for such a long time. With layouts, I think it's gonna be tailored to my own needs.

With formula automations, when I first tried it out, I was giddy.

I need to share with people like what I've experienced with Notion AI because I think it'll really blow people's minds.

If you like sharing your work, Marketplace is a great place to start because everything is done for you.

I love that it Works for you, not the other way around.

Quite frankly, if someone says I'm not going to use Notion for your project, I'm saying, okay, then we're not going to work together.

What amazing demos. Today's release is the biggest in Notion history. I'm really proud of our teams. They worked really, really hard on this. And some of them are in the audience today. So with the new building blocks like forms and layout, new workflow like automation and AI, and a brand new marketplace, we really believe Notion is the best place, best solution out there to tame the software sprawl you're all feeling today. But don't take just our word for it. Forbes calling Notion the AI everything tool. Companies like Affirm, Toyota, and Remote.com use Notion to consolidate tools, save money, and save time. But this is my personal favorite. With Notion Templates, now Notion Marketplace, creators like Chloe can change her career path and make a living on Notion. Example like this is exactly why we exist as a company, because it shows that if we just give people the right building blocks, the right tools, way more people can participate in the software economy without being programmers. And this truly warms our hearts. Now I want to talk about one feature we're not We're not shipping today, but I know it has been a top request for so many of you. That is offline mode. Just to be clear, we're not shipping offline mode today. But I do want to take the time to acknowledge that so many of you want this. I want this myself. Whenever I get on the airplane, when Wi-Fi gets spotty like here today, I do not want to think about Apple Notes. No, sacrilege. And I'm sorry that, you know, we could have been more transparent about our progress here. But the good news is we are making progress. We now have a couple teams working on Notion's offline mode. It takes some time to build because given how unique our, our data model is, In fact, one of our engineers even co-authored a PhD paper on this, on how to get Notion's block-based editor work offline. She finished her paper. So, so I want you to know that we're on it now and expect some visible progress in 2025, including a community alpha program to get your feedback.

Thank you.

Yeah. And, and for the meanwhile, I want to thank you again for your patience, and we will not let you down. Okay, that's a lot from Make with Notion 2024. And I hope you like what you saw this morning.

Yeah.

But before I let you go, we have one more thing here for you today. You know, there are 1 billion knowledge workers in the world, and they use all kinds of softwares for work, for life. However, there are only a few categories of tools that are essential to all 1 billion of us. We're lucky that Notion falls into those categories of tools— documents, notes, databases of tasks and projects that pretty much can be useful for everyone. And our mission is to bring beauty and creativity to those tools. Earlier this year, we applied the same thinking to another essential tool that 1 billion people rely on. That is calendar. You know, time is our most precious resource, and the calendar is one of the most frequently used tools for so many of us, and yet it hasn't changed in such a long time. So we launched the beautifully crafted calendar. Seamlessly integrate with the rest of your Notion workspace. And in just 10 months, millions of people are using Notion Calendar as their daily driver. So now you're thinking, what's next? Well, right next to the calendar, there's another tool that's essentially for 1 billion people. A tool that so many of us live inside hours a day. It's how we communicate for work and for life. And it has become our identity for the internet, right? And guess what? It hasn't changed for 20 years.

Not beautiful.

It's definitely not creative. Definitely not creative. And that is email. So today I'm proud to introduce the newest Notion product, Notion Mail. And to learn more, here's Andrew and Jason.

I'm Jason. I'm Andrew, and we are so excited to introduce you to Notion Mail. Everyone uses email. In fact, I know everyone here definitely uses email because you needed to register for this event. In many ways, email is our passport to the rest of the internet. It is how we log in and sign up for pretty much every website and service online. It's also how we communicate. The same way you might share your phone number, you share your email address so anyone can contact you. But I don't think this is too controversial to say, nobody likes using email. It's overwhelming. You're inundated with information, and it just never ends. I think a big reason for this is for the past 20 years, we've been stuck with a one-size-fits-all approach for the inbox. Doesn't matter who you are, what your job is, or what type of work you're trying to do. It's the same never-ending list of emails. And because of that, so many tools are built on top of email, not within it. So even if you're a small startup, you have to use so many external apps to manage your sales, support, and recruiting. But what if we could get more out of our inbox? What if we could break email down to its fundamental Lego blocks, make it more flexible, make it more like Notion? What if your inbox worked like a database where you can customize the groups, properties, and layouts for each of your flows? And what if writing an email was not as much of a chore as it was like writing a Notion page where you could use all the blocks you know and love to craft beautiful emails and use new blocks like a schedule button, which connects with Notion calendar and takes into account what you've written to suggest the best times to meet? And what if Notion AI not only helped you write emails but could spare you the tedious back and forth on your longest email threads? And I think most meaningfully, what if Notion AI could manage and organize your inbox for you so you never need to manually triage or label an email ever again? I think we've said more than enough We'd much rather show you than just talk about it. So please, Andrew, take it away.

Thanks, Jason, and welcome to Notion Mail. Here's a first look at your inbox, which should look really familiar. Right now, it's syncing an exact copy of my Gmail, but it looks cluttered, and it doesn't look like Notion. I have emails about real estate next to emails from the Guggenheim Museum, Next to really important inbound recruiting emails from this new candidate named Ethan. So I'm going to switch to a more minimalist view of my inbox. While it loads, you can think of a view in Notion Mail just like a view of your work in Notion, where you can filter, sort, organize, and group by what matters to you. So I'm actually going to hide email body text just to keep this view of my emails Simpler and less cluttered. Wow, would you look at that? We've built a whole library of views and templates for your inbox so you can stay organized no matter what you do in email, whether it's recruiting, customer service, sales, or just staying on top of your endless GitHub emails. Now, let's dig into getting some work done. Here's an even more focused view of my recruiting emails. And look at that, you can see my email from Ethan right at the top. But unlike every single other email product out there, my emails aren't listed by date. They're organized by my workflow. And here I see candidates that are in the resume review phase, interviewing, or even one, Eli, who's accepted an offer. Let's go back to Ethan. Right now, this email's labeled as a recruiting email. It's been tagged with the engineering role, And it's been moved into the resume review step of my process. And I didn't apply a single one of these labels by hand. Notion AI did it all for me based on a quick prompt that I've written for my inbox. Even more importantly, Notion AI actually wrote this entire first draft. I didn't have to type a single key. And just like Jason mentioned, we've added some advanced email blocks like the schedule block, which connects to your Notion calendar and finds the perfect time for you to meet. But what if that's not good enough? What if I wanted to work even faster? And that's where Notion AI saves us a hand again with auto-reply. I can turn on the scheduling auto-reply, and Notion AI will get to work thinking, drafting, and then doing all those steps for me, connecting to Notion calendar and making a booking link So Ethan just has to schedule with one click. Now, normally when you'd be tempted to hit snooze, try out Notion AI and auto-reply and save a bunch of time every day. This only works because Notion Mail, Notion, and Notion Calendar work together seamlessly on day one, and we think you're going to love it. All right, this was just a quick first look at Notion Mail. And we hope you saw how Notion Mail is personalized with views and prompts for your workflows. It's smart, where Notion AI can label and draft emails right when they come into your inbox. And it's also beautiful. Imagine using the slash command, @mentions, emojis, callouts, and quotes right in your email editor. So we have a big surprise. Everyone here in person gets access to Notion Mail today. We're also opening up a waitlist for everyone listening online, and we'll give you a much deeper first look later today on Stage 2 at 1:35 PM, and we hope you love it.

Thank you.

Good job.

Thank you, Andrew and Jason. Today, Notion Mail takes us one step closer to our mission. It brings beauty and creativity to another essential tool for your work's life—

life's work.

But we're not stopping here, and we need your help and feedback to make Notion even better for you. So please say hi and give us your feedback. And we're pretty easy to find because we're all wearing the Notion jackets here, right? And we'll do our best to turn your feedback into our roadmap. Thank you.