Notion

Notion's MCP drew so much agent traffic it strained its systems. Once Notion's MCP was available to agents working with OpenAI, agents sent a large amount of traffic, which strained the system and forced Notion to work out the economics of serving it.

Tibo Sottiaux uses this to argue that builders should design for agent traffic at scale: an agent interface can be held back for a while but is inevitable. Notion is also his example of a plugin paid through revenue sharing, where partners get part of the revenue when ChatGPT subscribers spend usage inside them. "The majority of actions on the internet will be taken by agents."

Lenny's Podcast▶ 31:02

Notion built composable building blocks that stack on each other. Ian Silber, OpenAI's Head of Design, cites Notion's early composable primitives as the model for keeping a product that keeps gaining capabilities feeling like one simple thing.

His argument is that reusable building blocks, rather than siloed one-off experiences, also let an AI model pull the pieces together. He lists systems thinking as a growing hiring criterion. "We want to be able to build and ship systems that can build on top of each other."

Lenny's Podcast▶ 31:00

Evangelists explained Notion by making templates, at launch and with Notion AI. Former CMO Rachel Hepworth described how evangelists built templates and explained a novel product to new users, first at Notion's launch and again when Notion AI shipped.

Andrew Grauer of Learneo raised it as a parallel to a similar pattern in his own company.

Subversive