Notion to fight tech bloat and unlock productivity

Notion is launching an APAC headquarters in Sydney to fight tech bloat and unlock innovation for Australian businesses.

Notion head of ANZ, SEA and India, Andrew McCarthy aims to grow the local business by targeting universities, start-ups and enterprises.

Notion, the connected workspace platform valued at $US10bn ($16bn), will base its Asia Pacific headquarters in Sydney as it chases growth in the Australian market.

The US-based business, which boasts more than 100 million customers globally aims to bolster its local positioning by targeting universities, start-ups, and enterprise businesses.

With 80 per cent of its business based outside North America, Notion is banking on APAC to be the business growth driver, with a significant focus on Australia.

According to research by Notion, Australians spend an hour each day on inefficient work, which they say translates to $228bn annually or 13 per cent of Australia’s GDP.

Notion makes the ambitious claim that its platform not only has the potential to reduce this figure, but also improve productivity.

It’s a bold claim from a brand competing in a heavily saturated category.

Notion wants to grow its business in Australia

The digital workspace platform market is expanding rapidly with brands such as Monday.com, Trello, Asana among a host of others vying to grab a significant share of the market.

However, while Notion wanted to help individuals and businesses overcome the tech bloat it also wanted to unlock transformative growth for Australian businesses, said Notion head of ANZ, SEA and India Andrew McCarthy.

“We live in a world where for the last 10 years, someone has made a software app for every function and every niche,” said Mr McCarthy, pointing to the 130,000 software apps listed on software review site G2 and BetterCloud statistics which show most businesses use more than 100 SaaS (Software as a Service) applications on their tech stack.

“The common thread we are hearing is there’s a big push to consolidate tools, and no one from the CFO to the end user thinks that more software is the answer. They’re all looking for ways to consolidate back and make it more connected, and that’s where we play a part.

“People have woken up and said, ‘Why do I have to use 10 different apps to find information?’ and we are now seeing a massive consolidation back down.

“When we look at all 130,000 apps globally, we realise they all have the same unique building blocks at the fundamental level. Our philosophy has been, if we can deconstruct software back to its individual building blocks, it creates endless flexibility and creativity for our users.”

Mr McCarthy likens the process to building with Lego, and believes by providing a platform to deconstruct software down to the individual building blocks, like Lego pieces, it can enable companies to “build the solutions they want”.

“For the last three or four decades, most of the value and creativity in the world has been captured by the people who build the software. There’s 25 million software developers and a billion knowledge workers,” he said.

Mr McCarthy said the rise of AI was helping to supercharge this process and unlock huge potential for businesses, however, he warned that people needed to avoid using AI and software to merely improve the current processes and instead rethink the end-to-end system.

“I think the biggest mistake people are going to make with AI right now is they think about it in terms of the narrow focus of the software they’re using today, as opposed to the end to end process,” he said.

“I’ve seen a couple of examples recently of teams dramatically reducing the cost, producing the same level output by just thinking end to end with the process. I think it’s if we don’t look at any knowledge work, there’s really like three parts.

“There’s an element of knowledge, there’s an element of intelligence, and there’s some part of automation. I think if we actually break it down into individual components, we can start to rethink the end to end workflow. I think that is what’s going to have transformative experiences for Australia, but also the world.”

Mr McCarthy likens it to the arrival of eCommerce and how bricks and mortar retail brands focused on taking their offline approach online, whereas pure play digital brands rethought the entire process and transformed the online retail experience.

The strategy for growth in Australia will see Notion target schools and universities, start-ups and scale-ups and enterprises to push take up of its products. However, Mr McCarthy said the strategy also targeted individuals.

“Unlike other enterprise-focused tools out there, we often find our way into organisations via a B2C2B (business to consumer to business) route.

“People love using Notion at home and we have great stories of people using Notion to plan their wedding, managing their personal to-do lists, and planning their vacations before introducing it to their colleagues to collaborate and manage work more effortlessly.

“We see a real yearning, particularly from Australians, to use fewer tools and be much more productive. A lot of our work life today is split between a lot of different SaaS tools we use in the office, and then every department uses different tools, and then different tools we use at home.

“The next generation really want to have one consolidated space where they can live their life and organise their life, and then also do their work effectively.”