Funnel teardown: Notion (Productivity and workspace)
Founder(s): Ivan Zhao, Simon Last and team

Notion's funnel turns personal free use into team-paid revenue. The free tier is the acquisition channel; the team-collaboration friction is the upgrade trigger.

TL;DR: Notion's funnel is the canonical personal-free-leads-to-team-paid pattern. Personal free use is genuinely valuable, which seeds adoption inside companies; team-collaboration friction (guest limits, version history, SSO) creates the structural upgrade trigger. The lesson for indie founders: when your buyer's individual use creates artifacts a team will eventually want to share, free-personal can be the most efficient acquisition channel.

What they sell: A workspace product combining notes, docs, wikis, databases, and project management in one canvas.
Who it's for: Individuals, small teams, and growing companies who want a flexible workspace instead of separate tools per use case.
Pricing: Free personal tier; Plus ~$10/seat/mo, Business ~$18/seat/mo, Enterprise custom; AI add-on ~$8-10/seat/mo (verified 2026-05-17).

Hook pattern: Identity-based positioning
The hero appeals to who the reader wants to BE (someone who has their thinking organized in one place) rather than what the tool does. The screenshot rotations show real-looking workspaces from different roles, so the reader self-identifies before evaluating features. Identity-based hooks compress evaluation when the category is broad enough that feature-comparison would lose the reader.

Story pattern: Template gallery as social proof
Story is told through a vast template gallery showing what real people have built. The reader does not need to take a marketing claim on faith because the artifacts are linked. Templates also serve as on-ramp scaffolding — many users copy a template as their starting point, which lowers activation cost.

Offer pattern: Free-personal plus seat-ladder team upsell
Personal free is the offer floor; team-tier upgrades fire at the collaboration boundary (guest limits, version history, SSO). AI is priced as an orthogonal add-on rather than a tier, which lets Notion add revenue without disturbing seat psychology. The structure is a textbook Value Ladder with each rung mapped to a natural team-growth event.

What's working:
Personal-free tier is good enough for real individual use, seeding viral adoption inside companies.|Team-collaboration boundary as upgrade trigger captures conversion at the moment a personal tool becomes a team tool.|Template gallery doubles as long-tail SEO and as activation scaffolding for new users.|AI priced as add-on (not as tier) lets Notion capture incremental revenue without restructuring the seat ladder.|Identity-based hero meets the broad category where feature-comparison would lose readers.|Custom Enterprise tier handles the largest deals without exposing the price to seat-counting competitors.

What to adapt:
Free-personal can be the most efficient acquisition channel when your buyer's individual use creates artifacts a team will eventually want to share.|Price new feature categories as add-ons rather than tiers when they cut across the existing seat structure.|Use templates as both SEO surface and activation scaffolding — they compress the time from signup to first valuable use.

What to avoid:
Do not launch personal-free without unit economics that support it. Notion has venture funding and a long horizon.|Do not adopt seat-based pricing if individual seats do not get clear individual value.|Do not build a template gallery before you have users to populate it; an empty gallery is worse than no gallery.

Brunson lens:
Hook: Identity hook (Brunson Expert Secrets) — the reader buys the version of themselves who has their thinking organized.
Story: Hero's-Journey-via-templates: each template represents a real person's solved problem; the reader is invited to copy the pattern.
Offer: Full Value Ladder embedded inside one product: free personal → paid team → enterprise → AI continuity add-on across all rungs.
Value ladder tier: Front-end lead funnel (free personal) plus per-seat subscription core (Plus, Business, Enterprise) plus continuity add-on (AI).