Piyush Gupta

Commoditizing Complements: Granola vs Notion

A fascinating battle is unfolding between two very different companies: Granola, a focused AI meeting notes startup, and Notion, the Swiss Army knife of productivity software. What started as a simple story of a specialized tool vs a bundled feature has evolved into something much more complex.

Notion is trying to make "AI meeting notes" disappear into its bundle. Granola is racing to make meeting intelligence so deep, secure, and interconnected that it can never be just another checkbox.

Granola's Vertical Wedge

Granola began with a simple premise: meetings generate enormous amounts of valuable information, but most of it gets lost in the chaos of daily work. Their solution was equally straightforward. An AI-powered tool that could transcribe, summarize, and organize meeting content with remarkable accuracy and intelligence.

Granola built something genuinely better. They created speaker identification that actually worked, summaries that captured nuance and context, and a user experience designed specifically for professionals who live in back-to-back meetings. They recently raised $43 million and gained rapid traction by doing one thing exceptionally well.

This is a classic "vertical wedge" strategy. It means entering a market by being dramatically better at solving one specific problem. Granola succeeded because they understood that good enough isn't good enough when it comes to capturing and organizing the knowledge that drives business decisions.

Notion's Commoditizing the Complement Move

Notion, meanwhile, had been on its own expansion journey. What started as a note-taking and knowledge management tool had systematically grown into an everything-app for productivity. First came enhanced project management features, then Notion Mail, then Notion Calendar, and finally in direct response to Granola's success, AI meeting notes.

Notion's strategy is textbook "commoditizing complements." Their core product, the all-in-one workspace, makes money through platform lock-in, collaboration network effects, and high switching costs. Meeting notes are a complement to this core offering. Teams that capture meeting insights need somewhere to store, organize, and act on that information.

By bundling AI meeting notes into their existing $20/month package (alongside calendars, email, project management, and document collaboration), Notion drives the effective price of meeting notes toward zero for existing users. Why pay Granola $12-40 monthly for standalone meeting notes when you're already paying Notion $20 for everything else?

Granola 2.0 and the Platform Pivot

Granola discovered a fundamental truth about knowledge work. The most valuable, up-to-date information in any organization isn't in documents or wikis. It's in conversations. Meetings, calls, and impromptu discussions contain the context, decisions, and insights that actually drive business forward. But this information has always been difficult to capture, organize, and leverage at scale.

Rather than compete head-to-head on price or try to out-bundle Notion, Granola made a strategic pivot with their 2.0 release. They repositioned themselves around this core insight about conversational intelligence.

Granola now positions itself as the system of record for conversational intelligence. They focus not on static documentation (Notion's strength) but on living, conversational intelligence that evolves with your organization.

This is classic counter-positioning. Granola identified a way to create value that Notion cannot easily replicate without undermining their own business model. While Notion excels at organizing structured information like documents, wikis, and project boards, Granola owns the unstructured conversation layer where most real-time decision-making happens.

Building great transcription is one thing. Building AI that can understand context, track decisions across multiple meetings, and surface insights from months of team conversations is something entirely different. This depth of conversational understanding becomes Granola's defensible advantage.

Takeaways for Startups and Incumbents

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