Notion

Instacart

Notion

Notion uses freemium pricing. The free plan is generous — unlimited pages and blocks for individuals.

The Plus plan is $10/user/month for small teams. Business is $18/user/month.

Enterprise is custom-priced. The free tier is intentionally powerful enough that individuals and small teams can use it forever without paying.

The revenue comes when those individuals bring Notion to their companies and entire organizations adopt it.

Notion also has an AI add-on at $10/member/month that adds AI writing assistance, summarization, and Q&A across your workspace.

Instacart

Instacart operates as a marketplace connecting consumers with personal shoppers and grocery retailers. Revenue comes from multiple streams: delivery fees and service fees charged to consumers (typically $3.99+ per delivery), tips to shoppers (passed through, not revenue), retailer partnerships (grocers pay Instacart for access to the platform and fulfillment services), and advertising.

Advertising has become the crown jewel. Instacart Ads lets consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Nestlé pay for sponsored product placements within the Instacart shopping experience.

When someone searches for "chips," Doritos can pay to appear first. This is incredibly valuable because it's advertising at the exact moment of purchase intent.

Ad revenue was $871 million in 2023 and crossed $950 million in 2024.

The retailer partnership model is key. Unlike DoorDash or Uber Eats (which listed restaurants without permission early on), Instacart works with grocers as partners.

Over 1,500 retail banners including Costco, Kroger, Albertsons, and Publix have formal partnerships. Instacart provides the technology and shoppers.

Grocers provide inventory and stores.

Notion

Ivan Zhao studied cognitive science at the University of British Columbia, obsessed with the idea that computers should be creative tools, not just consumption devices. He was inspired by pioneers like Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart who envisioned computers as tools for thought.

In 2013, he started Notion with the idea of building a tool that combined documents, databases, and project management into one flexible workspace.

The first version of Notion launched in 2015 and basically nobody cared. The product was too abstract.

People didn't understand what it was or why they needed it. The company burned through its initial funding.

By 2015, Notion was nearly dead — Zhao had to lay off almost the entire team.

With the last of his money, Zhao kept just one engineer — Simon Last — and moved to Kyoto, Japan, where the cost of living was a fraction of San Francisco. For over a year, Zhao and Last rebuilt Notion from scratch in a tiny apartment.

They rewrote the entire product, making it simpler and more intuitive. The 2.0 version launched in March 2018.

This time, it clicked. Product Hunt loved it.

Twitter loved it. Within months, Notion was growing 50% month over month.

Instacart

Apoorva Mehta was a 26-year-old Amazon engineer in Seattle who quit his job in 2012 to start a company. The only problem: he had no idea what to build.

Over the next year, he started and abandoned roughly 20 different projects. A social network for lawyers.

A way to track restaurant wait times. Nothing stuck.

Then one day he was too lazy to go grocery shopping. He looked for a service that would shop for him and deliver everything to his door.

Nothing good existed. The existing options were grocery store delivery services that only worked during specific windows, had limited selection, and required ordering days in advance.

Mehta wanted to order groceries the way he ordered everything else online — immediately, from whatever store he wanted.

He built a prototype in 2012 and applied to Y Combinator. The demo was rough — he ordered a six-pack of beer through the app and had it delivered to a YC partner's house during the application process.

It worked. He got in.

Instacart launched in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2013 with a simple promise: order from your favorite local grocery store and have someone shop for you and deliver within an hour.

Notion

Notion grew almost entirely through organic love. The product was so flexible that users built incredible things with it and shared them on Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit.

Template creators built entire businesses around selling Notion templates. YouTubers made "my Notion setup" videos that got millions of views.

Notion didn't need a marketing team because its users were the marketing team.

The template ecosystem was a massive growth driver. Notion made it easy to duplicate and share templates.

Productivity influencers and creators built elaborate systems — life dashboards, second brains, CRM systems, content calendars — and shared them with their audiences. Every shared template was a free advertisement for Notion.

The community strategy was deliberate. Notion hired community managers early and empowered super-users to become Notion ambassadors.

There are Notion meetups in cities worldwide. Notion Campus Leaders run groups at universities.

The company understood that for a tool this flexible, community was the best way to teach people what's possible.

Instacart

Instacart grew by solving a problem one city at a time. They launched in San Francisco, proved the model, then expanded to other major metros.

Each new market required recruiting shoppers, signing up retailers, and building enough consumer density to make the economics work.

The COVID-19 pandemic was the inflection point. Grocery delivery went from luxury to necessity overnight.

In March 2020 Instacart announced it would add 300,000 shoppers, then raised that by another 250,000 weeks later. Order volume increased 500%.

Years of planned growth happened in weeks. The pandemic proved that grocery delivery wasn't a niche — it was the future of how a significant chunk of the population would shop.

The enterprise play is the long-term moat. By providing white-label technology to grocers, Instacart becomes embedded in their operations.

Even if a grocery chain wanted to build its own delivery service, they'd need years and hundreds of millions to replicate what Instacart provides. The more deeply integrated Instacart becomes in grocery operations, the harder it is to rip out.

Notion

The "too flexible" problem. Notion can do almost anything, which means new users often stare at a blank page and have no idea where to start.

The learning curve isn't steep, but it's wide. People give up before discovering the product's power.

Every Notion user remembers the moment it finally "clicked" — but many potential users never reach that moment.

Enterprise adoption has been slower than expected. Notion is beloved by startups and small teams, but large enterprises need things like advanced permissions, audit logs, compliance certifications, and admin controls.

Building enterprise features while keeping the product simple for individuals is a constant tension. Companies like Confluence (Atlassian) have decades-long enterprise relationships that are hard to displace.

Performance at scale has been a persistent complaint. Notion pages with hundreds of blocks or large databases can become sluggish.

The app has improved significantly but power users with massive workspaces still hit performance walls. For a tool that promises to replace multiple apps, it needs to be as fast as each individual app it replaces.

Instacart

The post-COVID hangover was brutal. After pandemic demand normalized, growth slowed dramatically.

The company's valuation dropped from a peak of $39 billion in early 2021 to about $10 billion at IPO in September 2023. Investors who bought at the peak saw a 75% paper loss.

The narrative shifted from "essential infrastructure" to "nice-to-have luxury."

Unit economics are perpetually tight. Paying a person to walk through a grocery store, pick items, bag them, and drive them to someone's house is expensive.

Unlike meal delivery (one restaurant, one bag), grocery delivery involves dozens of items per order, refrigeration requirements, and substitution decisions. Every order that requires a shopper to call the customer about an out-of-stock item eats into efficiency.

Amazon is the existential threat. Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods delivery, and Amazon's own logistics network represent a competitor with nearly unlimited resources and a Prime membership base of 200+ million.

Amazon has been willing to lose billions on grocery delivery to build market share. Instacart's advantage is retailer partnerships — Kroger and Publix use Instacart specifically because they don't want to help Amazon dominate grocery.

Notion

Notion is a workspace that combines notes, docs, wikis, project management, and databases into one tool. Pages can contain any mix of text, tables, kanban boards, calendars, galleries, and embedded content.

Notion Databases are the power feature — structured data that can be viewed as tables, boards, timelines, or calendars. Templates let users start with pre-built setups for everything from CRM to habit tracking.

Notion AI adds writing assistance, summarization, and the ability to ask questions about your workspace content. Notion Sites turns any Notion page into a published website.

Instacart

Instacart Marketplace — the core platform where consumers order groceries from 80,000+ stores for delivery or pickup, with personal shoppers fulfilling orders. Instacart+ — subscription service ($9.99/month) offering free delivery on orders over $35, reduced service fees, and credit back on pickup orders.

Instacart Ads — a retail media platform letting CPG brands run sponsored product listings, display ads, and coupons within the shopping experience. Instacart Platform (Enterprise) — white-label e-commerce technology that lets grocers build their own online ordering and fulfillment powered by Instacart's infrastructure.

Caper Cart — AI-powered smart shopping carts (from the 2021 Caper AI acquisition) with built-in screens, barcode scanners, and payment that let shoppers skip the checkout line.

Notion

Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Coatue Management, Dragoneer Investment Group

Instacart

Sequoia Capital was an early and consistent backer. Andreessen Horowitz invested in growth rounds.

D1 Capital Partners led the 2021 round that valued Instacart at $39 billion. Existing investors including Valiant Capital, T.

Rowe Price, Fidelity, and Tiger Global participated across rounds. Y Combinator was the starting point (Summer 2012 batch).

The September 2023 IPO on NASDAQ priced at $30 per share, valuing the company at approximately $10 billion.