Amelia Salyers
1.1K posts
@ASalyers3
“Clarity of writing usually follows clarity of thought” — The Economist’s style guide. Storytelling @notionhq Prev: @turpentinemedia, @Future/@a16z, @Mixpanel
I'm hiring a small army of Notion Media Fellows to help us tell and amplify the @NotionHQ story. You'll work closely w/ the founders, get to play with our latest prototypes and also get unlimited credits for your Notion agents. Apply here: notion.pages.dev.notion.co/cbe4bae104b648…
✨New demo: what if vibe coding felt more visual? @brian_lovin @maryrosecook and I did a game jam using Notion as our "IDE": launching Cursor agents from a task board, and making a custom image for each task 😎 The demo shows 3 ideas for the future of agents: 1) Agents should collaborate across apps. Each app has its focus--Notion AI is good at drafting specs and organizing tasks; Cursor is good at coding. So let them specialize! Today we're launching a new integration where Notion AI can kick off Cursor Cloud Agents to do coding tasks. The Cursor API accepts natural language prompts, so I think of this as "cross-app sub-agents" -- it's kinda cute how it resembles humans hiring outside contractors 😊 BTW: the parallelism of cloud agents is incredibly freeing for creativity, but it also creates a new problem: sooo much work to keep track of! Which brings us to the next idea... 2) Agent orchestration is a data visualization problem. A powerful frame for designing agent UIs is to think of the chat transcripts as the "raw data" and ask: what visual projections might help people make sense of this data at scale? We need to engage our human GPUs -- our visual processing -- to understand what the computer GPUs are doing for us! One thing we can do is use AI to populate traditional UIs like progress bars and status updates. But there are also new possibilities now... For example: when you have a lot going on, it can be hard to identify tasks just by text titles. So we tried generating an AI image for each task -- turns out this helps a lot by giving it a unique visual identity! And of course, it also just makes it super fun to build with friends 😃 Speaking of friends... 3) The future of coding is collaborative. Sometimes it feels like IC engineers are being reduced to middle managers: shuffling information between the team's context and the coding agents that they individually manage. The solution: bring all the people and agents into one shared space, with shared context and visibility! In the video you can get a glimpse of how this feels. Mary, Brian and I record ourselves chatting about ideas, and then we use AI to turn that conversation into a list of tasks on a shared board. As the ideas get built in parallel, we can all monitor progress and review the work together, nothing is siloed. My main takeaway from this game jam was: damn, creativity with friends, at the speed of conversation, is incredibly fun. --- Our goal here is to let anyone use Notion as a fun and creative "software factory" to build software together with your team. Give the Cursor integration a shot and let us know what you think! (AI Image gen in Notion isn't GA yet, but coming soon and already out to some users) And let me know if you'd want a template or more detailed instructions on the setup we showed in this demo...
Exciting news from Notion's @ivanhzhao: Notion is working on a standalone chat app, to talk to and orchestrate your AI agents. "A chat-first Notion to manage calendar and email."
📞 @mschoening and I sometimes have meandering calls about malleable software and AI. This morning we tried recording one! We talked about cognitive debt, why CLIs are having their moment, what comes after files, and reverse-engineering smart homes... 06:55 - How software promotes agency 19:21 - Composable tools 25:00 - Smart home lighting hacks w/ Claude 33:20 - The subtle magic of CLIs 39:35 - Maintenance costs for personal software 43:19 - Avoiding cognitive debt with AI-generated explanations
Lots of talk about SF food these days. These are the only restaurants that matter: the progress Key Klub Mijote Nari Halal wings plus Mr Jiu’s Foreign Cinema Rich Table
I'm stoked to join @NotionHQ as a Social Lead on The Storytelling Team. Notion is building an AI-connected workspace that helps teams like Ramp, Figma, Vercel, OpenAI (and many more) create tools and maximize their productivity. Thank you for the opportunity, @ivanhzhao, @akothari, @ASalyers3. Let's get to work. 🫡
we just built the largest ugc program ever. we hit 500m views in 60 days and it was all built by a 19 y/o kid. in july, i saw cluely hit 300m views in 90 days with ugc. so i hired a 19-year-old student who'd been making content for three months to build out our ugc program. two months later, he built the most successful ugc program in our space. 500m views. that's roughly 10% of people online seeing content about wispr flow. here's the playbook he used: 1/ give creators real autonomy (or they'll leave) most companies kill ugc programs by micromanaging everything. we gave creators full creative freedom for half their content. make whatever viral content you want about wispr. your account, your voice, your style. we had creators turn down amazon and notion because we let them stay creative. they didn't feel like they were selling out. they controlled their content and stayed authentic. 2/ build a viral replication system we have 70 creators making content daily. we monitor everything in real-time. the moment we see a video hitting 1m+ views in the first day, we extract that exact script and send it to every creator. one viral video becomes 70 viral videos simultaneously. 3/ get extremely specific with your hooks the part most companies fail at: they give vague guidance. we built a library of specific, tactical hooks. not concepts - actual frameworks they can use. example: "use a really complicated name in your message. something like saoirse or tchaikovsky. when wispr gets it right, act genuinely shocked." this shows a specific feature, fits organically into any content format they're making, creates real emotion, and has just enough brand presence without feeling salesy. creators pick what fits their style and the content they're already making. 4/ be ruthlessly selective when we launched the program, 1,000 creators applied. we picked 60. quality over quantity matters more than people think. one great creator who actually understands your product is worth ten mediocre ones who are just chasing a check. you're not building a contractor list - you're building a community. a 19-year-old beat companies spending millions on ugc. the difference wasn't budget. it was letting creators actually create.
I'm stoked to join @NotionHQ as a Social Lead on The Storytelling Team. Notion is building an AI-connected workspace that helps teams like Ramp, Figma, Vercel, OpenAI (and many more) create tools and maximize their productivity. Thank you for the opportunity, @ivanhzhao, @akothari, @ASalyers3. Let's get to work. 🫡
