A Notion love story

Connie and Kyle were two singles looking for love in San Francisco. One thing connected them: both used Notion to create “date-me docs”—profile pages that they could circulate to find love outside of the swiping turnstile of dating apps. After a chance encounter at a hackathon, they exchanged docs (one of which was famous). The rest is history.

Notion: Let’s go back to the beginning. How did your worlds collide?

Connie: The first time we met was at a hackathon, but I’d actually heard about Kyle a few weeks before. One of my (hard-to-impress) friends mentioned he met a “super dope guy who was showing us how to do handstands.” So I looked him up on Twitter, saw his date-me doc, and thought: This is really good.

Notion: Wait—tell us a little more about what a date-me doc is.

Kyle: I wanted a canvas to creatively broadcast exactly who I am. So instead of using any app with a rigid form, I made my date-me doc in Notion. It was essentially my homepage.

I had actually seen Connie’s date-me doc as I was making mine.

Notion: So you had date-me docs common. Connie, did you reach out to Kyle?

Connie: I didn’t message him at the time, but filed it away. A few weeks later, a friend was going to a hackathon, so I tagged along. I immediately recognized that the guy giving the demo was Kyle!

We exchanged Twitters, and when he opened mine, he said, “Oh, you have a date-me doc, too!” So he messaged me his doc (which of course I’d already seen), and I knew that was my shot.

Kyle: I immediately registered it was the Connie from the New York Times article. I thought, “Wow, okay—I need to pursue this further.”

Notion: Kismet! What was your first impression of each other?

Kyle: My first impression of Connie was that she’s cheerful, kind of weird, very different. I wanted to learn more: curiosity is my catnip.

Connie: That stood out during our first date: he asked such good, insightful, probing questions. I could tell that Kyle was interested in me as a person, my culture, my life experiences.

Notion: What was the moment when you knew you had something special?

Kyle: Early on, I made a Notion doc with a bunch of questions. I really wanted to openly express, “Here are my strengths. Here are the the weaknesses I have. Here’s things about me that I prefer not to change.”

On our third date, I said, “I know this is not typical. But I want to hammer out the most hard-hitting questions. We can we make it almost a game—let’s be comically direct and talk through it, because we don’t have sunk-cost fallacy.” She was not only open to it, but excited by it. She brought in even harder-hitting questions.

Connie: I have this gigantic deck of four hundred questions that I’d been bringing to dates. My dates would look at like, two questions and say, “Oh, this is … weird.” Needless to say, I was thrilled we had the same idea.

For me it was a sign that this person sees me as someone who could be a life partner. And I found that to be a huge green flag.

Notion: Did your date-me docs turn into relationship docs?

Kyle: Our whole relationship is in Notion. Even our cat has a Notion doc—the Kitty Runbook. We have a CRM for all of our dates. We’re like, “How do we Kanban this?” We leave comments, and we go through review cycles—we make sure we have strategic buy-in on our dates. We use it for planning projects—our trip to China, Burning Man. It’s effectively turned into a relationship wiki.

I do all of my work in Notion. Why not take our relationship as seriously as we take our careers?

Notion: Impressive. Tell us about the proposal.

Connie: Kyle said, “Hey, there’s a creative writing workshop at Notion that might be fun.” I love creative writing, so I said, “Yeah! Let’s do it.”

When we arrived at Notion, there was a sign, a greeter at a table with name tags, swag bags, a security guard. We got a little tour around the office, which led us to the event room, where the syllabus was projected on the screen.

We were early, so I moseyed over to the laptop to see the full agenda. I scrolled down to the bottom, and there was the proposal! I shrieked, “Yes!”—and couched that excitement in, “Kyle, you’re so bold to do this right before the workshop!” It took me multiple seconds to register that the whole thing was a setup.

Notion: We had a blast setting it up—it’s not often that we get such a request! What is next for the happy couple?

Kyle: We’ll come up with a creative wedding—maybe a hackathon theme or cosplay. Something untraditional. It’s going to be pretty out there.

Connie: And we’ll plan it in Notion, of course. My date-me doc was actually how I discovered Notion. I needed a really quick way to publish a doc online—with Notion, one click turns your doc into a public site.

Kyle: The Notion developer who was in charge of that one feature is counterfactually why we’re engaged. In Silicon Valley, there’s this narrative that you need to build something that’s so useful—that really changes someone’s life. Ninety-nine percent of tools don’t hit that mark, but Notion is the backbone of my life. I didn’t expect a software tool to do that. 🖤