Marie Poulin — The designer who turned her Notion experience into an education business
The process by which a designer who shared her own work system refined the curriculum through student questions and grew Notion Mastery into a program with videos, hands-on practice, feedback, and an operations team.
Notion Mastery, created by Marie Poulin, is an education program that teaches both how to use Notion and how to design work systems for individuals and small teams. Students learn to connect goals, projects, schedules, and materials in ways that fit how they work. At the center of the program are not only explanations of features but also hands-on practice and feedback that help students apply them to real work.
When She Showed Her Work System, Teaching Requests Followed
Before she began teaching Notion, Poulin had worked in design and digital strategy, helping business owners with their online businesses. She created education products such as Digital Strategy School herself and also supported other business owners in launching and marketing online courses. By the time she encountered Notion as a new subject, she already had experience identifying customers' problems and structuring education products.
When she began using Notion in earnest in 2018, the first thing she organized was the materials and notes from a course she was taking. She later moved task management and quarterly planning there as well, and even recreated the functions of the existing work management tool she used with her husband inside Notion. When she showed this process to clients and acquaintances, requests began coming in from people willing to pay to learn how to use it.
Public content connected these requests to a broader audience. Poulin committed to posting one Notion video each week for 12 weeks, and a webinar she held around the same time caught the Notion team's attention, leading her to participate in official Office Hours. As videos showing her way of working and live explanations accumulated together, she became known as someone who taught Notion.
Selling Before It Was Complete and Finding Learners' Problems Through Consultations
The first Notion Mastery, launched in November 2019, was a six-week program sold for about $300. Rather than completing all course materials before selling it, she first recruited students with the plan to deliver lessons each week. The $10,000 first-week revenue recorded at that time was featured in an Indie Bites interview published on March 4, 2021. This is a record of revenue from the first week of the launch.
In the early days, it also offered the option of a one-hour individual consultation for an additional USD100. Because the number of consultation requests was not limited, schedules filled quickly, but the process of students sharing their screens and showing where they got stuck helped with course development. Marie Poulin later reflected on it as a paid research process that let her hear customers' needs and language directly.
In December 2019, she reopened sales while stating that it was still an unfinished pilot course. Marie Poulin refined the content weekly based on information from consultations, and students joined even though they knew it was still in production. It was a way to confirm demand for learning through sales and to make the educational content more concrete using real questions.
In 2020, she increased the share of courses in a business that had combined consulting and teaching. She moved the course from her personal website to an independent domain, commissioned brand design, and adjusted pricing and product structure. By reducing consulting hours and investing the time gained into improving the course, Notion Mastery became the center of the business.
Videos Attracted Customers, and Feedback Changed the Curriculum
YouTube was the most important customer acquisition channel. In a March 2021 post announcing that it had reached 1,000 students, Marie Poulin said that about 75 percent of surveyed new students mentioned her YouTube channel. The pattern was that people who had checked her explanation style and practical level through free videos purchased more structured education.
Older videos continued to be discovered while new courses were being created. According to Marie Poulin's 2021 recap, only six new videos were published that year, and only three of the top ten YouTube videos were made that year. The record shows the effect of already published practical content continuing to be used over time, as much as the frequency of continually making new videos.
As the course grew, the biggest thing she fixed was the learning sequence. Marie Poulin admitted that the early course assumed too much prior knowledge for beginners and skipped intermediate steps. In 2021, she worked with curriculum designer Emily Walker to reorganize the content into four levels by difficulty and four areas: self-development, personal productivity, business operations, and knowledge management. In December of that year, she released the foundational Level 0 and Level 1 in the new format.
The teaching approach also combined self-study of content with human support. Students learn the materials at their own pace while using live classes, question-and-answer sessions, and community support. It provides database and dashboard components and guides students to combine and modify them for their own situations.
The process of gathering student feedback also became established as an operational task. Marie Poulin explained that, unlike the early days when there was not even a follow-up email, she later sent a check-in form about six weeks after enrollment asking what was difficult and what kind of support was needed. Through the responses, she identified missing explanations and recurring problems and revised the content.
Growing into a team that divides teaching and support
Marie Poulin's publicly shared 2021 recap recorded 950 new students and more than $500,000 in revenue for that year. This is the revenue figure disclosed at the time and should be distinguished from personal income after costs are deducted. To run the growing education business, in February of the same year she converted longtime collaborator Georgia Cyr into the first full-time operations lead. With someone to take charge of customer support and course operations, Poulin could focus more on educational content and classes.
In the business structure, Poulin as an individual should be distinguished from the operating company. The creator of Notion Mastery is Poulin, while the entity operating the product is Oki Doki Digital, which she co-founded with her husband Ben Borowski. Ben had worked full-time at an outside company for a while before returning to the business in December 2021 to take on the technical lead role and Notion consulting for teams.
In a May 2022 interview, the business was introduced as maintaining four full-time people: Poulin, her husband, the operations lead, and the education lead. Poulin handled curriculum development, Ben handled API and technical applications, the education lead handled live classes, and the operations lead handled day-to-day business operations. Separate contract staff also contributed to design and community support.
Beyond courses, she also sold Notion templates. In a 2020 recap, Poulin separately disclosed template sales of $25,774. This meant selling both an educational product for learning an entire work system based on the same expertise and standalone resources for solving specific problems.
Operating a business that teaches a constantly changing tool
This business carries the burden of maintaining educational materials whenever Notion changes. In a 2023 interview, the two explained that deciding which lessons to revise when new features make existing methods simpler is a major challenge. They therefore sought to teach not only how to operate specific screens but also principles of designing work systems that remain usable even when features change.
On the official sales page checked in October 2026, the individual course costs $799 and provides one year of access to content, live events, Q&A time, and community support. After the first year ends, access can be renewed for $79 per quarter, with renewal optional and chosen separately by the student. The team explains ongoing material updates and expert support as the reasons for this maintenance fee.
The product range also expanded from a full course to specialized skills and team training. The official site lists Notion formula training, a dashboard design workshop, a workspace design course for teams, and customized consulting together. By allowing public workshop purchases to be credited toward payment for the flagship course, they also created a purchase path that leads customers who have tried a smaller educational product toward a larger course.
What is notable about Notion Mastery is the difference between showing one's own use case and teaching others to use it themselves. Marie Poulin met customers through free videos, filled gaps in her explanations through consultations and learner feedback, and enabled a team to continue providing education and support. It is the process of turning personal experience with a tool into a business by adding instructional design and operations.