Three friends bought an 82-foot alley in the Outer Sunset for $26,000 in March 2026. The previous owner had bought it at a city auction in 2025 by accident, thinking she was bidding on the house. They ran a design contest for a mural made of 1,280 crowdsourced images and auctioned the naming rights with a hard deadline. Notion won with $140,000, bid four minutes before the close, against $135,000 from Automattic. The mural was unveiled in June 2026 with the mayor present. The alley is now The Notion Way.
Dead Ended on 2026-04-07.
The site has been offline for 14 days, the creator announced the end, or nothing changed for 60 days.
Cause: Sold out. The auction closed as planned. The name will never be auctioned again, so there is nothing left to sell.
Exactly one thing to sell, a hard deadline, and two tech companies bidding against each other in public.
A right that only one buyer can hold at a time: a person’s name, the naming of something for a day, a whole life on eBay.
Every project is taken apart with the same seven questions, each borrowed from a standard analysis tool, so you can compare this one with any other on the board. The funnel numbers come from the daily snapshots, not from the creator.
Notion bought the naming rights to an alley in San Francisco, a street sign in the city's design, and the mural underneath. It bought civic goodwill and press; the neighbourhood got a paved, painted alley.
An open ascending auction with a fixed close. Two companies drove it: Automattic to $135,000, Notion to $140,000 four minutes before the end.
Exactly one alley, named once, never auctioned again. Costs of about $60,000 against $140,000 of revenue.
The design contest made about 1.2 million visitors participants before anyone bid, with 1,280 crowdsourced images in the final mural. Local press and the mayor's presence at the unveiling did the rest.
Hard to copy: you need to own an alley ($26,000 here) and to get a city to play along. The backstory, a composer who bought the alley by accident thinking she was buying the house, cannot be manufactured.
Permits and legal questions, a buyer who treats the alley as a billboard (Notion promised not to), and the fact that it can only happen once.
Absolute scarcity and a civic spectacle. The $140,000 came from two companies bidding against each other in public, not from many buyers.
| Date | Revenue | Reach | Impressions | Likes | Reposts | Replies | Visits (creator) | Online |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7 Apr 2026 | $140,000 | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | 1200000 | yes |