Recently I’ve been practicing using Cursor to create project MVPs. So far I’ve found it to be quite helpful. But to create projects we need ideas first.

I get project ideas pretty often and quite randomly. My usual approach is to write down the idea quickly, and then carry on with my current task. Then I have an idea on how to handle this idea (how meta) better, with a more comprehensive workflow. The workflow still has to work relatively quickly and not too time-consuming.

I came up with this workflow is like this:

1. An idea comes. Great!
2. Let’s quickly flesh it out by chatting with an AI. Look at various angles of the project and figure out a good MVP for it.
3. Once everything is good, ask the AI to generate a PRD document for it.
4. If the PRD looks good, ask the AI to save that PRD document to my Notion workspace.

Step 1-3 is pretty simple. Any modern chat AI nowadays can talk you through an idea and make a PRD out of it. Point four is where it gets more useful, as it automates the file creation. We can do this with the help of MCP server.

Notion has an official MCP server, so most of the work is already done. All it takes as usual is:

1. Setup access credentials in the Notion workspace’s settings,
2. Setup the MCP server in your AI interface of choice.

Most of the steps above are outlined clearly in the Github readme, so you’ll do fine by following them. Here are some of my additional notes:

• When setting up connection capabilities inside Notion, make sure to check “Insert Content”. That is needed for creating a file.
• For the moment the easiest way to set up MCP is either with Claude or Cursor. I use Cursor in this case:
  • Setup for MCP in Cursor is in Cursor > Settings … > Cursor Settings, then select “MCP” from the settings tab.
  • You can choose to use the MCP server globally or per project.
• Some MCP servers simply run using node. However, Notion’s official MCP server requires you to also install Docker and have its daemon running. The nice thing about this is that you don’t have to download the MCP servers code manually first.
• As always with AI, you can use natural language to ask it to save to Notion. More below.

Prompting Strategy:

Ask the AI to list databases in the Workspace. Ensure the database you want to add the page to is there Then, mention the database name when you ask to post the PRD.

I also found that the formatting wasn’t the best (lists especially weren’t formatted properly). This then took me some manual work to make things easier to read. Try to prompt the AI better to format things in Markdown before saving. I found some success by adding this prompt:

“Create a Notion page (or update a Notion page) with the following content, using proper Notion block formatting. Use heading blocks for titles and section headers, bulleted or numbered list blocks for lists, and paragraph blocks for regular text. Do not use Markdown syntax—use Notion’s block types directly.”

Finally, sometimes it does it automatically, but you can always ask for it to give you the link to the created post. This helps verify that the post is created correctly.