Xin chào! I’m Hien—a full-time builder, community-led growth strategist, and serial founder based in Ho Chi Minh City 🇻🇳
You are reading a ✨ friends only edition ✨ of Screate Growth Hub—we help builders scale their next million-dollar startups with community, real connections & good vibes—one story at a time, alongside fellow builders in 17 countries (and counting!)
TL;DR: Notion went from a struggling startup to a $10B giant thanks to a killer community. This is the exact Notion's early community programs and their "Community Everywhere" strategy, revealing actionable takeaways for your startup.
Everyone in SaaS knows the Notion story.
"We want to be the next Notion."
"How did Notion do it?"
"They went from an unknown startup to a household name through community—it's incredible."
It is amazing. They rebuilt their product four times, hit 1 million users in 2020, and just passed 100 million with a $10B+ valuation (as of July 2024). Remember, they were up against giants like Microsoft and Google. Challenging the status quo like that? No wonder we are all inspired!
Notion wasn't the first to use true fans for growth, but they nailed it. They mastered a few key things that most miss.
Ivan Zhao, CEO of Notion shared a picture of the milestone on their website.
🧐 So, how did Notion get started?
TL;DR: Notion almost died four times before becoming a $10B giant. Their secret? Relentless focus on early adopters and a "build with the community" approach.
It wasn't an overnight success. Far from it.
Notion nearly went under. Not once, but four times. However, their obsession with users turned them into a productivity powerhouse.
Here’s the real story:
1️⃣ The Vision (2013): "LEGOs for Software"
The team had a cool idea: Notion as "LEGOs for software." Give people basic building blocks—notes, docs, tasks, projects—that they could combine to build their own custom workspaces (and even sell them), with no coding required.
Why this idea?
Over 1 billion people were stuck with Microsoft or Google Suites, with no real alternatives.
The SaaS market was overflowing with rigid, fragmented tools.
A slide from a recent all-hands presentation, shared by Ivan Zhao, CEO of Notion on their website.
2️⃣ Early Struggles (2013-2015): Near-Death Experience #1, #2, and #3
2013: $2M seed funding—check. Initial website builder—check. But then… the tech stack failed. Big time. Frequent crashes, slow performance—a disaster. This was the near-death experience 1.
Hard decisions had to be made. Layoffs. This was the near-death experience 2.
The team moved to Kyoto, Japan—a completely new culture and language for the founders—to rebuild the product from scratch. This was the near-death experience number 3.
3️⃣ The Pivot (2016): Product Hunt Win #1
2016: Notion 1.0 launched on Product Hunt—a key platform for early tech adopters. Boom! Over 5,500 upvotes, #1 Product of the Week and Month, plus the 2016 Golden Kitty Award for Best Mobile App. Not bad.
But the real breakthrough came in 2018 with Notion 2.0.
4️⃣ The Breakthrough (2018): Product Hunt Win #2 and the Wall Street Journal
They did it again on Product Hunt—#1 Product of the Day, Week, and Month, with over 7,800 upvotes. Then, boom—a feature in the Wall Street Journal: "The Only App You Need for Work-Life Productivity."
The Notion 2.0 version took off in 2018, setting a new milestone that forever changed Notion—source: Product Hunt.
💬 So, how did Notion pull off this incredible feat?
It wasn't easy. You see, from 0 to 1, you need a winning product. Notion didn't get it right on day one. They almost went bankrupt multiple times.
Notion’s story reveals the key: a relentless focus on early adopters.
How did they really translate user needs into product success? The answer went beyond passive listening.
They did three key things right:
1️⃣ They actively asked their users for feedback.
As Camille, Notion's first marketing hire (employee #11), shared in an Elpha AMA:
“From the very beginning, we were having hundreds of conversations every day with users. Some of the earliest employees at Notion were community support professionals who doubled as UX researchers, always taking the extra time to ask users how they were using Notion, what they wanted to do with the product, what could make it better for them, why they wanted a certain fix or feature.”
A snapshot of Notion founders having a meetup with users back in the day. Source: Olivia Nottebohm, former CRO of Notion on Founder School by Slush via Youtube.
2️⃣ They documented their user feedback.
“All of these conversations were tagged by topic, feature, type of feedback and piped into a database that made it easy to understand what the data was saying at 10,000 feet, but also made the real qualitative substance of users' comments available to read at any time”
3️⃣ They also built a dynamic feedback loop—a system where early adopter ideas were shared, challenged, and refined into a strategic product roadmap:
“The numbers of tags would inform what to build next, and then engineers could dive into conversations to understand what was truly wanted and needed. Through this, we were also able to tag based on persona and use case - making it clear that early audiences to target would be engineers, designers, product leaders, HR leaders - and that our key use cases to delve into were wiki/knowledge base, docs and notes, and product management.”
👉 This eventually led to a crucial insight: people didn't want to build apps (like what the founders initially thought)—they wanted tools to simplify their lives and boost productivity.
This user-centric approach drove Notion to prioritize clean, minimal, and intuitive design—turning user feedback into a competitive edge.
🧗♀️ Growth in the early days at Notion
TL;DR: Notion's early growth was driven by a community-led strategy. Recognizing strong organic user adoption, they focused on nurturing the existing passionate user base rather than traditional marketing. This decentralized, bottom-up approach empowered users to create their own communities, which Notion then supported with resources and tools, driving user education and new user acquisition.
Notion's 2018 launch was a success, but it wasn't an overnight fairy tale.
They started getting a strong signal of natural, broad adoption but needed a marketing powerhouse to fuel it.
Enter Camille Ricketts, Notion's first marketing hire (employee #11) and a seasoned storyteller with experience at the Wall Street Journal, Tesla (alongside Elon Musk), and First Round Capital.
Camille Ricketts, former Head of Marketing at Notion. She was the marketing first hire and employee #11 on the early Notion team. Source: Moth Fund.
The founders originally wanted Camille to come on board and double down on the organic wave. And her goal was simply, ubiquity.
“Can we make this thing as ubiquitous as humanly possible where people feel like they are hearing about it from all sides? They saw a billboard. They saw it on Twitter. They heard about it from a friend. We wanted to surround sound as much as we possibly could.”
During the month between accepting the offer and onboarding, while searching for the unfair advantage that could help grow the company and reach ubiquity, Camille two discovered profound insights:
1️⃣ The most valuable content would be from the early adopters, not the brand.
“It was interesting to step into a company with all of the content background and expertise and then realize that the most valuable content that we could create would not be from us. It would come from the people who are using the software and wildly enthusiastic about it.”
2️⃣ Community-led growth was the way to go because thousands were talking about the product. Organically.
“When I stepped foot into this role, it was already going on. We were already seeing people tweeting a ton about Notion… There were already a few Facebook groups that were devoted to it and the subreddit already existed.”
Real tweets from real people directly on Notion’s “Personal” subpage. Source: Notion.
So, naturally, she brought in a new hire to deliver on that right away. That person was Ben Lang, an early adopter who publicly advocated for Notion through his “Notion Pages” and the Facebook group ‘Notion Made Simple’.
It was the very first community gallery for Notion templates at the time.
Ben Lang, who initially joined as a contractor before becoming the former Head of Community at Notion when Notion only had around 12 total staff, was the driving force behind some of the most impactful community initiatives. Source: First Round Review.
Ben’s site called “Notion Pages” which he built for fun, ended up being discovered by Camille and helped him have the chance to work with the early Notion team.
Initially, Camille and the team had a difficult time defining where to focus their efforts amidst three key dynamics:
1️⃣ Natural Advocates: Notion already had strong organic traction, with users tweeting, creating Facebook groups, and participating in Subreddits dedicated to it.
“The B2C side was just taking off internationally in a huge way. People were using Notion to plan their weddings, go to school, all kinds of long tail use cases…We saw that the organic wavewas going to serve us pretty well early on so we wanted to ride that as much as possible.”
2️⃣ Horizontal Product Risks: As a highly flexible tool, Notion risked being seen as "for nothing in particular, for no one in particular."
“The decision was made very early on that we were going to go afterindividuals, self-serve segment, SMBs and also the enterprises… It's a big storytelling challenge on behalf of my team to figure out, what are the things that we can say, the narratives that we can tell that are going to have broad appeal for multiple segments”
3️⃣ Going Upmarket: From the outset, the ultimate goal was to position Notion for enterprise teams while catering to its existing segments.
“…early audiences to target would be engineers, designers, product leaders, HR leaders - and that our key use cases to delve into were wiki/knowledge base, docs and notes, and product management.”
Olivia Nottebohm, former Chief Revenue Officer & Advisor to CEO at Notion shared a sneak peek into what the community-led funnel at Notion looked like via Youtube.
“Since I arrived, we've been focused pretty mid to bottom funnel. We've invested a lot in community, which generally connected and helped existing users become even more engaged and skillful with the product. We spent a lot of time optimizing onboarding and developing user education for people who had signed up already.”
Ben also shared his goals in the proposal on how to build a meaningful platform for these folks to meet, learn from each other and ultimately grow the Notion business:
“Connect Notion power users in real life”
“Facilitate Notion learnings between users”
“Provide tools for Notion fans to further evangelize the product”
Camille and the team decided to double down on what was already working: Notion's passionate community.
“Our biggest bet is that good community drives good business.”
- Ivan Zhao, co-founder & CEO of Notion shared in his interview about “How Notion is Winning at Enterprise SaaS by Building Community” (2021)
The thing is, they didn't build a community; they nurtured the one that organically formed around their product.
The opening of Ben’s proposal to Notion CEO. Source: Ben Lang from LinkedIn.
Well, before we go any further, let’s address the big elephant in the room.
1️⃣ What is ‘community’ referred to at Notion?
“Internally, we roughly think of community as three concentric circles. At the very center of it, the inner circle has about a hundred-ish people, where we consider the most passionate users, we call them Ambassadors. They know the product inside out, they create Youtube videos, online courses and even helped translate the product to their local languages. Before COVID, they set up meetups in their local cities. That’s the most inner circle. We know those people on a first-name basis…
Going to the outler circle, these are the online groups on the Internet, like Reddit, Facebook groups, Twitter... We try not to actively manage those groups. We pretty much step back and give them room, keep it organic and authentic…
The largest circle is everyone, if you are a Notion user then you are a part of the community.“
- Ivan Zhao, co-founder & CEO of Notion shared in his interview about “How Notion is Winning at Enterprise SaaS by Building Community” (2021)
2️⃣ What is Notion’s approach to community building?
Simply put, their approach was decentralized and bottom-up. They empowered users to create communities on the platforms of their choice, rather than forcing them into a single official forum.
“We never had this top-down approach to community that constrained people in a box. Our approach has always been to encourage people to do amazing things with Notion and empower them to share what they’ve built and be a part of this with us.”
- Ben Lang, former Head of Community at Notion shared in his interview with First Round Review.
Notion supported these existing, member-led communities, acting as a central hub (bottom-up: from users to Notion) rather than creating a top-down, company-controlled space (from Notion to users). They further supported these communities with various tools and resources.
“There was something really compelling about these being bottom-up and driven by the community versus coming from like top-down place saying like ‘hey come here, do it the way we want to do it’… It’s been a really interesting kind of model for us in how we approached it.”
- Ben Lang, former Head of Community at Notion shared in his interview with Bettermode.
🧐 Early community programs at Notion
TL;DR: Notion's early community strategy centered on two programs: a Template Gallery showcasing user creations and an Ambassador Program supporting highly engaged users, both designed to drive user growth and education.
The early team at Notion watched what users were naturally doing and spotted two clear trends:
“One thing we’ve done on the community side at Notion pretty consistently is identifying trends within our user base and building on top of that…Templates and ‘superusers’ were two of the earliest things that were clear to us.”
- Ben said in an interview with Review First Round.
They decided to focus on these two areas first, then gradually increased their support as these initiatives grew. This focused approach, starting with just one or two community efforts and scaling up slowly, worked better than trying to do everything at once, Ben said.
✨ Program #1: Template Gallery
Here is the sneak peek of Notion’s template gallery today. Source: Notion.
The idea of the template gallery was to “curate and showcase all the cool things the Notion community is doing with the product”.
For Notion, the template gallery was a game-changing feature, highlighting the product’s versatility and helping new users discover Notion and get started. It was a natural move for the team, as Ben had already been working on a similar project before joining.
“I had been working on a template site before Notion had one, and the team thought it was interesting. So, I worked a lot on our first iteration of the template gallery and how to source community templates and get people to build stuff on Notion.”
“One of the most interesting things we saw early on was how people were creating cool things on Notion and sharing them with their followers and friends. It wasn’t a place to do that on our website and something we were providing, so the first very logical project was building a template gallary where people could submit things they were creating with Notion.”
- Ben shared some of his early on projects via the webinar about community-led growth with Bettermode.
Where did the templates come from?
“We put in some templates ourselves, but actually it's creators and members of our community who are putting in these templates and monetizing”
👉 Can we do the same as Notion? How do I figure out which template to put out?
Yeah, I had this question while doing intensive research for this deep dive since nobody seemed to touch on this question specifically.
It turned out, that the Notion team had an effective way to map out the content based on personas and key use cases that you can apply to create these assets yourself.
”…we literally created a matrix with our personas across the top, and the use cases down the right. In each cell, we created a piece of content that would be relevant to both. So, for example: content about how to set up a wiki for designers, how to project manage for designers, how to use Notion docs for designers. It's been really productive to have this kind of guidance - not just for written content but also the video tutorials we've been creating and how we've organized information on our website. We'll expand the use cases and personas we create content for over time, of course, but it's been helpful to have these beachhead concepts in mind to start.”
A sneak peek of the community-organized events at Notion. This was the Notion Meetup in Seoul, Korea. Source: Ben Lang.
To “help Notion users meet up around the world”, Notion supported two types of events: those organized by Notion themselves and those organized by the community.
Community-organized events proved particularly successful, as users demonstrated a strong desire to connect both online and offline. These gatherings allowed users to explore different Notion use cases, network with like-minded individuals, and learn how to effectively integrate Notion into their daily routines.
“We kind of provided funding to folks who wanted to do this, and we were able to scale that to a point of where we saw meetups happening in almost everyday in different cities.”
- Ben Lang, former Head of Community at Notion shared in his interview with Bettermode.
They also tested out organizing their own events but this is what they pivoted away from.
“We realized it was much more powerful for the community to go run and organize these (events) on their own.”
- Ben Lang, former Head of Community at Notion shared in his interview with Bettermode.
✨ Program #3: Community-organized groups (or the member-led communities) → The Outer Circle of the Notion Community
Notion Community today acts like a central hub to point out the exact community resources for anything a Notion user needs. Source: Notion website.
The idea of these groups was to “let Notion users connect wherever they are, and however they want.”
Notion intentionally went down this route.
“Instead of creating our own hub where everyone in the community could interact and is the only place to go, we allowed people to go on and create their own communities… There are actually dozens of groups in different languages, interests, different countries, cities and they are all moderated and run by people in the community. We don’t actually run and moderate any of them.”
- Ben Lang, former Head of Community at Notion shared in his interview with Bettermode.
This hands-off approach worked amazingly well. Today, Notion has fan communities in over 50 languages, spread across Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, Clubhouse, and more.
✨ Program #4: Notion Pros (Superusers of Notion) later called Ambassador Program → The Inner Circle of the Notion Community
Notion saw some ‘super fans’ on social media, and “these were folks early on who we noticed were organizing a meetup, writing a book about Notion, or starting a Youtube channel about Notion”, Ben said.
The idea of the Ambassador program was to “bring these super vocal people on social media together to connect.”
“The initial base of Ambassador Program back in 2019 were just 20 people, and they were those who we happened to see the most vocal all across Twitter, and a couple of other social media platforms, because they had that shared quality of wanting to be vocal and expressive about their experience”
1️⃣ Connect with people who truly loved the product, getting to know them on a personal level—their interests, passions, and what they cared about.
Initially, “What he (Ben) did was he reached out to them, and he actually created an early Ambassador community on a scrappy Slack channel, and he had them share what they love about the product, what they were doing and how they were driving people to engage with them.”
Here’s a glimpse of that early Slack channel setup, shared by the Notion team on Youtube.
2️⃣ Understand what they were creating with Notion, how the product fit into their goals and what could they be doing to support them to do more.
The key to a successful Ambassador program is ensuring it’s not just about benefiting Notion as a company, but about aligning the company’s goals with the ambassadors’ goals. As the team dug deeper, they discovered Ambassadors were typically doing one of two things:
Building a platform to share their voice with the world.
Building a business and trying to monetize it.
“We would actually have channels inside of our Slack instance for the ambassadors that had these areas of focus based on what people really were passionate about or wanted to do and they were like a force multiplying flywheel for each other.”
→ The goal was to make these ambassadors feel really special, together with the Notion team, knowing how appreciative the Notion team is and feel genuinely supported in their efforts, empowering them to keep contributing and achieve even more.
That’s why the Notion team came up with perks and appreciation for being in the program.
“We created our own kind of space for them to connect, we hosted events for them to meet folks on our team, we hosted events for them to meet each other, we were sending appreciative videos, showing love from the Notion team.”
- Ben Lang, former Head of Community at Notion shared in his interview with Bettermode.
“…making sure there were enough incentives built in… Giving them preview of the features was so motivating to them, giving us feedback and feeling heard by our product team… And of course the things you would expect around subsidizing the events, making sure people feel really supported by us throughout the events and then also, promoting their works.”
Notion perks fully listed on their website. Source: Notion.
Later, Ben revealed these ambassadors were the ones who ended up starting almost all of these: (1) community-organized groups, (2) hosting events, and (3) creating amazing templates.
1️⃣ Each community-organized group is moderated by ambassadors, a risk that has proven highly successful.
To ensure these communities remain positive and informative, Notion:
Provides a strong Code of Conduct and Notion’s Brand Usage Guidelines.
Offers best practice guidance, recommendations, and dedicated support teams for moderators
Lists all official communities on their Community Page to ensure easy access for new and interested members.
Today, the Ambassador Program has become a well-structured program with full-on details on their website.
The program is highly selective, with a long waitlist as it only accepts 20 new Ambassadors every other month. Notion prioritizes proven community leaders, ensuring ambassadors have already demonstrated their influence within online spaces. Once selected to join, they continue to nurture and expand their own community hubs, which ultimately benefits Notion.
2️⃣ Each week, community members host online and in-person events ranging from introductory sessions for new users to deep dives into complex topics.
“Community Events” are all the events being hosted.
“City Events” are local gatherings hosted by Notion Ambassadors.
“Campus Events” are university events hosted by Notion Campus Leaders.
🚀 Coming up next week or more: How Notion built a $10B empire: The Community Everywhere playbook (P2) - “Scaling up at Notion with community programs”?
Sneak peek 👀
Community-organized groups
Ambassadors
Monetization & Certification → Kick off Consultant Community
Community page
Kick-off conferences
Kick-off Champion community
Kick-off Influencers/Creators
I wanted to fit these all into one essay, but Substack kept warning me about my email being too long. Ouch! 🥺
Let me know if you want me to continue writing the Part 2!
If you like what you are seeing with the deep dive so far, please share ♥️ Send this newsletter to others who are interested in nurturing a thriving community around your product.
Why?
Challenges always feel easier with friends (we’ve got 66 folks and counting!)
The more subscribers, questions and upvotes we get, the more targeted and helpful I can make this content. So please share this newsletter—it helps me create even more relevant insights for you!
I got so into reading that I almost went to work late 😂 Every word is on point, well-crafted, and the storytelling is great. This deep dive into Notion is super helpful for anyone working on a go-to-market strategy. Looking forward to more and more amazing newsletters like this! Big thanks to Sailee for sharing! 🙌
I got so into reading that I almost went to work late 😂 Every word is on point, well-crafted, and the storytelling is great. This deep dive into Notion is super helpful for anyone working on a go-to-market strategy. Looking forward to more and more amazing newsletters like this! Big thanks to Sailee for sharing! 🙌
What's the best golden nugget you found in this essay?