"Fast forward a couple thousand millennia — and along with the progress of more interesting tourist attractions, the way we keep track of (and work with) information has progressed significantly — from pen and paper, to the typewriter, the filing cabinet, and now all the different productivity and documentation tools we have available — tools that make it easier for us to keep notes and track things in our personal lives, as well as to collaborate on stuff at work."

"Undocumented, unreliable."

"Documented, reliable, but fragmented."

"However, a defining feature of this phase, which is where the world is today, is that all these tools, by and large, (1) serve one main function each, (2) are unbundled, and (3) are pretty defined in how they are used."

"Bundled, highly personalized."

"While many people are happy in phase 2 — Ivan Zhao and Simon Last have bet big on two things; (1) many people are not, and (2) people love playing with LEGO."

"But, it’s $10 billion and growing valuation comes from that fact that it is equally a collaborative tool — allowing teams to build knowledge bases and wikis, share documents, take notes, manage workflows, and essentially be a powerful sandbox where they can build any systems they need without having to code or connect dozens of tools."

"Like many great startup ideas, the original kernel that set things in motion came from Ivan Zhao setting out to solve a problem for himself."

"With his background in programming, he wanted to build a tool that would allow all these creative folks — who had the vision and idea for what they wanted, but just lacked the programming abilities — to get out there and build a self-expressive portfolio for themselves."

"“We focused too much on what we wanted to bring to the world. We needed to pay attention to what the world wanted from us.”"

"And people were just not interested in a no-code programming application."

"That’s a really important takeaway — you need a wedge into your market. A specific problem and use case that is real and relatable to the people you want using your product, one that is stupid simple to explain."

"A key issue was that they had built their app on a suboptimal tech stack, and it was crashing constantly. Their seed cash was burning with no revenue to replenish it, and they arrived at a hard choice many founders find themselves facing — start over, or run out of cash."

"they hit 1 million users with just their seed round of funding and only 18 people on the team, they delayed taking on VC money while Silicon Valley was knocking and their user base and devoted community exploded, they grew rapidly to their current $10 billion valuation, and through their domino approach to breaking into large companies — are now selling enterprise software through TikTok."

"It’s okay to copy. Ivan Zhao said on an AMA forum, “Our guiding light has always being history. To be honest nothing is new in Notion. We copied everything from earlier systems.”"

"Have a big vision, but find your Trojan horse. A big and inspiring vision is what get’s people to quit their job, get paid nothing, and go to Tokyo with you."

"Find a wedge — a specific problem and use case that is real and relatable to the people you want using your product, one that is stupid simple to explain."

"Be versatile. This can mean many things — but essentially, have strong convictions, but loosely held."

"Know when to take peoples money."

"But generally, there’s a lot to be said for creating scarcity for yourself in the VC market, and taking on money to scale when you have something that’s in a healthy position to have fuel thrown onto it."

"Do whatever it takes to survive. Hustle, be creative, and have grit and perseverance."

"key differentiator to their strategy is how they grow horizontally by marketing to a large base of people, segmenting their audiences, and leaning heavily into their flexibility, and the power of community."

"Here, your product powers every stage of your funnel - from helping users onboard, to discovering value, and then upgrading."

"The benefits here are fewer touches are needed by your team to sell, lower customer acquisition cost (CAC), quicker sales cycle, and you can better predict sales figures."

"This includes companies like Slack, Datadog, GitHub, and Coda."

"Notion started out by going after the market segment of consumers (B2C) and SMBs (B2B with <100 employees) and going after the people in those SMBs with a combination of a bottom-up and community-led approach. And then got them to be users and customers through product-led growth."

"As they have grown and built a huge and engaged community — they have continued to lean into product-led growth as their core growth strategy, but have also built out a sales-assisted model for bigger enterprise clients that their community actively contributes to."

"Notion is coming for Google’s lunch. They are bundling the use-cases from the spreadsheet and packaging them with an easier UI and UX."

"This means that Notion spans across many audiences and markets, and now not only do most SaaS companies still need to compete with the spreadsheet and each other, but they’re also competing with Notion."

"Notion is multiplying its user base year-over-year with, relative to other channels, no paid advertising."

"“ One way to maximize user commitment is by getting them to invest time and effort in learning the ins and outs of the tool at hand. Most enterprise (or even consumer) software has a learning curve. The more you learn how to use the software, the more utility you can extract out of it.”"

"Notion is selling a feature-packed product with so many levels of utility by incrementally moving people along that value curve."

"If a user was thrown straight into the full power of Notion right at layer 4, some people would get it, many would be lost and leave."

"Notion calls out the competitors that it’s replacing with no shame. These are tools that are all familiar and well positioned in the minds of their audience of consumers or SMBs."

"now you’re piggy backing on that to quickly help people get what you do, and then explain your differentiator."

"because you’re instead saying “We’re replacing X”. This is a bolder statement, sure, but it’s far more useful because people don’t have to perform any mental gymnastics to figure out what you do."

"Overpromising and underdelivering = unhappy user = churn and a leaky bucket."

"So, if this is a strategy you use, pick the companies that choose to compare your product to with consideration."

"Notion has been the clear winner in this space — and one key reason was that they bundled use-cases that were valuable even if you were the only person using it."

"This is called single-player mode — and it’s an exceptionally valuable strategy for subscription-based products focusing on B2B customers."

"This single-player strategy within a B2B product makes it much easier to follow a bottom-up approach to selling to companies."

"This single-player support for their bottom-up strategy is why they can sell to big companies through TikTok — because technically, they’re not. They’re selling to you and me, everyday people who work at companies, that then initiate a domino effect into the rest of the company."

"Notion know’s that, and a key way Notion has removed barriers to entry and helped make the decision to give Notion a go that much easier — is that they have made it very clear that they “place nice” with other tools via integrations."

"Now we’re in the sign-up process…and to continue helping new users “get it” and not be overwhelmed by everything — they use a personalization strategy."

"This, in short, ensures they send people down the most relevant and useful path within the product. It means people are seeing what they want to see."

"This activation step is where Notion’s most powerful feature comes into play — templates."

"When Notion launched, they had 30 templates that their own team produced."

"These templates made it easy for new users to discover Notion without having to do any work (i.e build) and learn about how it works. From here, as people played around more, they started moving along that value stack — until they reached layer 4 and started making their own."

"Because of this, there are far more templates covering way more use-cases than would have been possible if only Notion created them — building them a massive template gallery. And people love to make money and be seen adding value — so they are also motivated to share them."

"This is free growth driven by word-of-mouth. As more templates are shared in Slack’s, Discord’s, YouTube’s, Reddit’s, Facebook groups, Tweets, etc etc — more eyeballs are seeing Notion in a relevant light."

"This means (1) more people are coming in through templates, and (2) people who already use Notion are finding new ways to add to their existing workspaces and customize further. That’s a winning growth lever across acquisition, activation, retention and referral."

"Call out your competition. Creating a direct comparison point helps you explain your product to people much quicker, and is a handy way to help with a positioning problem. Be bold, creative and edgy here — people love a bit of banter."

"In a guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter, David Spinks gives a few examples of what member contribution looks like — and Notion has all of this going for them"

"A few Twitter enthusiasts loved talking about Notion."

"In a conversation with Forget The Funnel, Camille explained how they launched the program with a simple landing page — immediately getting 400 applications."

"With these fans, they wanted to really embrace them and and make them feel more connected to Notion — making them feel like members, and not customers. A large part of this was driven by both founders being extremely hands on with them."

"They hosted meetups where Ivan and Simon answered questions and spoke to them as peers. They gave them access to funds if they wanted to throw events. They gave them early access to features. Some swag was in there too."

"And, critically, they asked for their feedback on how to build a better product — helping them learn about their needs and motivations. This created a customer-advisory board essentially, bringing the voice of the customer deeply into Notion."

"When you build something that people really want, people will talk about it."

"It’s not hard to see how community has become a flywheel for growth — helping drive customer acquisition, activation, and retention. And for product-led companies like Notion, community-led growth “acts as a multiplier on top of product-led growth,” says Corinne Marie Riley, an investor at Greylock. It creates a “flywheel of active members strengthening the community.”"

"[First] Remember to align your interest with the goals of your community, remember and understand what is it that they want to do and go with them on that journey and really think about, and be close to the personal goals of those early, early adopters."

"[Second] Build in those distribution networks to drive enthusiasm and inspiration, and that community will give back as well."

"[Third] Empower your community to serve your customers. You don’t need to monetize it if your community is being the consultant or your community is selling the template."

"[Fourth] don’t try to own or regulate your community engagement"

"[Fifth] is stay scrappy. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. Experiment, lean in, try things. If they don’t work, that’s okay."

"[Finally], be grateful to the community. It’s really amazing when people spend the time to get deep into the product, to fall in love with the product and then decide to turn out to the world and tell your story for you” ”"

"First — it’s pretty typical to see B2B companies throw money into paid channels — a diminishing returns approach that burns cash."

"Second — SaaS startups are usually just obsessed with numbers like churn, conversions, and sign-ups. But, Notion has taken a more strategic approach in addressing this concern."

"They removed the pressure to grow to a certain number and did what any growth-stage company should do – they focused on the quality of their content and making it a platform a smaller audience loved."

"If your product solve a real problem and you find the right early adopters (pre-requisites for being able to grow) — look out for where these people are talking."

"Make it easy and rewarding for people to contribute. Create opportunities for your existing customers to share the systems, processes and workflows they’re using successfully with others in the community. If possible, do that in a way where people can make money."