How Notion Built a Community That Sold Its Product for It

Ricketts began as a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, then moved to comms at Tesla, where she sat next to Elon Musk and made sure he had every fact ready for the press. She says the job taught her to be completely on top of the information, and to paint an emotional picture of a mission so that people feel something about it. She later spent about five years at First Round Capital before joining Notion as employee number 11 and its first marketing hire.

She remembers Notion's first office as feeling like a home: an apartment above a loft, shoes off, rugs, tea and couches. The air conditioning was poor, there was no overhead lighting, and one colleague switched on a headlamp as the evenings got darker. Ricketts says those hardships are now the team's favorite memories, and the late nights before big launches are where "our hearts lie".

Her most stressful Notion memory was a massive outage on the first day back from the 2021 holidays, which also took down peer companies. The team scrambled to communicate what was happening and how long the fix would take. Users on Twitter and Reddit were largely kind, with replies like "Give them a break" and "sending hugs", which reinforced for her why community matters. Lenny adds that people come back to an awesome product even after a long outage, and Ricketts agrees there is more resilience in the system than you might expect.

Ricketts says community-led growth has become a buzzy aspiration, so she gives a concrete definition. It is when your community creates so much ubiquity and name recognition that you can begin moving into the enterprise. At Notion, people shared what they had built, and some started businesses around the product. That meant companies had already heard about it through many channels by the time they considered buying, which de-risked Notion as a choice. She sees Figma achieving something similar.

She prefers the word "discovery" to awareness, because discovery means someone has heard enough, or been intrigued enough, to take the step of learning more. The metric she found most instructive was net new visitors to the Notion website, tracked month over month. The brand team, including the people working on community and content, was responsible for bringing in more people who had never been there before.

Attribution was easiest for influencer marketing. Notion sponsored creators across platforms and could see people arriving directly from that content. Some community activity, such as event attendance, could also be reported by community members themselves.

The community efforts that mattered most were the ambassadors, in-person events, and later influencers. Events took off in 2019, paused for 2020 and 2021, and are now back to about 30 a month around the world, according to Notion's head of community, Ben Lang. They helped spread Notion internationally and led to relationships such as the one with Station F in Paris. Ricketts says the aim was to align Notion's goals with those of community members, many of whom started revenue-generating businesses as consultants, course makers or influencers.

When Lenny asks how founders can know such work is worth the investment, Ricketts answers that Ivan Zhao believed in community from the start. Her top recommendation is not to make metrics the be-all and end-all early. Notion saw organic scale tied to community in where it was expanding geographically and in what users said when surveyed, so it did not measure concretely until last year. She says one of the worst things a company can do is cut off organic fervor because it is not yet generating ROI.

Ricketts says community is not the first investment for products with long sales cycles or high price points that need many touchpoints. It is close to a no-brainer for freemium products that have what she calls an atomic unit of sharing, something the product creates that people want to share because it says something about them. At Notion that was templates and personal workspaces. Figma and Canva have the same dynamic, because showing what you made signals that you are organized and skilled.

The template ecosystem became a real economy. Around mid-2021 the team heard of a creator who made $35,000 in four months selling a single template, and Ricketts says that became a common story. Notion supported these creators with guides and with connections between people running similar businesses. Consultants who came up through the community are now relied on by many companies, and some employ dozens of people.

Ambassadors and templates were blended, with Slack channels organized by interest, such as events or templates. Ambassadors are not paid promoters but people who love building with Notion and sharing it. They joined for early access to features and AMAs, but stayed for the friendships and for peers who answered their questions. A separate "champions" community, also on Slack, brought together the most avid users inside customer companies and helped customer success keep adoption on track.

Lenny sums up the approach as finding what is already working and making it more effective, and Ricketts agrees. She adds that Ben Lang's strength was refusing to impose a single design. Early on he spent a great deal of time on one-on-one and small-group Zoom calls asking people why they were there and what would make it better. She advises against arriving with fixed notions of what a community must look like.

On convincing skeptical founders, Ricketts asks them to consider what will serve long-term success more: ubiquity and word of mouth, or revenue now. She points out that many wildly successful companies delayed monetizing every little thing so as not to dampen the enthusiasm people had for sharing the product. Once a large tide of people is excited, there are many more options later. She also says organic growth is worth cracking if you lack the resources for paid growth, and it becomes a buttress for any paid growth later.

Besides Notion, Ricketts points to Figma, which she sees as a sibling company that traded knowledge with Notion, and to Stripe. Stripe Atlas was not core to its product line, but it let Stripe build a community of founders by offering advice and resources for getting started. She suggests that a community does not have to be about your product: it can be about the knowledge or resources your target users need.

She does not think community is right for every company, and warns that people picture a big forum or Slack, when it can take other forms. Ricketts built a two-by-two matrix with axes for pre- or post-product market fit and for enterprise or consumer focus. For a pre-product-market-fit enterprise company, she suggests customer advisory boards: small circles of ideal users, connected to each other and to you, who can grow into your biggest evangelists.

For an enterprise company with product market fit, the emphasis moves to champions and consultants, with Salesforce's ecosystem of outside implementers as the classic example. Notion's own quadrant, product market fit with a consumer lean, is where ambassadors and influencers take off, because vocal individuals spread usage like wildfire. She says she will share the matrix and her "commandments for community builders" for the show notes.

To pick ambassadors, Ricketts says to do what you would do for positioning: look at your best-fit customers as they are, not as you wish they were. The ambassador program that began in 2019 had just 20 people, chosen because they were already the most vocal about Notion on Twitter and other platforms. For incentives, the team offered previews of features and the chance to give feedback to the product team. Founders and the head of engineering joined special conversations, and Notion subsidized members' events and put their creations at the center of its social channels.

Her commandments include not chasing a number early, so that you don't dilute the impact in order to show growth, and making people feel seen and heard. Ben shared monthly community updates at all-hands meetings and on Slack, which inspired everyone in the company. There is a light application process, and members are inducted about 20 at a time each month, so newcomers can be welcomed and introduce themselves. She says that if you grow to, say, 5,000 ambassadors, conversation goes quiet because people feel they are speaking to an auditorium.

Lenny says he saw the same effect with his paid newsletter's Slack community of about 10,000 people, where the paywall acts as a healthy filter. Ricketts adds that Notion also helped members who run their own external communities, such as a Vietnamese Facebook group with around 250,000 members and a subreddit of about 210,000. Notion's own community lives in Slack because the team wanted to be part of people's everyday lives rather than a separate destination.

Lenny credits a First Round Review guest post with giving him his first 500 newsletter subscribers. Ricketts joined First Round in 2013 and says the Review worked because leaders such as Josh Kopelman and Brett Burson gave her runway, and because early interviews landed a few really big names. Those names made it easier to persuade others. It helped First Round get discovered by people in non-traditional geographies and by employees of big companies like Google, Apple and Amazon who were curious about startups.

Her central idea is that you must think about content market fit, just as you think about product market fit. Ask who the audience is, what they need to get promoted or avoid failure, and what causes them anxiety, then build a content product for that. She stresses that painkillers beat vitamins. For the First Round Review, that meant helping operators share failures so others felt less alone. Lenny adds his own four jobs of a newsletter: help people make money, entertain, help them get better at work or life, or inform them. Ricketts adds that there are emotional jobs as well as utilitarian ones.

Quality takes time. Ricketts says a First Round Review piece took about eight hours of writing after prep work, and Lenny puts his median at about 10 hours, with a strong correlation between time spent and how well a post does. A lot of that time went into connecting the dots between interview material and pulling out bigger themes, rather than just reporting what a person said. She says getting to know your audience to an almost excessive degree is the heart of her content market fit questionnaire.

Asked whether founders can skip PR now that they can go direct, Ricketts says she is a big believer in comms, and not only because she was a journalist. Few megaphones reach such a breadth of people with a stamp of credibility. She supports owned media and expects influencers to shift how we discover products, but she says a good relationship with the press still pays off.

As an example, she cites David Pierce, then at the Wall Street Journal, whose early story calling Notion the one work-life productivity app you'll ever need was its "big break" and visibly moved the graphs. At First Round she saw portfolio companies with stories that conveyed their mission attract more candidates, investors and customers. She adds that Product Hunt was another big channel for Notion, through its launches, Notion 2.0, major product launches, recently Notion AI, and the many templates posted there.

On founders posting on social media, Ricketts says it comes down to personality and authenticity, and that the biggest mistake is setting a quota of things to say each week. Even Notion's main accounts saw more traction when they were more reserved and waited until they had something of value to say.