Notion

“And the one that I found to be the most instructive was net new visitors to the notion website. So month over month, how many new people who had never been there before were motivated enough to come and actually learn about the product.”

“Probably like mid-twenty-twenty-one, we heard of one creator who had made like 35,000 dollars in four months selling one template. And that was a very common story then from that point forward.”

“In terms of how I think about what it actually is, it's when your community helps you achieve such ubiquity and such name recognition that it actually allows you to start moving up market into the enterprise.”

“David Pierce, who I think is one of the best working journalists in tech today. He's at the verge now. He was covering personal tech for the wall street journal early on at notion and published a story that said, this is the one work life productivity app that…”

“I think if we look at a lot of the companies that have been just wildly successful from the start, they're people who have pushed off maybe monetizing every little thing. If it's going to really put a damper on that type of enthusiasm and momentum that people …”

“So you end up with Facebook groups that have, I think Notion in Vietnam has like, 250,000 or the subreddit, which I now know has like, 210,000 people in the Notion subreddit. And those are all run and moderated by community members who just love running their …”

“So there actually is an application process for joining the ambassadors. It's a very light application process, and it really is just so that we know how many people are interested in this. And then they're inducted around. I think it was at the time it was 20…”

“If you grow to something like, you know, oh, we have 5000 ambassadors, which feels like really good to say, like on a website. The conversation is actually very muted. I think because people feel like they're speaking to an auditorium whenever they say anythin…”

“It was so interesting to us how giving them the preview of features was so motivating to them and being able to use them and then give us feedback and feel really heard by the product team.”

“Like I think that community lends itself particularly well if you have something that your product creates that people want to share because it exhibits something about themselves.”

“The initial base of the ambassadors program, which started back in 2019, Was just 20 people and they were the 20 people who we happened to see be the most vocal already across Twitter and a couple of other social media platforms”

“I think that one of the biggest mistakes you can make on social media is giving yourself a quota that you have to hit and say, like, I have to say X number of scintillating things every week on these platforms. We've just seen so much more traction, even from …”

“And he says that they're back up to 30 in-person events a month around the world.”

“Like so many companies now of many sizes are relying on the consultants that first came up through our community. And some of those consultants are now employing dozens of other people.”

“Basically all these feeds information land in our data warehouse, which is BigQuery. And from there, they're pushed out via a reverse CTL tool we use called Census to Slack and Notion.”

“I was chatting with the founder of Notion for the series I'm working on, and Notion didn't hire their first salesperson until they were past ten million ARR.”

“In my Notion deep dive on how Notion builds product, one of the interview answers was just like, we should have hired product managers earlier.”

“At Character, at our VC fund, we Had a conversation and decided we're going to try to have our main communication happen in notion so that if we're talking about something, it's in a form, it becomes a document, and the expectation of how you react and respond…”

“I think notion, I think at ten million ARRs when they hired their first salesperson.”

“This is not what I do, but I think it's the easiest place to start. Spin up a Google doc or a notion page, just call it daily log and then bullet point out like the date of today. And then as you're going through your day, you have a meeting, just type in the …”

“I call it product scrapbooking where I have this like massive notion database of every opportunity, big or small that's ever come up. And when a, like a piece of evidence, you know, out in the world comes in, it could be like a support ticket or like a CSM sen…”

“If you're building the Lego inside Notion in the code base or product, the system work for you. If you're building non-legal way, the system works against you. So in some sense, we're creating a tool that has an emergent behavior. You need to channel in that e…”

“At that time, Notion was five people. We lay off, I brought it back to me and Simon, two people.”

“That's why we're also working on an email product right now.”

“The majority of people, they wake up, they have report due, they need to get their job done. They don't care creating software to optimize whatever they're doing. They don't care.”

“We have this internal notion called talent density, right? Which we're not, we don't try to track number of people, but we try to track how talent dense revenue per employee we are, and people want to work with other more talented people. So it's a positive co…”

“The bus, the smaller the bus is easier to turn corners, easier to accelerate, easier to maneuver. The bigger the bus it is, it just, like, bigger the boat, bigger the bus, slow down. And as a leader in the company, you decide who sit around you on the bus seat…”

“My mom helped me, well, actually, my mom helped me kickstart a company, because I'm Canadian. In order to move to U.S., you need to, like, register a company. So my mom helped you with the initial, and they raised the money, and I sort of returned the money to…”

“So now we're looking at, holy shit, we spent the last five, six years building all those Lego blocks for knowledge work. If we're just putting it, AI coding agent on top of it, you can have any kind of knowledge, customer software, customer agent for whatever …”

“For the longest time, where Notion runs on one instance of Postgres database, and then we find the beefiest machine, we keep scrolling, find a beefier, beefier machine to scale our user base. But then we were running off the, even the largest instance there is…”

“I think the good advantage is if a customer use Notion, they can address those three, four use cases in one place, especially for our startup mid-market companies, their need for each of the vertical use cases is not as complex.”

“Before react wins, there's a competing technology called web component from Google. And it makes sense. Web component feels like a Lego like the building block like, and we're betting on that technology. And then we realized, because it's so new, it's just so …”

“You can create progress through better abstractions, and that thing compounds faster. It can catch up to all the things you build much quicker than you ever thought, right? Or humans are not thinking, not good at thinking in terms of abstraction or the exponen…”

“I made three or four websites and realized, oh, actually people don't know how to create with the software media, computing media. So that got me to want to create a product like Notion today, which is a lot more people to create tools, create software for the…”

“Only hardcore Lego fans care about Lego bricks. Most people care about Lego boxes. And they actually want the Lego box to be ready-made when you on package box, the set is there for you.”

“If you create this thing called a product or business, you attract people are value aligned to it. Then if you're trying to optimize too much on this competition, revenue side of things forced to introducing something entire value. Then you, the system, it's l…”

“Notions ethos probably more like a east coast rather than west coast. So somewhere in between, right? It's more direct.”

“Too much of yourself, then there's no users. You're just doing our project. You're just doing a research project, right? And it's too much for business. You're building a commodity, right?”

“It's the over overhead is actually more from internal communication, right? It's really hard to get people's mind to be aligned on things to see the world in the same way. And the part that you do need people, maybe you can solve better through systems or bett…”

“This is really helpful. If we create product, at least a horizontal product, because you're trying to channel the energy, use smaller parts to create something that the sum is much larger than its parts.”

“It never hit me, hit us as like a binary state. It just kind of like, oh, Good. We have people who care about this thing we make now. Oh, good. People are reach out to us or paying us. And it's a kind of very gradual ramp.”

“Software, and especially tech, it's just every six months, every 12 months cycle, they don't, we don't think enough about create something that lasts. I care creating something that's, at least the form factor lasts longer than half 18 months.”

“Yeah, we did not intend to build CRM, but what is a CRM? It's a relational database. That's why we give people that break. That's a relational database and they can build CRM themselves.”

“And we call it sugar called broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar. So give them the sugar, hide the broccoli inside of it.”

“People in our community can create a living selling Notion template, Notion apps, that they're not a software engineer, right?”

“Half our B to B customers coming from prior personal users. And a lot, most of them use Notion for notes and docs in the first place.”

“Which is a real time communication mechanism that powers, for example, every time you use Notion, I think you interviewed Ivan, when Notion is to broadcast messages in real time to other collaborators, they use a real time engine that I built for Socket.io.”

“For instance, Twitter for us, hasn't been that impactful. And I think for, Tools like notion. They've been really, really impactful.”

“The takeaway lesson is that every company succeeds on the foundations of the idiosyncrasies of the founder. The idiosyncrasies of the founder. Rippling succeeds for almost the polar opposite reasons that notion succeeds. But in both cases, the companies succee…”

“Don't build it yourself. You're not Vercel. You don't have a full-time wicked awesome engineer that wants to build this. Could all this stuff be built yourself? It's the same idea of building your own notion. You could do it, but don't do it. It's these produc…”

“We're doing performance reviews right now, and it's actually really easy to use ChatGPT with internal knowledge, hooked up to GitHub and like our Notion docs and Google docs. To give a, get a really good sense of what this person has done over the last 12, 12 …”

“All agents are also like, if you look at all the harnesses, whether it's the open source ones or the ones from the model companies ours as well they all resemble a coding agent now.”

“Which essentially is, I mean, the static image of a chat is basically the dead fish here. You have to feel the AI. To some degree.”

“I think there's a real danger in sort of making the token spend the metric to like boast about, which is the same as when people boast about how many lines of code they've written in a day.”

“The week that we were going to get a term sheet from True Ventures, Notion pivoted from website building to document collaboration, and so True Ventures was like, hey, sorry, we have a conflict, and we're like, yep, no, no worries.”

“And I generally encourage them to not use the GUIs. And I encourage them to use the tweets because I just know that over time they're going to be curious and like pull at other threads. And one day they wake up and they're like, Oh, I understand more of the su…”

“I do suspect in six to 12 months from now, a lot of companies are going to actually start asking questions around RRI, and I think that will be an uncomfortable conversation for a lot of folks.”

“On one hand, I do see like sort of a drop in usage of Figma in some designers at Notion.”

“The first version of the Notion editor was terrible. Like there was like no, it was all blocks. You couldn't even select between two blocks, but it turns out it didn't matter. And so I think that is like just working diligently on the wrong thing for way too l…”

“At least on the writing side, every time there is an intervention, a human intervention, it should feel a little bit like a bug.”

“Now we have the same designers and PMs also just contributing to the production code base to a lesser degree, of course, but like you can see where the trend is headed”

“Notion is dabbling in it as well. I use dabbling right now, but obviously at some point we might become more serious about it.”

“And I think memory is sort of in the shape where we've had a lot of people and a lot of people at other companies too are like, well, I set up an obsidian base or a notion area and I tell it how to basically build my mind palace and how to put, it's like, eh, …”

“I do that one too. That one's actually a very useful thing to do is you download grok bots for one of your bots. Mine is like a QA tester bot. And that way, if there's ever Bug report, or if we're kind of testing out a new build for example, example of the des…”