A glowing Wall Street Journal review was Notion's first growth inflection
Camille Ricketts · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts · Dec 11, 2022 · at 58:24
Camille Ricketts, former Head of Marketing at Notion, discusses the impact of tier-one press coverage on startup trajectory.
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“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 you'll ever need. And that was notions big break. Like truly, if you look back at the graphs, Like, that made a demonstrable difference”
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“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.”
Early-stage community builders should not prioritize quantitative metrics
“And actually one of my number one recommendations for anybody who suspects the community could be a big growth driver is to not make metrics the be all end all at the very beginning.”
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“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.”
Delaying early monetization protects user enthusiasm and word-of-mouth momentum
“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 …”
Users are more resilient through outages than founders typically think
“There's more resilience built into the system than you might think.”
Net new website visitors is the most instructive brand awareness metric
“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.”