Stepping Back to Move Forward

Early Days

Notion was founded in 2013 in San Fransisco by Ivan Zhao (current CEO), Chris Prucha, Jessica Lam, Simon Last and Toby Schachman. The first public version of Notion, dubbed Notion 1.0, was launched in August 2016. This was followed up by Notion 2.0, a more flexible version, released in March 2018.

Notion started out as a platform to replace multiple productivity apps and empower users to build their own workflows. The founders initially built and shared a prototype with friends and family before launching to a public audience in 2016.

Notion’s first 1,000 users were acquired organically with no paid marketing, focussing on serving a loyal and active fan base who were happy to share the benefits of Notion through social media and various forums, such as Reddit.

Rapid Growth

The pandemic served as a blessing in disguise, as remote work was suddenly the new norm globally, and people sought reliable productivity tools that could also help them collaborate with simplicity, regardless of what operating systems they were using. This helped Notion’s user base to grow from 1 million in 2019 to over 30 million in 2023.

In 2020, Notion was valued at $2 billion, however by 2021, they raised $275 million in funding at a new valuation of $10 billion.

As user growth accelerated, the team at Notion didn’t stand still. They expanded their products to include features such as Notion AI, Notion Calendar and made notable acquisitions (time-based job scheduler Cron, building and automation platform FlowDash and secure email product Skiff) to strengthen their offering.

The integration of such acquisitions is becoming apparent in the platform, for example, I recently noticed that Notion is now offering a unified AI-driven email product, called Notion Email.

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Quality

Notion’s team had the audacity in 2015 to redesign and redevelop their product from the ground up, after coming to the realization that what they built would not be able to achieve the scalability and features required to realize their ambitions. This redevelopment involved extensive cost and time, and may have been seen as a significant step backward.

Their focus on re-establishing the quality of their product, rather than delivering yet another average productivity tool, eventually paid off. There was a marked difference between the look and feel of the revised Notion over their competition, which enabled them to deliver something special and more unique, ultimately allowing them to grow organically at pace.

The Power of Users

Notion capitalised on the advocacy of the user community by seeing feedback, support and enabling their community to inform which product areas the team should focus on.

Whilst this seams like an obvious opportunity to grasp, many competitors have failed to capitalize the opportunity by either paying too little attention to a small group of early adopters whose passion for the product makes their feedback incredibly valuable.

Keep it small

Notion could have expanded the team rapidly but instead decided to keep the team smaller, maintaining a flatter structure within their agile teams for as long as possible. This enabled them to iterate at a high pace and respond to user feedback swiftly.

Their product review meetings where centred around four significant purposes:

• Defining the user problem

• Exploring solutions

• Recommending an approach

• Reviewing before launch

Notion placed a high degree of focus on quality, accompanied by working in two-week sprints and planning their roadmap twice per year. This gave them the benefit of long term planning and short term focussed delivering useful functionality, whilst ensuring they were close to what the community was asking for, building on ideas observed from the behaviours of their users.

Build First

Notion place significant value on their development team and notoriously have only a relatively small number of Product Managers. When new ideas are identified, the teams move promptly into prototyping and designing, rather than taking time with meetings and strategy overhead.

Whilst I’m sure they have a clear product strategy, Notion appear to favour showing a working idea and evolving it, over governance documentation and management overhead.

As companies grow, this way of working can become increasingly challenging, however, Notion still holds this way of working in high regard, even as they expand.

Often, having a founder/leader who is highly invested in their business can help teams to focus on greater speed-to-market and delivery towards a clear vision, compared with companies that may have a career CEO with less emotion attached to the overall success of the company.

Sugar coated Broccoli?

CEO Ivan Zhao has been known to admit the original intent was always for Notion as a creator platform allowing creators to build what they wanted with no coding, however, their first attempt did not garner the interest his team had hoped for. It transpired that selling a creator platform was extremely tough and although it was a useful endeavour, it was likely something that people didn’t even realise they needed.

To address the lack of demand, the Notion team re-established the platform as a productivity tool, without explaining to the audience their full intent to create a platform for creators. This later approach worked, and eventually users who originally adopted Notion for its productivity capabilities, began to realise how powerful it was as a tool for non-technical people to create powerful, useful products.

To this day, Notion competes with project management software, CRMs, website creator tools and more besides, through it’s ability for creators to use their imagination and build useful tools and services. Notion also has a thriving market place, with an estimated 13,400+ creators offering Notion templates and services created by themselves, to solve problems for others.

Zhao calls the idea of presenting users with something they think they want (productivity tool), with something they truly need (no code creator platform), Sugar Coated Broccoli.

Relentless Persistence

Although the first version of Notion did not achieve product-market-fit, the team were confident enough to pivot fast before it was too late. They later reaped the rewards of taking such bold actions.

As a company grows, it can be come harder to make such consequential moves, however there is always an opportunity to make big decisions, which seem counter productive in the short term, but will pay back significantly over the longer term.

Notion’s leadership consciously took a few steps back to redevelop the platform, enabling them to make many steps forward. These moments are where transformational leadership stands out over “safe” leadership.

Thinking Outside your Domain

Zhao’s experience is multifaceted. His skills and education spanned software development, arts and sciences. At university he noticed that his artistic peers really needed software to help them put their creativity into action, but they didn’t have the coding background to do so.

Zhao was the only one in his circle who was both artistic and held the technical expertise to develop such a platform, that could help his peers and other non-technical innovators bring their ideas to life. After identifying this problem, and Zhao’s ability to solve it, the idea of Notion was born.

A similar point of interest that resonated was that in his down time, Zhao also consumes content and literature that are not directly related to software. In doing so he is able to tap into inspiration from other fields, cultures and life in general, enabling him to be inspired with new product ideas and problem solving techniques that help him when building Notion.

This practice highlights the importance of taking a step back to gain a new perspective when stuck on a problem, but also doing something different regularly, such as observing nature, which can not only recharge you mentally, but can also help you to create new ideas that solve seemingly unrelated business challenges.

I’m very interested to know what else you may have learned from Notion’s journey so far? Reply to this post with your thoughts.

References

Notion’s lost years, near collapse during COVID, staying small to move fast, building horizontal

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