Welcome to the 9th edition of GrowthDeck! If you enjoy reading deep dives like this, please share it with your friends or colleagues who would appreciate it. Now, let's dive in!

There’d be hardly any person in the SaaS world who has never heard of Notion.

Can you imagine a work collaboration software that started as a side project, today has around 30 million users, and is valued at over $10b?

This is exactly what Ivan Zhao, Simon Last, And the team at Notion have pulled off within a decade. Today’s issue is all bout Notion’s Journey, the ups, the downs, and some amazing growth drivers that the founders used to scale Notion.

The story of Notion's meteoric rise is a testament to visionary thinking, strategic execution, and an unwavering commitment to user-centric innovation. There is a lot that can be learned from this issue that you as a founder can implement while building your SaaS.

It all began in 2013 when Ivan Zhao conceived the idea for Notion while constructing a one-page portfolio website. He grew frustrated with the limited tools available to effectively manage his work. Ivan left his position at Iinking that same year. In 2013, they secured seed funding and embarked on the journey to build an all-in-one tool named Notion.

Through iterative efforts, they diligently advanced the product; however, positive indicators were elusive. In 2015, Notion confronted a grave crisis as founders Ivan and Simon grappled with financial challenges and frequent program crashes. They came to the realization that they were promoting a product they personally enjoyed, rather than one that truly met customer needs. Recognizing the need for a dramatic shift, they took bold steps: downsizing the team, relocating to Kyoto, Japan, and Ivan even secured a $150,000 loan from his mother to continue this venture.

After coding for nearly 18 hours a day while living in Kyoto, they unveiled Notion 1.0 in March 2016. From that point onward, their trajectory has been consistently upward.

Now that we know the entire story of Notion, let’s dive into some growth drivers that propelled Notion’s growth.

The majority of Notion’s growth is from Word of Mouth (WOM). From the beginning itself, they significantly emphasized making a community around the product and getting the users.

Today Notion’s subreddit has around 297k subscribers. And it has significantly helped them in acquiring users. Today, there are nearly 20 posts per day on the Notions subreddit and the number of new users joining the community is increasing day by day. These new users could be their new customers, existing customers who find out about their features.

Apart from Reddit, Notion had some outstanding programs/methods to engage with the community.

Notion excels in allowing people to demonstrate creative abilities, develop templates, and even monetize their work. This strategy attracts both creative hobbyists and prospective entrepreneurs, resulting in a dynamic environment.

This gives rise to the IKEA effect (a phenomenon of cognitive bias where consumers place a higher value on products that they have partially built themselves, rather than on products that are already pre-assembled).

To help communities grow on their own, they started something called the Notion Template Gallery in April 2019. People could put their templates there, and others could use them either for free or by paying. This made a big difference and lots of people quickly began sharing their templates. Then, in May 2021, they launched their APIs, and after that, the number of products made using Notion just went way up.

In order to further improve community-led growth and increase its reach, Notion introduced the Ambassador program (Previously known as Notion Pro). Notion ambassadors are people passionate about Notion and are willing to teach it and share content. This not only helps to get more awareness among users but also helps them onboard new users.

Once they started their Ambassador program, about 400 people signed up quickly. But to make it easier to handle, they made the group a bit smaller. Now, Notion has a big community program that brought in a lot of new users.

All in all, Notion has aced it when it comes to community-led growth. Here are a few things that we can learn from Notion.

Notion has a template gallery that functions like a marketplace for users to trade their templates. This turned out to be quite successful, leading users to begin selling and sharing their templates on r/notion. Some even began creating newsletters solely discussing various types of Notion templates. This approach helped them gain significant attention and engagement.

As people share more templates on platforms like Reddit, Slack, and Facebook, more folks are getting to know about Notion. People who already use Notion are also discovering new ways to connect their work and routines with it. This helps Notion grow in terms of getting new users, keeping current users engaged, and getting them to tell others about it. It's a great way for Notion to keep growing.

Here is how the whole loop works:

When you have a complicated app that can do many things, it's important to make it fit each user's needs. If you don't make it easier, users might feel confused and give up. Notion understood this and cleverly fixed it with their smart onboarding technique.

When you sign up, Notion takes you through a friendly quiz. It's about getting to know your goals. Imagine you're Emily, setting up a Notion workspace for your Foundation marketing team. You tell Notion you're working with a team, and voila! The magic begins.

First, you'll create your workspace and set the team size. Then, you pick your department. Next stop: inviting your team (a golden chance for referral growth). Now, you're all set to explore. And guess what? Notion serves up templates that match your needs. Since you're the marketing whiz, you get templates like Brand Assets, Meeting Notes, and more – stuff that keeps you hooked.

Here's the genius part. If you'd said, "I'm a lone ranger using Notion on my phone," your journey and templates would be different. This smart customization makes sure you're excited and ready to roll from the get-go.

Ivan himself being from a design background emphasized heavily on the good UI of the product. He would repeatedly recreate a design, making small changes here and there—like swapping an image or adding a different line of text.

Ivan explains, "Our main idea is to try out many different variations. If it feels good, which you can improve by studying fonts and successful companies, you can keep making different versions until you find the best one."

Even now, Notion continues using this method to make decisions. Designers, writers, engineers, and even the in-house illustrator create multiple versions of their work.

The important thing is to stay flexible, create rough drafts, consider big ideas (even if they're not great), and let out as many concepts as possible. Then, ask your teammates to test them thoroughly. Eventually, you'll narrow down the options to the best one. Ivan believes this approach is why Notion's brand stands out so much.

Ivan is a strong believer in Preserving knowledge and utilizing it for further use.

Here is a picture from their internal Figma dashboard:

According to Ivan preserving knowledge is necessary because people can see older versions of the same page and can actually learn how the design evolved over time and can prevent the same mistakes again.

Notion has undeniably risen as an exceptional company that adeptly addressed multiple challenges and achieved remarkable heights. There is a lot that can be said about this outstanding journey. But for now, we will wrap up this article.

That’s all for today. This edition took us about 20 hours of effort. If you think your friends or colleagues would like this, please share this link with them. Thanks for reading and don’t be shy to leave a comment if you have any. Also, please consider following us on Twitter (Keval Jagani, Meet Shukla) and sharing this blog post.