The community-led framework that scaled Notion into a $10 billion brand
The writing-behind-the-brand
Happy Sunday 👋,
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If you’re not a paid subscriber, here’s what you missed this week:
I spent the last 6 hours delving into the internet archives and found the original ProductHunt launch of Notion.
Since then, Notion has gone from zero to a $10 billion valuation (yes, billion, with a ‘b’). So I unpacked the early days of their startup story to see what happened and what you can learn from it.
Let’s go👇
Last week I wrote ‘without a good origin story, you’re toast’, which I believe to be true. But maybe not for the reasons you think. You see your origin story is important for your customers, especially in markets where the goods are visually very similar. It’s an easy differentiator that builds trust and connection with your audience.
But in some markets, like tech for example, an origin story is less important. For software, we don’t really see the same ‘origin stories’ we see elsewhere. When it comes to software, potential customers have different expectations—they have a problem they want solved and the question: can your software solve it?
Ivan Zhao started Notion with his co-founders back in 2013. He was the only guy in his friendship group that had an interest in art and a background in coding. So, he started building websites for his artist friends. This is an important differentiation and a great starting point. If you’re friends are asking you for a thing — it’s likely other people want it as well.
Ivan had a deep belief that everyone can be a creator, you just need a platform to make it happen, and so the idea of Notion was born.
❌ Build for you and what you want