How Notion Built a $10B Company by Systematizing Community Growth
A case study in transforming organic user behavior into strategic growth mechanisms
Near collapse and the move to Japan
In summer 2015, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last found themselves coding eighteen hours daily in a cramped Kyoto apartment. Months earlier, they had been Silicon Valley founders with angel funding and a small team in San Francisco. Now they were two sleep-deprived engineers eating instant noodles while watching their dreams collapse.
Notion crashed constantly, built on a suboptimal tech stack that made it unusable. Angel investment was dwindling. They had fired their entire four-person team and sublet their San Francisco office. “If you looked at the burn rate, we all would’ve died together,” Ivan recalls. “It wasn’t much of a choice.”
The move to Kyoto wasn’t romantic—it was survival. Neither founder spoke Japanese, and they chose the city because rent was half San Francisco’s cost and traditional houses were larger than Tokyo’s “tiny shoe boxes.” In their isolated bubble, disconnected from Silicon Valley’s hype machine, something profound happened: they stopped building what they thought the world wanted and started listening to what it actually needed.
This wasn’t just product iteration—it was philosophical transformation from builder-centric to user-centric design, establishing the foundation for everything that followed.
Rebuilding from first principles
The original Notion had been a no-code app-building tool, reflecting Ivan’s belief that everyone wanted to create applications. But he had fundamentally misread the market: “Most people don’t want to build their own apps,” he would later realize. “They simply want something that solves their problems quickly and efficiently.”
In Kyoto, Ivan spent upwards of eighteen hours daily in Figma, “designing frenetically and barely sleeping, pumping out version after version” of Notion 1.0, according to the Figma blog. This wasn’t random iteration—it was systematic exploration of “permutations,” creating the same user flow repeatedly with slight alterations until finding the optimal choice for each feature.
This obsessive attention to design permutations established a crucial principle: every element of user experience should be intentionally crafted, not intuitively guessed. It was disciplined creativity—structure constraining and guiding innovation rather than limiting it.
When they launched Notion 1.0 in March 2016, it featured Notion’s iconic black-and-not-quite-white aesthetic and came with “more than 30 document templates for things like product roadmaps,” according to Sequoia Capital. Those thirty templates seemed minor. They would prove to be the cornerstone of a billion-dollar growth engine.
Users start sharing templates organically
What happened next reveals a fundamental truth about sustainable growth: the most powerful mechanisms often emerge organically before systematic amplification.
Notion’s team noticed something unexpected: users would create templates because they loved the product, then get excited about their adaptations and share them with friends, family, colleagues, and social media connections, according to Mercury’s analysis.
Communities sprouted everywhere—“Slack groups, Discord servers, Facebook Groups, a Subreddit, email lists, and in-person communities that centered around Notion and its use cases.” So quickly that “in a lot of cases, the Notion team didn’t even know about the communities that were cropping up,” according to Mercury’s report.
This presented a classic startup dilemma: how do you systematize something that works precisely because it’s organic? The answer lay not in control, but in amplification through structured support.
Formalizing community strategy
In 2018, Notion hired Camille Ricketts as Head of Marketing, according to Mercury’s analysis, and one of her first moves was bringing on Ben Lang as Head of Community—himself a Notion superfan who had built a website for sharing templates and launched his own Facebook group. This wasn’t just hiring; it was formalizing community-led growth strategy.
Ben’s approach was to “foster and facilitate the organic projects taking place within Notion’s online communities” by identifying “themes that were naturally occurring in these online communities and converted them into well-executed strategies,” according to Bettermode’s report. The first major initiative was the template gallery.
Ben had “noticed early on that users were creating templates for Notion’s online workspace and sharing them with their peers. Notion identified this collaborative trend and offered its support by creating a template gallery,” according to Bettermode’s analysis.
This wasn’t just content repository—it became the core of a sophisticated viral mechanism.
How templates became a growth engine
The template system created “Notion’s growth loop”: “Users can submit new templates and use existing templates from a big library available on many public platforms,” according to Productify’s analysis.
The mechanics were elegantly simple but strategically profound:
Discovery: Users would first sign up to Notion “because they discovered a template that solves their pain point,” according to Productify
Exploration: “The more users explore templates, the more they explore Notion’s features,” notes the same analysis
Creation: As users became sophisticated, they customized existing templates or created new ones
Sharing: “By allowing people to share their creations with the world, Notion has created an entire marketplace outside of Notion for these templates,” according to How They Grow
Templates became so valuable that “Notion stores are the most tagged in Gumroad for ‘Business & Money’"—users were building businesses around Notion templates, creating an ecosystem where the product’s success directly enabled user monetization, according to How They Grow.
This wasn’t just user-generated content; it was user-generated value creating compound network effects.
Building the ambassador program
Template success led to formalizing Notion’s Ambassador Programme, where Ben “prioritized geography and a fan’s knowledge and passion for the platform when appointing ambassadors.” Crucially, “the decision was made to not remunerate and to create a vetting process that looked for examples of community building expertise,” according to Michelle Goodall’s analysis.
These ambassadors were “doing substantial work: moderating comments, troubleshooting other community members’ issues and questions.” In return, “Notion incentivized these power users with early access to features and direct communication with the product and executive teams,” according to Mercury’s report.
But the program went deeper than perks. “They also provided ambassadors with resources and funding to build their own platforms through in-person and virtual events.” Notion helped these ambassadors “create online courses teaching Notion, which, in turn, spreads the word about Notion and brings more users,” according to Mercury and HackerNoon.
The result was a distributed growth machine: “Notion Vietnam has 200k+ members. r/Notion, started by ambassadors now has 300k+ members, and those ambassadors still manage this subreddit,” according to HackerNoon.
Documentation as growth infrastructure
While templates and community captured attention, Notion’s systematic approach to documentation provided the infrastructure enabling everything else. “Notion produces lots of documentation. This is great for SEO and helping prospective users decide whether or not Notion is a good fit for them,” according to Dru Riley’s analysis.
But their documentation strategy transcended traditional help content. They understood that comprehensive documentation enabled users to become power users faster, accelerating their journey from consumers to creators to community contributors.
New hires at Notion are “expected to review the permutations Ivan and Simon explored during their 2015 rebuild” because “they need to see how we came up with the way we think about things,” according to the Figma blog. This systematic approach to preserving and transferring knowledge became central to scaling their community program.
Results and scale
The results were extraordinary. Notion achieved “95% organic traffic” while they “hit 1 million users with just their seed round of funding and only 18 people on the team,” according to Productify and How They Grow. By 2023, they had “over 30 million users globally, with approximately 4 million paying subscribers,” according to The Growth Elements.
More remarkable was maintaining momentum: “Sales doesn’t engage until after we already have paying users,” and “the majority of its sales pipeline comes from product qualified leads” where “the whole step of becoming a paid user is really owned by the community,” according to Community Inc’s analysis.
Even enterprise sales benefited from community-driven awareness: “It wasn’t a rare occurrence for us to hear from folks who are C-suite or VP-level executives that they heard about Notion from their kid,” according to Community Inc.
Strategic principles behind the success
Notion’s success wasn’t accidental—it emerged from recognizing and systematizing interconnected principles that demonstrate how structured thinking can amplify organic community dynamics.
User-Generated Value Creation: Rather than collecting user-generated content, they created systems where user contributions generated value for both contributor and community. Templates weren’t just shared—they became businesses.
Community Everywhere Strategy: Instead of building “a big forum… or something else where people are chatting away all day long,” they “allowed people to go and create their own,” adopting a decentralized approach, according to Community Inc.
Documentation as Growth Infrastructure: Comprehensive documentation wasn’t just support—it was user enablement accelerating the journey from consumer to creator.
Strategic Patience: “Don’t expect a community to have an instant impact on your metric, and don’t attach ROIs with communities. Notion does not have a direct measurable KPI to see its community’s effectiveness,” according to HackerNoon’s analysis. They optimized for long-term compound effects rather than immediate attribution.
Product-Community Flywheel: “Notion still remains a Product-led growth company but having a healthy community multiplies and accelerates product-led growth,” according to Productify.
Lessons for other companies
Notion’s transformation from failing startup to $10 billion company reveals how organic user behavior can be systematically amplified without destruction. Their approach demonstrates that sustainable growth mechanisms emerge when companies create frameworks for users to generate value for each other, rather than generating all value internally.
Templates weren’t just features—they were growth infrastructure. Community wasn’t just marketing—it was a value creation system. Documentation wasn’t just support—it was user enablement architecture.
The lesson isn’t copying Notion’s tactics, but understanding their framework: identify organic user behaviors creating mutual value, then build systematic infrastructure to amplify those behaviors without constraining them.
True mastery in growth, like any creative discipline, emerges not from rejecting frameworks but from understanding them deeply enough to innovate strategically. Notion’s billion-dollar template engine proves that the most compelling growth stories often emerge at the intersection of systematic thinking and organic community dynamics—where disciplined structure meets genuine user insight.