Winning at Enterprise through Community Building with Notion CEO Ivan Zhao

Thanks everybody for being here today. I'm so excited to welcome you to this session. It's myself and Ivan, co-founder and CEO of Notion broadcasting live from his office, which is a very rare sight in these pandemic days. I'm super excited to be here over the next 40 minutes or so and talk about winning at enterprise by building community. Hi Ivan, how are you?

Well, thank you for having me today.

My pleasure. So I know the last time we were hanging out virtually was for a diversity and inclusion workshop that I was running for you and the team. And that was awesome. I also had the chance to run the same workshop for a lot of your Community Champions. And I'm just really excited to hear about what you've been working on since I last saw you. So how about we just jump straight into this?

Sounds good. That was about, yeah, 8 months ago, 6 months ago.

Yeah, 8 months ago. So I know both your community and your team have grown so much since then. So for folks who are at home, just so you know, we're going to cover like a few topics today. We're going to talk about Notion and, you know, enterprise. Then we're going to move on to talking about building community. And then we want to talk a bit more about how community is fueling enterprise growth. And then finally, Ivan's going to share what the future has in store. So yeah, let's start off. My first question regarding, you know, Notion is how do you actually describe Notion and tell us how it's a useful team, a useful tool for teams and companies?

There's a lot of ways to describe it, and the best way we describe it, it's all-in-one collaboration tool. So imagine if you're running a team or company, you probably use a lot of different tools to get work done every day, something from notes, documents, to wiki, to a project management tool. And Notion can put all those use cases in one product. So customer primarily use us for two reasons. First is this consolidation of tools. So to give you one example, we have a customer, Meta Lab, it's a design agency. They replaced about 11 tools with Notion, right? So their employee have fewer places to look for their documents and to-do lists. And the other reason is the, like in the video in the earlier, which you saw, is the flexibility, right? In order for us to replace all those tools, Notion has to be very flexible. It's kind of like Lego for productivity. So with Notion, you can have your task board right inside your document and customize however you want. So our philosophy is that software should mold into how your, how your team works, not the other way around.

I love that idea of software molding to how your team works. I use Notion in a bunch of my personal projects and company projects, and I think what people forget is tools can be so simple and so seamless. I think we kind of have a bit of a legacy of clunky things like Google Docs and otherwise, but Notion just is fun and easy to use. So yeah, I really, really hear you on that.

It has to be fun. LEGO is fun. So the software, we should try to make it more fun.

Yeah, exactly. And I love that analogy with LEGO because it's both useful and playful. And, you know, I think about that with Notion all the time, like such small things. You know, the first thing that I noticed, I remember the first time I used it was just being able to like embed a bookmark and then like actually have like an image image take you to a webpage instead of just like a standard hyperlink of text. Little things like that, being able to like pick different header images adds so much delight to the product. Um, let's keep talking a bit more about Notion and enterprise. What have been some of your most successful efforts when it comes to building an enterprise audience and an enterprise pipeline of customers?

So we talk about enterprise. Um, Well, I think one thing that's not obvious to a lot of people, uh, it's, uh, Notion is not just only an enterprise B2B company, but we're also a B2C company. Like, our business model is B2B SaaS, right? But our sales motion, it's a lot similar to a consumer-like company like Dropbox. There's a lot of B2C elements to it, right? People fall in love with Notion for personal notes, for to-dos, and if they find us helpful, they take us to work. right? And we have seen many companies adopt Notion wall-to-wall this way. For example, Square is a recent new customer of ours, and initially they're just, you know, a few people use Notion internally or themselves. Then there's a few small teams. Now there's nearly 1,000 people run on Notion every day. So this B2C and plus B2B motion give us a lot of the sales efficiency. And, uh, but in order for us to pull off this motion, we have to have a strong consumer brand, right? Not just a business brand. Like, we care a lot about design and the font, like you mentioned. Uh, we care a lot about our voice and tone on social media. And, and then to give you another example, like a couple months ago, TikTok discovered Notion. There's a lot of teenagers, they just make their Notion workspace for their study notes and showcase them on TikTok. And we didn't expect this at all, right? They're probably not going to become enterprise customer anytime soon, maybe in 5 years, you know, but it's a good thing for us. Keep the brand young and keep the product nice.

Yeah, I think one of the things that I noticed very early on about Notion, just building on that, is that people that were using it in their personal lives were obsessed with it. It really just got this kind of cult-like following. I feel like as soon as, um, you know, friends started using in their projects or in their early-stage startups, all I ever heard was Notion, Notion, Notion. All I ever got sent were Notion links. And I was like, what is this tool that everyone keeps talking about? And that's certainly how I got into it. But then I became one of those like accidental Notion evangelists because suddenly I'd be sending everyone everything through a Notion link and I'd be building everything on Notion, planning a friend's holiday. And I love this idea that maybe a lot of software entrepreneurs overlook. When you have a B2C angle, in addition to your B2B angle, you're actually getting getting a lot of those B2B leads from your happy B2C consumers, right?

Yeah, very much so. Like, one philosophy we have, it's, uh, every person works somewhere has to be a personal user, every personal user works somewhere, right? So people have this double life of B2C, B2B in their identity. So probably not the TikTok teams, but most knowledge workers have to keep their notes somewhere in their personal life too.

So that's amazing. And I think it must be a testament to how beautifully designed and well-executed the product is that so many people have brought it into their workplaces, talk so much about it that finally their work is like, okay, let's take a look.

Keep the consumer great usability.

Absolutely. I love that. Keep the consumer usability great. Amazing. So I'd love to move on to our second topic. This is all about building community. You know, you and I are both super passionate about community. This is kind of how we first connected all those months ago. Building community has always been a really, really huge emphasis at Notion. So please tell us, what does this look like today and what do you refer to when you say community?

Yeah, it's a, it's a pretty tricky word. I think it can mean a lot of different things to many different people. Internally, we roughly think about community as 3 concentric circles. And so at the very center of it, there's about 100-ish people around 20 countries in the world, what we consider the most passionate Notion users, and we call them Notion ambassadors, right? They know how to use the product inside out. They create YouTube videos, online courses, or even help translate the product into their local languages. Before COVID they set up meetup in their local cities, right? That's the most inner circle. And we know those people on their first name basis. So if you extend a little bit beyond, going to the second circle, these are the online community, the one on internet, like the Reddit, the Facebook group, the Twitters. I think we probably have one of the largest Reddit for SaaS product with about 100,000 members. And yeah, we try not to actively manage those groups. We're very much step back and give them room and keep it organic and authentic. So that's the second circle, the online groups. I would say internally our philosophy, it's the largest circle is everyone. If you are a Notion user, then you're part of the community, right? To give you one story. So when we just started the support, customer support team, it was actually called the community support team. Because that's our philosophy. That's how we see them. Our users are part of community. In the very early days, I, I work on all the support tickets myself, and we're learning so much from those early users, and they help us refine the product. And give you one really heartwarming story. It's like when we officially launched the 1.0 on Product Hunt, which is another online community itself, I remember many of those users that we talk with Through support, they come to leave a comment, they come to upvote the product. I know, and it's— they help us to become one of the most fastest voted product on Product Hunt at that time. So the idea is everybody who— if you use Notion actively, then you're part of the community. Really stuck with me after that. So those are the three circles how we define community at Notion.

Yeah, that's incredible. And it's funny that you mentioned Product Hunt because I used to work with Ryan and the team and You know, we definitely have a similar approach. You know, we didn't really think about customers, we didn't really think about customers of Product Hunt, we thought about community members of Product Hunt, people interacting in different ways. And I think there's a great philosophy in that, you know, this idea that, of course, you're going to have your early adopters, like you mentioned, that first concentric circle, the people planning events and talking about it. But, you know, there are a lot of folks who you probably haven't had the chance to connect with one-to-one, but are still very much, you know, a part of the mission and a part of what you're thinking about.

Like every forum, every community has the active engaged people and for creating content, or those are the lurkers and in a good way, right? So they read the people think and maybe they give a thumb up and we need to engage with all of them.

Incredible. So I'm sure there are a lot of founders who are thinking, how does he get 100,000 people talking about his product on Reddit without even trying? So let's ask, you know, what are the keys to building a community that thrives like this? You know, you've talked about some things that you have actively focused on, other things that have just happened organically. What do you think accounts for the growth and impact of your community at Notion?

Yeah, actually we don't, it's very organic, like the word you mentioned. It wasn't trying, we didn't engineer this and I think if some things that allow, help it to become a large community, first is like going back to the Lego idea. The product has to be able to enable the flexibility so people can create their own things and showcase that, right? So that's on the product side. I think on the, on the people side, on the community side, it's, uh, we always want to make sure that, um, our, uh, the community's interest, the members' interest aligns— our interest aligns with the members' interests, right? That's a big one. So you cannot just build a community that's just about helping yourself, right? You really have to understand what motivates the people who spend time engaged in your product, like what are at the core of those folks, right? Many of our community members, they are creators in their heart, right? They're just like the Lego builders. They build, they design, they share the templates, the inspirations, and they show on Twitter, on Reddit. Right? And, uh, or they can even make a business off Notion. So for example, we heard many community members selling their Notion templates on Etsy, and some of them even can make $30,000 in a month. So the incentives are really aligned there, right? Another part is, um, you also need to nurture the community. So, uh, we have full— two full-time employees. I believe you met Ben.

Yes, Ben's awesome. Ben Lang.

Ben and Francisco. Those are very experienced and incredible community builders, and they know their job is to coordinate with the community members, the Notion ambassadors. They spend a lot of time on Zoom talking with everyone, listen to their feedback, incorporating their feedback back in the product. And one of them is based in Europe, the other is based in San Francisco. So, but they still have to wake up at all hours sometimes because our community members are around the world. So, uh, to make sure I have all like time zone covered. So the product has to enable it. The incentive has to be aligned. Then we have to nurture it. We have to put in the work to taking the feedback and listen and work with everyone.

I think it's absolutely incredible for you to talk about how you are aligning the incentives of Notion, the product, the mission, the investments, the resources to what your community needs. And I think one very real life example of that, that we also like haven't shared yet is what what happened last summer with like Black Lives Matter and this conversation coming into tech and people in your community saying, I want to know more about how we can make our community more representative and inclusive. And that's how we literally ended up connecting in the first place, right? And your team came in and we would like troubleshoot all these different scenarios and worked through new solutions and next best steps. And I know that you invested in that, not just for your team, but also for your champions, right? These extensions of your team, the active people using your product out in different regions of the world. In their communities. And I just wanted to share that because I think it shows how the impact a company can make, you know, goes beyond just the changes they make to the product, but to the actual real needs of the people driving their community forward, which I thought was awesome. And I wanted to talk a bit about people building with Notion and selling templates because I was actually in a Clubhouse room earlier today with Frances of the Notion Bar, one of your champions. And she was telling me that her business is exploding. She's running it as a side hustle and she came into my office hours to ask for advice on how to respond to the scaling demand. She now has so many people asking her to build her custom Notion templates for her. And, you know, that's just one person who I know because she's here in London where I am as well. But, you know, there are going to be so many more out there. And then the final thing I kind of wanted to touch on there You were talking about the value of listening to your community. You know, it's not just about building the community. So you have that volume that you can look on. It's about actually then listening to the things that they do. And, you know, when I think of brands that leverage Brandwatch, you know, my other job, they're using our platform to listen to their community, whether it's, you know, BBC looking at what people are saying about TV shows online so that they can develop new storylines, or whether it's food companies looking at, you know, the upcoming trends so that they can develop new products. People are leveraging the value of community by acknowledging a community isn't just a standalone thing that just sits there waiting for you to access it. It's living and breathing, right? And you can listen to it.

Very much so. Yeah. Internet enables all those people with like-minded, either using Notion as a product or like other brands to be connected together, right? It's, it's worth to listen and understand. They're essentially your customers.

Absolutely. I'm glad we could share some cool stories to inspire folks. Let's move on to how community is fueling enterprise growth. I know there are going to be a lot of folks getting their pens out to take some notes here. What are the community efforts most angled at driving enterprise growth?

I think it has to come from our belief, our biggest bet is, that good community drives good business, right? It's, there's direct connection there. And it's one thing that, you know, you hear about Notion, it's good for, it's a good collaboration software from us. It's another thing that you hear from, you know, 10,000 other people rave about it and showcase the best practices. Right. And so far we tried to actively, actively design our enterprise community effort, uh, around two, two angles. The first is what you just mentioned, the Notion consultant community, right? And the people who selling their templates, who can help enterprise or SMB companies set up their Notion workspaces. And many of them make it, even quit their day job and make their entire living just by helping other people use Notion better, right? It's amazing.

Like, this is how awesome—

when we start Notion, we definitely didn't thought about that, that the product we can design, we design, it can be and help other people, uh, have be their livelihood.

So that's the Notion economy.

In other words, maybe we should make our product more streamlined so product can do more. But also the Lego at the same time has the flexibility to let everybody to create their own things, right? So that's first one, the, the Notion consulting community. The second one is a brand new effort which we're starting to experiment, and actually we're trying to figure out a proper name for it. We can call it Notion Champions, where the the Notion People Network. The idea behind that is that in larger, mid-large companies, those are a lot of Notion users that try to bring a product like us into their larger companies. And those are Notion fans themselves. They use Notion personally. But in order to introduce a product like Notion into an enterprise setting, they need to navigate a lot of different things. They need to figure out the best practices, you know, So we're trying to create a workspace environment for those people to talk to and meet each other, right? It's kind of like they all like the product, um, and now they have a place to talk about the thing they like and best practice of bringing Notion to work. We're still slowly realizing how much power is connecting those people and connecting those champions. And, uh, it's a brand new experiment and we're going to report back how it goes in the enterprise setting.

Yeah, that sounds awesome. This idea of giving the people inside enterprises that want to push for progress, push for change, push for innovation, push for greater productivity, almost creating a space for them to speak to other like-minded people so that they can actually strategize, like, hey, how did you actually get buy-in to move forward with this software or move forward with implementing that? Is that the kind of stuff you're talking about?

Yeah, it's kind of like, Imagine you all like this band, but you don't know who else likes this band, right? You know, which club plays this music. And so our job is to create a club, a space for those Notion champions in the enterprise space to meet and to talk to each other and mingle and share the best practices and maybe step out of the way and just see what people do with it, right? And even for some larger companies, There might be multiple Notion people, Notion champion inside a 1,000-people organization and they don't know each other. So we should help them connect and figure, hey, actually you're trying to push Notion to this department or trying to bring Notion to that department. Maybe we should join, have a single Notion workspace. So help all your information to be more connected.

Yeah, that's brilliant. I think that's incredible. And what I like about the lesson in that is that it kind of takes pressure off, you know, people that want to replicate the strategy. It takes the pressure off you having to just always be the person proving the value of your product. You know, it takes so much pressure off your sales team or, you know, your paid marketing, like, instead of actually trying to send that message that your product adds value, you have real people who have that social proof because they're using it, and they've gotten value out of it. And they're already convinced, they're already convinced. And it kind of reminds me of how robotic process automation is being adopted at enterprise level, because usually what happens is, there's, you know, one engineer that sees an opportunity, you know, takes that to their CTO, but their CTO is like, oh, I don't know, it looks expensive, looks time-consuming, I don't know if we can really get into this. But that person's like, I'm going to apply this in my team, in my project, or in this specific way, I'm going to prove that this can add value. And then suddenly, you know, one single use case for robotic process automation builds and builds and builds until you're suddenly getting towards that place where you're an intelligent enterprise. So I feel like this is definitely, yeah, an effective strategy for growth at enterprise level.

Yeah, going back to the earlier point, we talked about connecting the consumer B2C energy with the B2B energy, right? If many people on the consumer level, they know the value of a product and they know the product works on enterprise level, we should connect the channel, that energy, into— figure out how can they help them to channel energy into their workspace.

Brilliant. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. So I've got another question about community and enterprise growth. What impact do you think this has made among enterprise buyers, you know, who may not be your typical community members? And can you tell us a bit about how you measure or monitor this?

Measure— measuring is hard. And to be honest, we still trying to figure this out, how to precisely measuring this. But you sort of know it's there. Like to give you one example, like, you know, we just— Notion is very international. Majority of our user base and customer is actually outside United States, but our sales team is largely US-based at the moment. We're just starting a European sales team. But on the Europe side and Asia side, majority of the customer come in, if you would ask them, hey, how you hear about Notion? And, you know, Why do you want to buy us? And those are coming from the community, like word-of-mouth efforts that they heard about us from either from someone on social media, on Reddit, on Twitter, or even could be their, you know, one of our kids using Notion through TikTok, right? Those word-of-mouth really bring in Notion. And so, hey, actually it's a great enterprise team tool. And it's one thing to hear Notion is great for you from us. It's another thing to hear from 10,000 other people. Going back to the point again. So to be honest, we're still trying to figure out how to precisely measure this, but from qualitative word of mouth sense, it happens all the time and we're just very grateful for it.

That's incredible. The best growth engine is the referral growth engine. Honestly, it's the best because it's so authentic, it's so real, and it shows— yeah, it's just so validating, isn't it? It's so validating of the product that you've built and also the incredible community support folks that you've got on your team, knowing that people are discovering your product, you know, because people that they care about are recommending it to them must feel pretty good.

Yeah, we're— it feels good, but we need to make the product better. There's a lot of ways we can improve on both on the product side and on how we interact and incorporate feedback from the community, right?

Amazing. Yeah, I love that. I love that acknowledgement that it's always work in progress and there's always a way to be better for the customers. So let's talk a bit more about, you know, our enterprise customers or buyers interested in Notion. What are these enterprise buyers looking for from a community experience?

Yeah, we're still slowly learning about this, but I think the biggest learning lesson so far is they don't have a lot of time. They're buyers. They're not playing. They're less about playing with Legos and trying to figure out what to do. They have a problem in their mind to start with. Right, they're looking for specific solutions rather than just play with Notion for fun. So we want— our strategy here is to make it super easy for them to get involved with the community and find out what they need without as— with as little effort as possible. So for example, we use Slack for our community's communication because that's already part of the enterprise buyer's workflow, right? They don't need to learn another tool to communicate with us, communicate with the rest of communities. And we have channels with very well-defined purposes, like one for product feedback and one for sharing templates and inspiration and best practices, right? And yeah, fundamentally we see those enterprise customers want a community for the same reason that they want to use a new product, right? To solve a problem, to save time, to kill a pain, or get ahead. So it's very important for us to keep that in mind when designing experience for them, right? To get them what they need and get out of the way as quickly as possible.

What I love from that is this focus on designing an experience that works for the enterprise person. You know, you talked about the fact that they are time poor, and you talked about the fact that they've already got a stack, a setup. They're in Slack, they're with their emails, they're doing their thing. So for you to think about what community could look like for them, which is work in progress, as you say, you're optimizing for what is going to be that most frictionless thing.

Yeah. And another big difference is they have a problem in their mind, right? And, and they, they know their pain point, they're looking for a solution. And Notion, by the fact that the Lego-like, very flexible, we probably have one of their solutions. We just need to do the matchmaking as quickly as possible or get them to the people who knows the solution, the consultants earlier we talked about, as quickly as possible.

Yeah, that's incredible. And I love that idea of connecting the dots because this is something we've been thinking about at Brandwatch. You know, we're growing our community team and we're thinking there are a lot of folks who are the person in their team responsible for leveraging this product. They're, they're responsible for getting that consumer intelligence and then cascading that back towards the team. But in many cases, that person could actually be like isolated within their organization. They don't necessarily have other people optimizing for that task or that activity. So just like you, we're also thinking about where are these opportunities to create space for them to meet with other people trying to do the same thing? And how can we facilitate them getting that information as quickly as possible so they can keep excelling at their job.

Exactly, yeah. Going back to the, the champion, create the dance floor for people to mingle and find with the same pain point, they can share their knowledge, right?

That's awesome. And have people been receptive to Slack and everything that you've offered so far to support these connections and support this knowledge sharing?

Very much so, uh, actually, uh, Camille, uh, our head of marketing, and Ben and Francisco, they just posting out a lot of, a few Slack messages, Twitter, Slack messages earlier this week. So, hey, are you the Notion people inside your company? We'd love to provide a space for you to mingle and talk, right? And so far almost 1,000 people replied and just in the last couple of days, we're really surprised by this. Well, while we're still experimenting this, providing a dance floor for this Notion champion inside enterprise.

No, that's amazing. That's so cool. It's kind of like, yeah, I guess it shows that people were really waiting for that invitation or waiting for that opportunity. And that's so actionable for other SaaS founders in the room. You know, people are probably on various stages of their community building journey. Maybe they're still really early. Maybe they've already got a community, but they haven't worked out how to engage them. This example that you just shared, Camille and Ben literally And Francisco just put a call out. They were like, hey, are you out there? Let's talk. And that invitation is now creating that next step of then, I guess, bringing everyone together.

Very much so. Yeah.

Amazing. Yeah. So, so many great tips and so much great advice there. Before we move away from this topic, I just would love, you know, how have you been able to kind of, um, I guess just, yeah, like get that momentum going for ideas like that to come out of your team? Do you know what I mean? Like, you know, where does that come from? Are you just trying to make sure there's enough space for people to be experimental and try new things?

Trying new things is definitely important, and but also just observing what people do in the wild, right? It's like observing what's happening on Reddit, happening on Twitter. People are talking. Yes, we try to group people together, but there's a lot of organic motion and create a Then once you observe the motion and create, productize a little bit and processize this thing a little bit. For example, we're working on the next generation, our template gallery. And a lot of those templates are coming from the community members themselves. And that's just one effort to, you know, see what's happening in the wild and make it better and expose it to more people.

Yeah, I love that. I'm so glad you shared that example because, you know, I still don't think we say enough how much makers, founders, leaders get just from listening to their community. There's so much value in that. Even if I think of, you know, Hustle Crew, like my company where we're focused on diversity in tech, sometimes a workshop will come about just because I see people in our community talking about something on LinkedIn and suddenly a post about, I don't know, like struggling to work on bias in recruitment will get really viral and suddenly everyone's posting about it and suddenly everyone's sharing about it. And so I'll just go back to the to the team and say, hey, should we do a webinar on bias in recruitment? Like, people seem to be talking about this. We'll put a webinar up, hundreds of people will sign up. And I'm like, oh, okay, great. I'm really glad I was paying attention. And I think we forget that just being able to listen and observe and then action what we see and hear from our community can actually help us really, like, level up our product roadmap.

Yeah, very much so. It's kind of like To give you one concrete example, like early days Notion, like one feature that a lot of people like about Notion is you, for each page, you can create an icon and page cover to it, right?

Yes.

And the icon, well, actually it's come more a community-driven feature. Like we noticed a lot of people added emoji page icon in their page titles before we have the feature baked in. And so, oh, after that, why don't we just Add the feature in the first class, as a first class feature, so people can with one click add emoji to their page. So people easier to remember what page is, make it more fun, going back to the Lego idea. That's very much from observing the early adopter, the community member, how they use the product and productize their feedback into the product itself.

That's incredible. And I'm so glad that you did that because that is actually one of my favorite features in Notion. And I can't tell you how many minutes I've spent deliberating what image I should choose and what icon I should choose. Cause I feel like it says everything. It's like, I want to send the right message. I want to make the right impact. And it's so nice to have that personalization feature. Yeah.

It helps you remember things better too, especially in a team setting. You have thousands or hundreds of different pages. Oh, you remember that page with the mushroom icon or that page with the diamond? No, helps.

I love that. Yeah. I didn't even think about that. It's kind of like next level tags. Awesome. Well, I know we could talk about community all day, but you know, we're running out of time. So I'd love to talk about, you know, the future, what's going to happen next. So my first question is, what more are you excited to do with the community to extend your success with enterprise customers?

Yeah, a couple of things we talked about so far already is this Notion Champion, Notion People community to bring the users and enterprise together. And we're also, like I mentioned, we're also working the new template gallery to showcase community creation. Another thing actually we're releasing sometimes next month, it's our developer community. Yeah, we're launching the API out of private beta next month, and so far there are about 500-600 people in the private beta building on top of Notion already. There's like 20,000-30,000 people on the waiting list and the email list. And it's quite amazing. So they have their own community on the site besides our consulting community and the enterprise community. And it's quite amazing to see what they're building on top of Notion already. And I can't wait for the public launch next month.

Wow, that's awesome. Notion API, that's so cool. And yeah, I mean, just as an individual, I'm getting excited about all the things. That are going to happen with that. And, and I think it's great that you're, you're willing to do that. You know, we have like a bunch of tech companies that have done really well going down the API route because they've been willing to, like you said, put the community first and listen to the needs and bring people in and, and respond to that. And we have some companies that have been very open about how they haven't done the API, you know, path very well. I'm thinking specifically about Twitter, who are going to be relaunching their API this year. You know, they kind of put put their hands up and said, we made too many changes. And, you know, our community's products broke because we then didn't tell them about the changes and we weren't really like keeping up with it. So they're kind of coming back round this year and kind of going, okay, we need to like put the developers first and actually make sure we're supporting them and listening to them and not breaking things that then break all the hard work that they've put into their product.

Yes, tricky. A good thing that all those early beta testers in our developer program give us their essential designer roadmap for the next, you know, 6 months, a year, for what we should do with API. And hopefully we don't break their API, the thing that built on top of us once we go out of beta.

That's incredible. Wow. I mean, yeah, that's gonna be really, really exciting. So, so cool. Um, so kind of Still thinking about the future, I wonder, are there any last learnings that other community builders or enterprises out there in the audience can take away?

I would say that a big one is definitely that don't root out community just because you think that's not right for your business, right? And going back to our earlier philosophy that if you have a user base, you pretty much have a community already, right? You— people use your product for a reason, either to solve a common pain point or it provides a common fun activity for people, right? And so there, as long as there's a common ground, then there's community, right? So you just figure out where they hang out, where— what the community is. Um, maybe to start with, no, it could be as simple as starting a user group and just collecting early customer feedback or beta testing early features. And listen to them, invite them to a Slack group and maybe get them to talk to each other. It's also worth to start small and get to know a core group of people really, really well, then figure out what's the next step. I think at the end of the day, community is just— this is all about humans fundamentally and human needs a lot of care. Again, like we talk about, you really got to listen and care about what they say and nurture that. It definitely has some work, a lot of work involved. It's not easy, but it's also really rewarding.

Yeah. I love that. When you were talking just then, I was kind of reminded of that Paul Graham essay, "Do Things That Don't Scale." And you know, you said it's important to start small and remember that your community is made up of humans and each human has their own needs and their own cares, and you need to show that care. And I think one of the reasons why a lot of folks maybe shy away from investing in community is because at the beginning, it is about doing those things that don't scale, and people might feel like it's not worth their time, or it's not worth their resources. But, you know, we're here today to say, hey, it absolutely is.

Yeah, you have to listen to just like Paul Graham, the YC school, you really have to listen to your customer and to build a product. Community is the same thing. I would say the only difference is community is they talk to each other, right? And just, you get them to talk to each other and observe the pattern rather than you talk to them one-on-one.

Yeah, that's incredible. So you're absolutely right. That philosophy of community and the value of community isn't just about what you as a business owner can learn, but it's also what you learn from hearing the community interact with each other.

Very much so.

That's awesome. So I know we have some top takeaways that you want to share with the audience today. If we can just get onto the next slide, I would love for you to, yeah, maybe just like recap these learnings because a lot of folks are here to learn about community building from you, the co-founder of Notion. So yeah, help us share those takeaways. Maybe I'll kind of kick off and then you can kind of just like expand a bit. So we've got 3 kind of top takeaways and this is absolutely what's sort of, you know, worked for Notion. So this is how you can invest in community to drive enterprise. The first one is don't take ubiquity for granted. Every touchpoint matters. Do you want to expand on that a bit, Ivan? I know you've talked about it already, but just expand on it a bit more.

Yeah, like going back to the point I just talked about, behind every feedback and behind every support ticket, it's a human using your product and care about about your product, right? And fundamentally, if you have a business or not depends on do you provide value for those people, and whether those people on Twitter, through your support, or on Reddit, listen to them, you know, because one people support a ticket for you, that could means 100 or 10,000 people with the same problem. So really listen to every single one of them.

Yeah, I love that. And, you know, I'm really touched by that remark you made earlier of kind of you know, going through the support tickets, you know, seeing every incoming message as a community member sharing a piece of important information with you. You know, that's what we're talking about when we say every touchpoint matters. You know, don't be afraid to like go through all your social channels and, you know, go through the DMs, see what your users are saying, you know, jump into your support channel, Intercom, whatever that looks like, see what folks are saying, Don't put one channel, you know, at a higher value over the other. Like, just be willing to like really get into the trenches and see firsthand what folks are saying.

Yeah, very much so.

Awesome. So let's move on to our second top takeaway: enable storytelling. You know, we saw an incredible example of that at the start of this fireside chat, you know, with that amazing video that you shared all about you and the story and the product. But yeah, you have learned that storytelling helps you appeal to enterprise.

Yeah, like a story, it ties people together, right? Give them a purpose, a common ground to talk about something. And for us, you can say Notion's Lego for productivity. That's one story to help those community members or users to pitch Notion and bring them into their workspace. Then like, hey, say, what is Notion for? Why is Notion good? I say it's really flexible. You can reduce all your many of tool, combine them into one. And so give them the case studies, you know, give them a good positioning and help them empower them to tell the same story that you want to tell directly to their managers, to their buyers inside their company. That's our marketing's job at Notion and brand's job as well, you know.

That's incredibly valuable advice. What I loved most about what you said was empower them to tell a story to the buyers inside their company. And I think sometimes we forget that, right? Like we forget that they're within an enterprise, especially so many decision makers in a chain before someone makes that call to give budget to invest in a new software product or a new tool. Even if you have someone, you know, in your community, let's say, who's really active and supportive and evangelizing it, they've got to go back to their boss. And that's where what you're saying comes in, building these case studies, making it as easy as possible for someone in your community to tell the story of why this product will be great to their boss. That's what works. And that's what helps them.

Yeah. And they're super busy. They're the buyers. So make this, make the story very precise and crisp and the value proposition super clear. Clear.

Yeah, I love that idea. That's definitely something that we do at Hustle Crew as well, where we can just say, hey, this is why people book our workshops. This was the problem. This was the value. This is what happened. Literally 3 short bullet-pointed paragraphs. And it works. It really works. And you said it best. People love stories. And I feel like even in that book Sapiens, they talk about the power of stories. He's like, people are literally connected through story. Like civilizations are built through stories. So yeah, if you're not using storytelling, start doing it. All right. So let's go on to this third and final takeaway. Always add value. I know you've spoken about this a lot, but it seems like the perfect note to kind of end on. Align your goals, your company's goals with the community's.

Yeah. Going back to incentive, right? People do things. For reasons and you need to figure out what motivates them, whether it's for fun. Notion's Lego, it's really fun to use it and fun to share what you created, or you can make a living out of selling Notion templates or being a Notion consultant. And, you know, yeah, align this and trying to don't take value away from the community just because you can, because like it's the community members, they make your product what you are. And, uh, and it's at the end of the day, it's really heartwarming and help the ecosystem to see people can make a living out of the product, the system you built. And, uh, it's— I'm very proud of and very grateful for, you know, um, the ecosystem, the community we have for Notion based on this.

Yeah, that's incredible. And one of the things that's really remarkable about Notion is it almost feels like there are no, like, barriers or boundaries between all these different groups of people that you're talking about. You know, you talked about those three three concentric circles originally within the community, like the super active folks that were actually like running events before the pandemic to teach people about Notion. You know, you talked about the team, you talked about every single person that interacts with the product, and it feels like you've been able to just seamlessly connect the dots between all of these individuals. And just as the company has grown and moved forward, kept their perspectives very much a part of the internal conversations.

Yeah, we have a saying that from TikTok teams to enterprise teams, we welcome all, right? Because the product is very flexible, and we want it to be very useful, flexible to as many people as possible.

So that's incredible. Amazing. Thanks, Ivan. I've learned so much from you today. It's been like a real honor to basically have your toolkit opened up so I can learn more about community building and learn more about how you're leveraging community to grow at enterprise level. I'm sure everyone in the audience has learned a lot today as well. So let's wrap up here. Well, with a thank you, and hopefully I'll get to see you again soon.

Thank you for having me today.

Awesome. Chat soon, Ivan, and thanks everyone in the audience. Really appreciate it.