Rachel Hepworth
Former CMO at Notion, now marketing and growth advisor
Where to hear and read about Rachel Hepworth1 episode or test
Rachel Hepworth is the former CMO of Notion, who joined in 2020 and helped scale it 10x to more than 100 million users, after earlier marketing roles at Slack and LinkedIn. The most useful lesson from her is to prepare a community early so it teaches users what a flexible product is for, and to run separate playbooks for consumers and businesses.
Our users were our marketing team in many ways, which is a really huge advantage.
How Notion’s Community Helped it Win in AI
Rachel Hepworth: the story and the lessons
1Rachel Hepworth's path to Notion
Hepworth usually joins startups after product-market fit to help them scale. She has 15 to 20 years at startups. She was first marketer at a Series A company, then joined LinkedIn right after its IPO.
Her previous company had 11 people, so LinkedIn, at about 2,000 employees, felt enormous.
LinkedIn taught her to grow through existing customers. She learned marketing at scale there, with cross-selling as a key lever.
Few insiders appreciated how strong LinkedIn's business model was until they left.
Slack taught her to turn free trials into activated, expanding teams. She founded growth marketing at Slack and worked closely with growth product.
Many people just kicked the tires, so retention still took work. Slack's CEO famously said a good product could sell itself without a sales team, and that did not happen.
She joined a 60-person Notion that wanted to move upmarket without losing fans. In 2020 Notion had about 60 employees, where a business its size would usually have a few hundred. Its enthusiasm came mostly from consumers, prosumers and early-stage startups.
The team was fully remote and prized product craft. By the time AI Writer launched it had about 400 people.
2How Notion shipped AI first and made it stick
Hepworth credits the founders for seeing AI early and betting on speed. The founders got early model access and saw the shift before others. They concluded AI would change the industry and had to be used.
Hepworth gives pretty much all the credit to the founders. Speed was the imperative from the start, and small size and a product-driven culture made it possible.
Notion prototyped AI Writer in a hotel room and ripped up roadmaps. At a company offsite a small group prototyped the first version. The rest of the company dropped its plans to ship AI Writer, with an alpha out in a few months and then a waitlist.
It was one of Notion's fastest and most successful launches. The prototype crew felt like the company's earliest days of building from scratch.
Trying AI was easy, so the hard work was building a habit. AI Writer spread by word of mouth with almost no effort, but people tried it, had fun and forgot about it.
Even Hepworth kept forgetting to use Q&A instead of pinging a colleague. Users also had to learn that prompting differs from searching.
She puts AI in the flow of work instead of waiting to be found. Newer features can build a whole database from a short description. Her exercise-tracker prompt produced fields she had not thought of.
Proactive placement answers the habit problem because users do not have to remember to look for the feature.
Hepworth treats AI ambition as a timing bet on the models. Aim too high and the models are not ready. Aim too low and a new model crushes what you built.
Notion started with writing because chat suits writing. Q&A then won by recalling your own content, such as why a budget was set at $2 million last year, which search cannot do.
Where wrong answers are costly, AI quality has to be near perfect. If users must check every output, the productivity gain disappears.
A wrong budget figure has serious implications, so the quality bar stays high.
3Hepworth's community playbook at Notion
Notion used community, templates and demos to teach a blank-canvas product. A product that can do anything leaves new users stuck. Templates and demo videos countered analysis paralysis in core Notion, and the same playbook was applied to AI.
Pushed to a million users, the community found use cases in days that a small team would take months to find. Hepworth says AI is really similar to Notion's blank-canvas problem.
Notion started its community with the top 10 to 100 power users. They ran events and made courses, and were gathered in a Slack group. Community was the first hire after the head of marketing, started by early marketing leaders Camille Ricketts and Ben Lang.
It later grew to campus leaders (students teaching classmates) and a Champions program for people moving their whole company onto Notion.
Notion gave community members early access so they could amplify launches. Users got alpha and beta access, tips and the launch date, so they posted real results on LinkedIn, TikTok or Twitter on launch day.
Early testers also showed where users struggle, which shaped Notion's own education. Her phrase for it: "luck favors the prepared."
She split advocates into three tiers, each with its own team. Community members get one-to-many programs and events. Paid creators are run like a cross between social and paid marketing. Thought leaders with academic or professional authority are unpaid.
Thought leaders are reached leader to leader, often through Twitter, by a product leader or founder, and the tie must not be transactional.
She focuses on activating champions rather than growing their number. Champions must opt in and be self-motivated. Signing people up was easy, and keeping the community healthy and active was the work.
Moving a community from 20% active to 50% active beats adding members.
Users translated Notion without being asked. Usage ended up about a third each across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, though it was never part of strategy. Users translated the product, wrote docs and made videos in their own languages.
A small company could not run custom marketing for France, Japan, Korea and Germany. Hepworth says it happened out of love for the product.
She wants community praise to stay believable, so criticism is welcome. The community called out the weak Projects launch.
Her image: a community with only thumbs up is like a review site with no thumbs down.
4Moving Notion from consumers to businesses
Hepworth tested whether a consumer-to-business funnel really existed. At least 25% of business workspaces began as a personal workspace. The true share is likely higher because mobile, desktop and email paths can't be tracked.
Users often made a second workspace with a work email and shared it. Anecdotes backed the data: people saw a friend or colleague using it.
She phrased use cases in each team's language, not feature language. "Databases" is a scary word nobody likes. Product teams heard "build your product roadmap in Notion" and marketing teams heard "build your marketing calendar."
Segments were product, engineering, design and marketing. Segmenting also showed where the product breaks at larger company sizes.
Notion pushed users from solo use toward shared use inside companies. Solo use as a docs replacement is limited. Notion is worth more shared and with databases.
Consumers and businesses each got their own acquisition playbook. About 80% of customers are consumers, yet more than 80% of revenue comes from businesses. Consumers got community, social, organic SEO and templates, while businesses got performance marketing, events and webinars.
Personal users have very low LTV, so almost no money can go into acquiring them. Hepworth says the company asked daily whether more focus would grow it faster, and no one can know the road not taken.
A consumer halo opens doors but does not earn enterprise trust. Buyers already knew the name, but Notion still had to show large organizations use it for serious work.
A consumer-only brand can be pegged as unsafe for sensitive data, so security and admin features matter.
Hepworth names Projects as a launch that taught the company a lesson. It mostly repackaged existing features, had no monetization plan and targeted no audience, and it had almost no impact.
"We prioritized date over probably product experience or having a really strong message." The company learned not to repeat it.
How Notion’s Community Helped it Win in AI
Notion's former CMO explains how a community of power users, templates and influencers helped launch Notion AI, spread the product globally and move upmarket into businesses. Notion grew 10x to more than 100 million users while about 80% of users are consumers and more than 80% of revenue comes from businesses.
Hepworth usually joins startups after product-market fit to help them scale. She has 15 to 20 years at startups. She was first marketer at a Series A company, then joined LinkedIn right after its IPO.
Her previous company had 11 people, so LinkedIn, at about 2,000 employees, felt enormous.
LinkedIn taught her to grow through existing customers. She learned marketing at scale there, with cross-selling as a key lever.
Few insiders appreciated how strong LinkedIn's business model was until they left.
Slack taught her to turn free trials into activated, expanding teams. She founded growth marketing at Slack and worked closely with growth product.
Many people just kicked the tires, so retention still took work. Slack's CEO famously said a good product could sell itself without a sales team, and that did not happen.
She joined a 60-person Notion that wanted to move upmarket without losing fans. In 2020 Notion had about 60 employees, where a business its size would usually have a few hundred. Its enthusiasm came mostly from consumers, prosumers and early-stage startups.
The team was fully remote and prized product craft. By the time AI Writer launched it had about 400 people.
Hepworth credits the founders for seeing AI early and betting on speed. The founders got early model access and saw the shift before others. They concluded AI would change the industry and had to be used.
Hepworth gives pretty much all the credit to the founders. Speed was the imperative from the start, and small size and a product-driven culture made it possible.
Notion prototyped AI Writer in a hotel room and ripped up roadmaps. At a company offsite a small group prototyped the first version. The rest of the company dropped its plans to ship AI Writer, with an alpha out in a few months and then a waitlist.
It was one of Notion's fastest and most successful launches. The prototype crew felt like the company's earliest days of building from scratch.
Trying AI was easy, so the hard work was building a habit. AI Writer spread by word of mouth with almost no effort, but people tried it, had fun and forgot about it.
Even Hepworth kept forgetting to use Q&A instead of pinging a colleague. Users also had to learn that prompting differs from searching.
She puts AI in the flow of work instead of waiting to be found. Newer features can build a whole database from a short description. Her exercise-tracker prompt produced fields she had not thought of.
Proactive placement answers the habit problem because users do not have to remember to look for the feature.
Hepworth treats AI ambition as a timing bet on the models. Aim too high and the models are not ready. Aim too low and a new model crushes what you built.
Notion started with writing because chat suits writing. Q&A then won by recalling your own content, such as why a budget was set at $2 million last year, which search cannot do.
Where wrong answers are costly, AI quality has to be near perfect. If users must check every output, the productivity gain disappears.
A wrong budget figure has serious implications, so the quality bar stays high.
Notion used community, templates and demos to teach a blank-canvas product. A product that can do anything leaves new users stuck. Templates and demo videos countered analysis paralysis in core Notion, and the same playbook was applied to AI.
Pushed to a million users, the community found use cases in days that a small team would take months to find. Hepworth says AI is really similar to Notion's blank-canvas problem.
Notion started its community with the top 10 to 100 power users. They ran events and made courses, and were gathered in a Slack group. Community was the first hire after the head of marketing, started by early marketing leaders Camille Ricketts and Ben Lang.
It later grew to campus leaders (students teaching classmates) and a Champions program for people moving their whole company onto Notion.
Notion gave community members early access so they could amplify launches. Users got alpha and beta access, tips and the launch date, so they posted real results on LinkedIn, TikTok or Twitter on launch day.
Early testers also showed where users struggle, which shaped Notion's own education. Her phrase for it: "luck favors the prepared."
She split advocates into three tiers, each with its own team. Community members get one-to-many programs and events. Paid creators are run like a cross between social and paid marketing. Thought leaders with academic or professional authority are unpaid.
Thought leaders are reached leader to leader, often through Twitter, by a product leader or founder, and the tie must not be transactional.
She focuses on activating champions rather than growing their number. Champions must opt in and be self-motivated. Signing people up was easy, and keeping the community healthy and active was the work.
Moving a community from 20% active to 50% active beats adding members.
Users translated Notion without being asked. Usage ended up about a third each across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, though it was never part of strategy. Users translated the product, wrote docs and made videos in their own languages.
A small company could not run custom marketing for France, Japan, Korea and Germany. Hepworth says it happened out of love for the product.
She wants community praise to stay believable, so criticism is welcome. The community called out the weak Projects launch.
Her image: a community with only thumbs up is like a review site with no thumbs down.
Hepworth tested whether a consumer-to-business funnel really existed. At least 25% of business workspaces began as a personal workspace. The true share is likely higher because mobile, desktop and email paths can't be tracked.
Users often made a second workspace with a work email and shared it. Anecdotes backed the data: people saw a friend or colleague using it.
She phrased use cases in each team's language, not feature language. "Databases" is a scary word nobody likes. Product teams heard "build your product roadmap in Notion" and marketing teams heard "build your marketing calendar."
Segments were product, engineering, design and marketing. Segmenting also showed where the product breaks at larger company sizes.
Notion pushed users from solo use toward shared use inside companies. Solo use as a docs replacement is limited. Notion is worth more shared and with databases.
Consumers and businesses each got their own acquisition playbook. About 80% of customers are consumers, yet more than 80% of revenue comes from businesses. Consumers got community, social, organic SEO and templates, while businesses got performance marketing, events and webinars.
Personal users have very low LTV, so almost no money can go into acquiring them. Hepworth says the company asked daily whether more focus would grow it faster, and no one can know the road not taken.
A consumer halo opens doors but does not earn enterprise trust. Buyers already knew the name, but Notion still had to show large organizations use it for serious work.
A consumer-only brand can be pegged as unsafe for sensitive data, so security and admin features matter.
Hepworth names Projects as a launch that taught the company a lesson. It mostly repackaged existing features, had no monetization plan and targeted no audience, and it had almost no impact.
"We prioritized date over probably product experience or having a really strong message." The company learned not to repeat it.
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