How Notion’s Community Helped it Win in AI

so we came back from this global company offsite and we're basically told rip up your road maps everything you thought was important isn't and we're just going to Sprint to try to get the first version of notion AI which was AI writer out the door as fast as humanly possible so we use the community we use templates we use demo videos to help people get inspired and then understand the ways that they can kind of best build the product and AI is really really similar so the way notion was already going to Market in many ways was very complimentary to the way people are more and more going Market with these Pro suumer AI tools these days my joke is that the marketing team needed to acquire the student in India using notion only on their mobile phone and the VP of product management in San Francisco with a team of 100 and if you think about like what it takes to acquire those two different customers

it's very very different welcome to subversive a podcast dedicated to sharing stories from the best consumer subscription apps in the world we'll bring you lessons for how to grow your consumer subscription business including insights and inflection points that led to exponential growth from leaders at category defining companies and Innovative startups let's get into the show my guest today is Rachel Hepworth the former CMO of notion Rachel joined notion in 2020 and helped scale the company 10x to more than 100 million users in this episode I talked to Rachel about noi's early investment in AI with the launch of AI writer in 20122 about how the company's community and influencer marketing strategy helped to fuel its growth and the unique opportunity ities and challenges of building a business where 80% of customers are individual consumers but more than 80% of Revenue comes from businesses all right welcome Rachel

Hepworth to the subversive podcast super excited to have you on the show today huge admirer of your product you're the former Chief marketing officer at notion which is a tool that I've used across many companies and now as an adviser to many companies um so really excited to talk about your story at notion today let's just kick off with your background and uh a little bit about where notion was at when you joined the company in 2020 yeah very happy to be here and nice to finally chat face to face Phil after a couple years of kind of being remote and online I've spent about 15 20 years at startups of all different sizes so earliest was series a I was the first marketer latest was LinkedIn that I joined right after I went public but I'm generally in that uh you found product Market fit and the company is really trying to scale and that's when I come in and sort of help the company I came to notion in

2020 so a little over four years ago it was a very small company that already had a lot of success and in fact it was quite undersized compared to the size of the business it had about 60 employees at the time which was crazy typically it would have had a few hundred so notion was very early to the small company Trend that we're seeing today and they really wanted to figure out how to take the incredible enthusiasm mostly around consumers prosumers early stage startups and move up Market to larger organizations bigger team sizes while still keeping that magic of the user base that love them so much and so that's a lot of what I came into do got it yeah and so it sounds like like me you've joined a number of companies right at that stage where they already have initial product Market fit but they're trying to accelerate growth as much as possible and it sounds like you you got brought in in particular to help

notion move up Market I guess before we

get more into the notion story tell me a little bit about slack and Linkedin did you have experience there helping those companies move a market at all yeah so LinkedIn was the most mature company I've ever been at it had just gone public had about 2,000 employees which for anybody who's worked at a big company isn't big but to me felt very massive because the company i' been at before LinkedIn was 11 people so it just felt Gargantua and Linkedin I didn't appreciate it at the time but LinkedIn is a business with an incredible Mo and you can still see it now and I think nobody at LinkedIn actually appreciated how strong the business model was at the time everybody who's left since is like oh my God I didn't I didn't fully know how good I had it and now I have to go out into the cold C world and compete with all these other products but from linkon I learned a lot about kind of marketing at scale leveraging your

existing customers to continue growing the business cross- selling and slack was just getting started in terms of really approaching scale I had a few hundred employees at that time already a lot of buzz in the Bay Area in Silicon Valley if I told any of my family or relatives where I was going they had no idea what I was talking about thought it was like a company for slacker so it was very kind of aming but that was right at the stage where Stuart slack CEO had famously talked about how you know you don't need a sales team anymore when the product is really good it can sell itself we're going to scale to billions of dollars without human beings involved and we know that that is not what actually happened but back in those days slack and that whole business model was really new and people thought maybe he was right maybe this was a new way of operating and so I joined on the growth SI started the growth marketing team

really working very closely with the growth product team to figure out how to take all of that incredible top of funnel that was coming in and make sure that it turns into like activated users the teams can expand and they can you know deliver real value to the company and so there were a lot of people who would try slack but with a lot of these femur products there's a lot of kicking the tires and there's still work to do to get them to retain I know we're going to talk a little bit later about consumer versus prosumer and about how Notions balance is is creates a lot of unique opportunities and challenges but it sounds like you'd already had some experience working with these hybrid consumer prosumer businesses both LinkedIn and slack so let's get back to notion like you I worked at a lot of smaller companies so for me 2000 would be a lot of employees too but it sounds like when you join oce it was still

small so 60 people what was the culture like in those early days when you joined in 2020 well it was covid times and so I joined a fully remote company did not want to be remote but had to be remote even at that time it was Global so we had people in Dublin we had people in Tokyo because most people don't realize this but notion is a very Global customer BAS Bas it's about a third a third a third across neyar Amia and APAC so even with a company that's small we had people all across the globe and it was it's a company that's very steeped in you know product Beauty and design and just attention to detail and so a lot of pride in the product that had been built and a very very big vision of where the company wanted to go how you get from that current state of reality to that Vision was a little bit hazier so you know a lot of work to do to the dots uh notion wants to be ubiquitous and have everybody use it and so you

know you got to do a lot of work to try to get everybody with a computer onto your product got it okay so you have this beautifully designed product you already have the beginnings of strong product Market fit it's already a somewhat global company 60 employees spread out across the world you join in 2020 and one of your primary focal points is helping bring the company up Market let's fast forward to this first big inflection point that we want to talk about today which is the launch of AI writer so notion was a relative early mover into the world of AI everybody's working on AI now right but less than three years ago that was not the case

that's right and so tell me let's let's just start with what prompted noan to decide to invest in AI so early before a lot of other companies were making that move I have to give pretty much all the credit to the founders here they saw the opportunity really really early they got Early Access to gp4 I think like a lot of Founders you know people have been kind of tracking open AI on what was happening but the product wasn't that impressive until GPT I think it was 3 maybe came out and there was just this huge inflection point and people realized oh my God there's something real here we're going to have to take advantage of this because this is going to change the industry so it's a little bit of part of company lore at this point but we're actually at a full company offsite at this time and people were supposed to be bonding and listening to talks and you know spending time with each other and instead you

know a small group of people from notion basically barricaded themselves inside a hotel room and started prototyping like the first version of notion Ai and I think people really love that because it was back to the very very very earliest days of the company when you were just trying to build the original product from scratch so we came back from this you know global company offsite and we're basically told you know rip up your road maps everything you thought was important isn't and we're just going to Sprint to try to get the first version of notion AI which was AI writer out the door as fast as humanly possible and deliberately before anybody else manages to get anything out there like speed even at that time it was obvious that speed was kind of the imperative and you had to move really really quickly so we got a you know an alpha up within a few months created a weit list like it was probably one of the fastest

products that we've ever launched and probably one of the most successful products we've ever launched yeah one of the advantages of still being small at that stage at only 60 employees and then also just being a product driven company recognizing that speed kills yeah it's funny that you mentioned the story of being at an offsite I remember I was at fair at the time but December 2022 being at the company holiday party and everybody was talking about Chach and everybody you know had it up on their laptops on their phones and I think the the founder and CEO of the company even used chachu to help inform his speech at the Holiday party that year because that's what everybody was doing right they were playing around with it and trying to figure out how they could get the most value out of it so but but

because it was such early days I think a lot of consumers were still figuring out what even is this and how do I use it so how did you educate your early adopters at notion about AI writer and what they should even do with it yeah well one thing I'll say is that the company was you know probably I don't know maybe 400 people at this point because it was two years after I joined so we were a little bit bigger than 60 but still trying to move you know sort of that same speed the education was interesting in some ways it was very easy because it's a very magical product and it's very easy to start using you know you just enter something into a text box and then it does fancy things for you so it catches people's attention it spreads the word of mouth coefficient is incredibly high and it was so new and it was so incredibly different from what anybody have ever experienced that you know you got that organic growth without almost

any effort at all I think what is more challenging that we discovered and people are still thinking about is how do you build habits and repeatable use cases about it so everybody tries it out they play with it they find it fun they love it and then they forget about it and so there's no value if you don't interact with it and you know use it and AI has sort of a version of the blank page problem that notion as a product can have when you can do anything with a product you don't do anything with it because you don't know where to focus or what your first use case should be so we had to figure out when to prompt people to use it when to insert it you know it can't just be a feature that you have to navigate to and click on you know you have to present it and push it in front of people and you have to give them ideas about the ways they could use it or get value and then at that time you had to educate them on the different

between like prompting and searching because it will give you very different results based on what you type in and that's just a very very new muscle for people and we didn't know at the time so that's the thing we were learning along with our users and so this is where Notions Community I think became really really useful there's only so much a small company can do you push it out to a million users and they will come up with Solutions and experiences that you never could have imagined and they'll do it you know within days versus within months so making sure that we gathered you know we gave away initial set of usages for free we let people play with it we shared what they were doing on social and sort of using the community to build the awareness and then build the diversity of use cases was really really effective yeah so what I'm hearing is you experienced earlier than many companies

that are using aad now this Taurus effect that a lot of people have started talking about right where the power of these tools is so remarkable that everyone will come and give you a try because they want to see what they can do with it but because it's such a horizontal use case and there are so many different applications they don't quite know where to begin and so there's this real activation challenge yes you actually leaned into using your user Community to sort of educate each other and sort of Kick the tires and explore the space together and that helped you both to identify what some of those killer use cases were and then also educate the rest of your user base on how to get the most value out of the writer tools right yeah that's right it's really a continuation of Notions existing marketing strategy which is you can kind of build any workflow or system you want in notion go do it and you know

people get analysis paralysis when they first log onto the product because there's so many different ways that you can build things in notion you just you don't want to make a wrong move you're not sure exactly what you should be doing so you get paralyzed so we use the community we use templates we use demo videos to sort of help people get inspired and then understand the ways that they can kind of best build the product and AI is really really similar so the way notion was already going to Market in many ways was very complimentary to the way people are kind of more and more going to Market with these prosumer AI tools these days so

let's use this as a transition into the next topic which is around this idea of community and when we were talking about this episode you mentioned to me that Community was always a core part of Notions DNA it's not like you woke up one day and said you know we're going to build a community or we're going to do influencer marketing it was already sort of built into how the product had been built from the beginning but specifically in the context of launching AI writer and then expanding it into this broader not AI Suite of tools how did you lean into Community as the then Chief marketing officer of the company in order to start to get more awareness and deeper usage of of the AI tools a lot of it's about inviting them into the initial versions of the product that you're building you know the alpha and beta you get feedback you see how people are using it so you get those use cases in the very early stage and then you see

people to amplify your launch so that when you're launching it they're not seeing it for first time figuring out and then four days later talking about how they use it but they're all prepared to share on LinkedIn or TW Tik Tok or Twitter whatever it may be the ways that they found value with the product and so that just involves making sure that you are giving access to the right group of people that you are enabling them and you know kind of educating them on what the product is they know when you're going to launch they're prepared for it they know some of the best ways that you know people can get value from it and they can sort of be a surround sound uh for your product and so a lot of it is you know about just giving them Early Access giving them extra enablement giving them tips and tricks and then learning from where they're having trouble so that you can prepare your own education and enablement for your

customers and then sort of activating everybody all at the same time that makes a lot of sense and you you mentioned the right people there so I'm curious to hear a little bit more around to what extent were you proactively reaching out to existing influencers or people with large followings on platforms like YouTube or Tik Tok or Instagram Notions tools you sort of organically these Diamonds in the Rough that you know had found a new and creative use case for notion maybe they didn't have a big following yet but you just figured hey this person has a really interesting story to tell so we want give a platform to tell it I'd say we did both and so it's a little bit of like you know luck favors the prepared sort of thing so you want to help everybody get access to the product and hear about it and from that you'll see a few pop up where you're like oh they just did this post that went viral we didn't know who they were

but like something they did really resonated with people and then there's others who have an existing audience and are talking about things that are very complimentary to your own company or product so you know Their audience cares about the thing that your company does and will be interested in it so those you can go out and proactively kind of tap and engage with and so I think of the first is sort of your kind of very organic Community the second is a little bit more the formal relationships oftentimes the people you'll pay because they're building a business around Their audience and you know kind of selling things to their audience and then there's an interesting third one that's popped up with AI that exists in other places but we just didn't tap into it which is sort of the the thought leader influencers where because of you know they either have you know academic Authority or they have professional

Authority but you know they're they have a day job that's very very important so their job is not building an audience but they have an incredible amount of influence and credibility because of the authority that they've built up in their particular area so those are people that are worth forming you know specific relationships with you don't just hope that they'll see you and be interested in your product like you reach out to them and try to engage with them but you generally don't pay those people because you know they can't you can't buy them like their reputation their day job is too important so they have to really believe that what you're doing makes sense for what they're already engaged with is actually high quality Their audience will want to know about it and that's become really interesting and in the AI space where things are moving so quickly so people are really looking for

authoritative voices to tell them what's real and sort of you know what may not be as cutting edges people try to make it sound so that's really interesting so

what I heard was there's sort of this pyramid you've got the bottom of the pyramid and that's probably the largest base which is just the every person who's using notion every day every week every month and they're finding new and creative ways to use Ai and your tool then you have the influencers on top of that and maybe some of them you are paying some of them you're not but they Lars and then this third category which I heard as much about but ites a lot of sense especially in the Contex of AI is these academics or thought leaders who they're not influencers that's not their day job but um because of the work that they naturally do they're finding new and creative ways to use Ai and in your case use AI particularly within notion but in but in their case they're not interested in money they're just interested in advancing The Cutting Edge of the field and they're actually the hardest to get because they're

reputation matter so much that they're not going to back a product until they're confident that it's worth putting their name behind so how did you stair step your way from like that early base of people who are already using your product to those you know Pinnacle influencers that were only going to jump in once they knew it was safe to do so I mean it helps if you have a product that is cutting edge and you have you know for instance we have a community team who kind of builds this large community and does a lot of work on events and communication with them and it's you know doing things that scale these are people highly engaged in no they're very important they're very special to the company it's a little bit of a one to many on the community and then we have people who are running influencer marketing you know formally which is a little bit more of the paid you know it's a cross between like social and and

typical paid marketing for the folks that are more thought leaders you know that's you have your Executives reach out to them like you're not going to have a you know random marketing manager be like hey can you talk about us like that's sort of thought leader to thought leader and so having your you know your product leader your founder whoever it may be form those relationships often through Twitter but sometimes through other means is sort of the most effective way you have to build a relationship like it's not transactional and that's really the key got it yeah and you mentioned

you led the community team that was one of several teams that you led as the CMO at notion how was the community team structured and and how did that structure look the same or different versus some of the other companies you worked at like LinkedIn or slack we invested a lot more in the community team than the other companies that I have been at and I think that's been a trend that's grown over time so the community team existed when I joined notion it was the very first thing that was built out by Camille rickets who was the first head of marketing and then Ben Lange who was the first hire and really kind of incepted the entire community so the credit for Notions Community team really goes to them at its core I think it was so obvious to kind of the early Folks at notion that there was something special with all of the chatter and the conversations that were happening and then how do you amplify that why they

chose that to be kind of the first marketing hire after the the head of marketing Community grew over time so in the beginning the first formation of it was you know let's get the top 10 to 100 people who are talking about notion they're holding events they're creating courses like these are the power power super users who create incredible leverage in the system the ecosystem and they really love this product let's all get them together in like a slack group so that they have a conduit to us and we can communicate with them and they can talk to each other and like we can really nurture people who are like some of them investing their whole lives in this company and this product that was the first Incarnation then we grew it to different audiences so we developed a campus leaders program which was really focused on students you know ambassadors tend to be prosumers campus leaders were often like sophomores sometimes freshmen

on campuses who love notion and wanted to teach everybody how to use notion for your coursework so that was a very clear Social Circle and then after that we built a Champions program which is really about sort of the super users in companies who were often trying to get their entire company on to notion which is no small feet they're trying to change the way people work and they wanted help they wanted to learn best practices from other people about how you onboard and Advocate and like you know try to get these teams to move on to notion because they wanted to do all their work in notion and if you know people send them a a Google doc they die a little bit ins size so like how do they how do they help kind of move their company into this new way of working so those were kind of the three main groups and then we think about how we get just more people invited Under the Tent you know you want all different levels

people spend their life on notion and the people who love it but you know they have day jobs and they're not going to be able to devote a lot of time how do you build experiences and systems for them and that was sort of like the next Evolution that the company was thinking about when I left got it well and I feel like Community can be powerful both for bread expanding to New Markets whether that's geographically or upm market and then it can also be valuable for depth which you mentioned there the sort of Trojan Horse strategy if you get a champion within a company and then if they have enough influence and if project is good enough they can get it to land and expand within that Enterprise let's start with breath

because you said earlier that notion is this interesting case where it's about a third a third a third across North America Europe and APAC why do you think it became such a global product so early on and how did the your community team and strategy need to adapt to different International markets or did they need to adapt the answer is we actually really don't know why it was that Global it was not a part of the company strategy it something that we observed and then tried to support rather than went out there and deliberately did you know one of the main theories is just the the product design and style in some ways is you know it's it's both opinionated and unopinionated about how you work it's so flexible so it will adapt to many different cultural Styles sort of workflow so it lets you be used by a large variety of different teams who may have different working Styles across the across the globe that was a

theory the community was really important because you know the company was very small for a long time and there's no way a small company can do custom marketing for like France and for Japan and for Korea and for Germany and you know all these places where we had large uh groups of users so for some of our early countries I mean you had people in the community who were translating the product like they just decided to do it because they wanted to use product in their native language they kind of went that far they definitely were the ones to build awareness they built you know educational docs they built YouTube videos the native language they answered people's questions so it was really important because we would never have had the bandwidth to be able to support all of those different types of users and it kind of let notion spread in a much more economical way uh because we had you know our users were our

marketing team in many ways which is a really huge advantage and they did it very organically we didn't ask them to it was just like they it was the love they wanted to yeah well I have two thoughts on that I mean one I hope I'm not misremembering this but if I recall correctly I think Facebook used a similar strategy to translate it product in international markets when it was going global I think Javier Olan who was one of the first growth leaders there basically developed this idea that you've got all of these users in international markets who are so excited about this product because it's unlike anything they've ever seen before and so they can help Facebook more cost-efficiently translate the product into those local markets and then the second point is you hear so often about this fcy of like if we build it they will come if we just build a great product then everybody's going to want

to use it and that is rarely true and even when it is true it's not quite that simple but in no's case it sounds like it was such a unique and flexible and adaptable product that people really were pouring their lives into it and finding ways to push the margins on how it could be used and and then in this particular case finding ways to adapt it to their local Language and Cultural context okay so we talked about breath and we talked about what an international product notion was let's

talk a little bit more about depth and specifically this point you made that you had these Champions within companies m and ideally those Champions sort of planted the seeds for you to land and expand from Individual prosumers into team or Enterprise accounts and and this gets back to your role moving notion into more and more of an upmarket product so what did that process look like and to build on that what were some of the other strategy and tactics you used as CMO to to start getting notion into larger and larger Enterprises the one of the big questions at notion was always are we thinking about about our opportunity and our audience and our Tam in the right way like notion is a you know heavily consumer product that makes all of its Revenue through companies it's target audience in many ways is just anybody with a computer which is a very very large T So You' have a lot you have a big Tam but you know there's not a lot

of specificity or Focus there and it's hard to appeal to both groups and so when you're thinking of why will this make sense for a company to you know both acquire consumers and acquire businesses the thing you have to believe is that 1 plus 1 equal 3 like there's some way to combine those audiences and those funnels to be more efficient and more impactful than you could have ever done alone and so we spent a lot of time trying to think about that consumer to B2B funnel like does it exist is the first question we want to believe it exists but but does it actually exist can we find proof of that and then if it doesn't exist how do you accelerate this or create even more leverage out of it because we so many consumer users personal workspaces and a relatively small number of B2B who were you know very very valuable and so some of the things we did we tried to you know prove this theory in many different ways one

of them was through data and we had some success so we know that for instance 25% of all of our B2B workspaces came from somebody who originally used notion in a personal workspace so they're discovering exposure to notion and their decision that it was like a a great tool came came from the personal use case and you could see that then they created a second workspace that used a professional email address that often was multiplayer instead of single player and so you saw some of that you know user Journey happen through the data and there were many things we couldn't track you know you build something on mobile then you do a desktop with a different email there's breakage so you can't you can't track all of the examples of this so that 25% is the minimum versus the Maxima was probably much much bigger than that and then you had all the anecdotal stories of people who are like oh my friend used this or you know I saw

my colleague using this or whatever it may be where people you know see it from the consumer point of view and then decide that it would be useful using a company so that was one is just like how do we take all of that consumer awareness and consumer love and use it to fuel the B2B growth and then it was how do you help people understand one that the value of notion was really collaborative because you could use it in a company by yourself and many people did and that wasn't as valuable for notion and it wasn't as valuable for people using it so how do you make sure that people use it in a multiplayer setting versus just a single player setting then how do you help them understand all the different ways to use it so you know people would use notion is basically a replacement for docs and that's great but it's limited like if you don't use the full set of value which really includes databases which is

a very scary word that nobody likes to use you're not getting the full power and then it's hard to understand why You' use it instead of Google docs and so that was about understanding those use cases you know who are the professionals Within These companies who are using it so you know how are we segmenting them then how do we serve up the use cases that help them be more successful invite more of their teammates on and sort of expand within a company so there's a lot of work done on like audience segmentation the use cases within those segments where notion breaks that different company sizes you know does these tools don't scale endlessly so how ambitious can you be as you go out market and then where do you have to wait for the product to kind of uh catch up and we really focused on you know product engineering design marketing these functions that are very collaborative they're often very cross

functional which is great so if you're a product marketer and you work with product and you work with design you B at end you're starting to bring people in from all different teams uh and they have a lot of um you know project management collaborative use cases and so instead of saying you can use a database for anything we would say for product you can build your product road map in notion or for marketing you build your marketing calendar in notion and this isn't a New Concept but you really have to phrase things in their language versus in the language of the feature and then ask them to figure out how that feature maps to their own use cases um so that we spent a lot of time doing that because you have a very large and diverse audience it's not easy to know all the use cases not easy to know the language that you should be using uh so it took a fair amount of work but it really helped people see the value of

the product and kind of be more successful and invite people um onto the platform in Greater rates got it and so if I heard correctly it sounds like you used a lot of data and segmentation to understand who the right Champions were like what Target company size specific functions you mentioned their product design engineering and then you sort of sifted through the data to find who your Champions were and then it sounded like you used the community team and other parts of the marketting to support them did you get to the point at any point where you sort of proactively reached out outbound to Great candidates at particular companies who might be strong Champions or was that never a lever that notion tried we did some of that but a lot of it came inbound so if people were that people if you're going to be part of the community you really have to want to be a part of the community you can't

push somebody to it so you sort of want people who are going to raise their hand and so you know you can suggest things you can send them emails you can invite them to join things and that is helpful but at the end of the day they really have to be self-motivated to be an advocate for the product inside of the organization so you have to make that more appealing you have to support them you have to make it easier for them to be effective but we didn't spend as much time trying to actively grow the size it was more activate the people who were there it was actually easy to get a lot of people technically in the community but you wanted the community to be healthy and active and that was where a lot of the work came in that makes sense so they have to be intrinsically motivated and it's more about finding the people who are already willing to pound their fist on the table and say everybody at this company needs to be

using notion versus pushing on a string to get people who weren't already using notion to Champions even if they fit fit the bill of a good Champion yeah and I mean that obviously will come but if you have several thousand people in a community and you're like this community is I'm making up these numbers but you know 20% active then the goal is to get it to 50% active versus add more people into the community so let's talk a

little bit more about this I guess it's both an opportunity and a challenge you talked about which is I believe the numbers you stated were 80% of Notions customers are consumers but 80% of the revenue is coming from businesses and that's a little bit extreme but obviously there are these other hybrid prosumer Enterprise companies out there you worked for at least one of them at slack and you've got figma and and a couple others so let's start with the challenges what were some of the challenges that created especially as a marketer for figuring out how to cater to those two different audiences my joke is that the marketing team at its extreme needed to acquire the student in India using notion only on their mobile phone and the VP of product management in San Francisco with a team of 100 and if you think about like what it takes to acquire those two different customers it's very very different so you know the

large audience is an opportunity but it's definitely a challenge it sort of flies in the face of all classic marketing and Company strategy building recommendation which is to find your Niche go very specific get deep with them and serve them better than anybody else the fact that's where notion sort of community and ecosystem was critical it was a huge lever and it was also critical you couldn't do it without that group like it just wouldn't be possible so it's sort of a necessary component to the marketing strategy we had to think a lot about building consumer motions and then B2B motions is at the end of the day what we ended up doing consumer is where the scale comes in so if you care about the number of people signing up for notion the number of workspaces being created that's a number driven by consumer at the end of the day because that's where the volume is if you care about Revenue that number is driven by

you know these companies which is a smaller volume but like the revenue you can spend money to acquire people at businesses you can't really spend almost any money to acquire personal users because their LTB is very very low and so you're looking for highly scaled and very low kind of CAC uh AC strategies for Consumer and you're looking for a little bit more of the spear fishing targeted approach uh for B2B where you can you know invest real marketing dollars because the ROI is higher so you know there's overlap between them as we said because some of the personal ended up turning into B2B groups but that was a slow process you know that wasn't a strong enough direct lever for us to rely on it so it it was definitely a challenge I wouldn't say we solved it perfectly we made progress figuring out what the consumer levers were which is really things like Community social we did a lot with like organic SEO and

templates these things that scale for low marginal cost and then on the B2B side for very particular audiences we had success with Performance Marketing you know events webinars things like that and then throughout it all you were just leveraging the ecosystem as much as possible to spread the word and kind of make the brand really pop and play even bigger than the product really was but I would say it was one of the most fun and also the most challenging things at notion and the company sort of had this existential question every day of like is this the right strategy or would we grow even faster if we had more focus and it's hard to know the road not taken so all you can say is that notion is quite successful and you know it was a it's an ambitious school you know to try to get everybody who's a knowledge worker on to your product yeah yeah I mean as you said who will ever know the counterfactual but it seems like things

have worked out pretty well for you all and I think there's a whole wave now of AI first consumer and prosumer companies that are facing the same challenge of catering to both audiences so I work with a few of these companies right now perplexity 11 Labs gamma and there is this Allure to going after the massive consumer Market the students the teachers the individual cons but at the end of the day it's the larger Enterprises that are going to pay you and so it is a balancing act did you

find that there was a halo effect in terms of brand or or even going back to community starting with the consumers and the individual prosumers and then using that sort of elevated brand appeal to then be able to better sell these larger Enterprise customers or did that not really cross over very well there's definitely a halo effect if you have tons of people talking about how much they love your product it can't fail to penetrate and like people are familiar with you and feeling like a consumer brand is not always a bad thing in terms of the Delight that the product brings you always have to be a little bit careful that you're not pegged as a consumer product that can't scale that isn't safe that doesn't have like the permissions you know or the other kind of Enterprise features that you need to be a quote unquote serious product at a large organization I think companies have become a lot more comfortable with

these prosumer esque like products because it's become kind of very trendy ever since the days of Slack people are now used to it and expect it but you do have to be careful that you're not pegged as purely a consumer product because then people won't trust you to deploy you to large organizations or handle sensitive information so there was definitely a brand Halo it helped a huge amount with awareness people were aware of the love like it has a great cache and then you had to also build up The credibility of you know we're also an Enterprise tool and large organizations use us to get serious work done yeah it really is such a double-edged sword I mean you said two things there that I hear all the time which is a lot of the best Enterprise Products start it as consumer products or at least take a lot of inspiration in terms of product development from consumer products because consumers are

so fickle and their attention spans are so short that you just have to design every element of the product to Perfection for for you to be able to retain their attention but then at the same time as you move up Market you've got to be thinking about security features and administrative features and that just means you've got to be taken seriously and so if your whole brand has been built on consumer then it can actually become a headwind at some point to over so we've talked about the launch of AI writer and we talked about the importance of community on the marketing team at notion and then about this sort of hybrid consumer prosumer versus Enterprise approach to user and revenue growth I want to bring things back full

circle now to the evolution of notion AI over time and so what started as AI writer has now become this full Suite of multiple AI tools how has notion AI evolved over the last couple years and where do you see it going in in the next few years I mean I wish I had the crystal ball about where AI was going in general cuz that's really a million dollar question um it's been interesting to watch The Evolution because it started as a writing product which is where so many of these AI tools originally started you know the chat format really lent itself to writing notion was already a product that had a lot of writing in it so it was very natural um and then the company got very ambitious and sort of started thinking about how do you build AI into everything and what's funny about AI these days is that if you're too ambitious the models haven't necessarily like they're not where you needed to go

but then if you're not ambitious enough a model will come out that crushes whatever the product was that you built you know that was kind of for the model day so it really is a big challenge I'd say the next product that was very successful for notion in the AI space was Q&A which instead of creating content it's about kind of recalling all the content that you've made I mean the classic thing is you write everything down and you can never find it and you can never find it and search you never reread it and so all that information and knowledge is lost forever Q&A even when the company released it I think people internally it it took people didn't instinctively realize how amazing it was until they tried it a few times because you think of it like search but it's very different than search with search if you say things like why did we set the budget at $2 million last year what is search going to do with that it

doesn't know but like Q&A will answer that question so instead of being a replacement for search it really was one of the first features that I think of as a replacement for bugging your colleague with like a slack message or turning around being like why did we do that what happened at that meeting do you remember this decision it will actually give you those answers which is really pretty amazing and great for company productivity and just you know your own enablement but to the point about habit building you know this is a product that you know my company released and I still had trouble remembering that I should use it instead of go paying somebody on my team with a question that it definitely Q&A could answer but I forgot to use it so it's just like such a big challenge in the product development space to kind of build that habit so Q&A was really successful and then now you know notion built AI into a few other

things but the thing that they've come out with recently which is you know after I left so I wasn't a part of the development process but they have some really interesting features around for instance creating databases automatically which is it's the feature which is the most powerful and provides the most value and it's the hardest for people to understand how to use so if you can solve the challenge of how people ACC into this value it's really really helpful so now instead of being like I need to know how to build up my like columns and rows and my different you know data types it you know gets very complicated you just write out I tested this the other day with I want to do an exercise tracking tool I didn't even give it very much information just laid out a perfect database with things I hadn't even thought about and it's sort of magical as all the best AI products are so it's interesting to see

it built into every aspect of the product and you don't have to go and say I want to use AI to build this you just go create a notion page and it serves it up for you as like we can do this for you now and that's what I think is really important in the product development is inserting AI when people can get Val of it proactively versus hoping that they will remember to go and find it and uh engage with it yeah the habituation piece is such a challenge for companies especially because of that blank page horizontal use case problem you talked about earlier and I think this really brings things back full circle to why the community was so important because rather than you guys trying to stand at the top of the mountain and just shout at people over and over again know notion AI is here here's how you use it you could really Empower your community to do that also I have a confession to make so before this

recording I I went into chat gbt and I was like I'm going to try this I've never tried this before chat gbt pretend you're Rachel heworth I'm going to interview you let's go back and forth and it was a lot of fun it was something I'd never done to prepare for a podcast episode but then it started hallucinating and making up stuff that I knew was wrong and so it it it gets to the the challenges we're still facing with AI which it's gone a long way in a couple years but it's funny to think about where like the question of what is good enough product quality like when is it even if it's not perfect when is it good enough and for a lot of things the answer is it has to be almost perfect because if you have to go through and check every single thing you lose a lot of the the gains that you would have had and so the bar is pretty high for these oh for sure well and especially using your example you know what what was our

budget for this if you get the wrong number on that that could have some pretty serious implications yeah well

this was great let's wrap up with our lightning round so I'm going to ask you a few short questions you can give me short answers to kick things off what was the best part about working at notion and what's one thing that you might change I mean the best part was probably candidly I joke that I always want to work for a company that doesn't need marketing which is not really true companies always do need marketing but if you have a product that's already beloved it's just much more fun and so a place where people they were so enthusiastic and just wanted to talk about all the different ways notion had changed their lives or all the fun things they've done with notion it really it makes my job much easier and it's very energizing to hear all those different stories so that was really fun I also feel like notion did better on cracking how to sort of drive that love in Word of Mouth proactively versus

observe it happening and that was really interesting for me because that was always the big question at slack we're doing so well but how do we drive more of this and it was a little bit of a question the whole time I was there and notion through community and social and some of the other things like really got a lot closer and so that was like very satisfying from a professional point of view I think the worst part or the most challenging part we talked about really is the audience as a marketer and I come from a product Market marketing background I want to feel like I'm the expert in the audience and I know everything about them and what their needs are and how they talk and like how you should communicate with them that is not possible with a product as horizontal as motion is you have to pick and choose where you need to sort of understand your audience but it is painful because you always feel like

you're just not deep enough and you could do so much better work if you just you know were able to focus on the sliver of the market and so the strategy of why we're doing that was very clear but from a you know excellence in marketing perspective it always felt a little bit sad that you know you couldn't feel like you were in deeper with the people that you were marketing to yeah that makes sense and I think both those points you made go back to the power of product Market fit that we talked about earlier right both as a marketer in your case or a product growth leader in my case your job has made much easier if you're working at a company whose core product fit is already really really strong and then you also talked about the importance of word of mouth and often times I'll have companies ask you know how do we generate more word of mouth and the answer is often well continue to invest

in your core product because people a great product yeah have a great product which is not what people want to hear and obviously to push Word of Mouth forward but yeah it starts with having a great product there's really no substitute for that so on that point what is one of your favorite consumer or prosumer subscription products and why do you love it so much I'll I'll give you two one is nerdy and one is more modern so the nerdy one is I spend a lot of time with the Libby app which I don't know if you Ed but it is a library app to put free books on my Kindle I'm like weirdly cheap about things so I love the fact that you can borrow books without ever visiting the library and I use it all the time and they just redid the UI and it's a really good app it's like this free public app and it is really good so I'm always impressed with kind of what they're doing and then I recently started using granola it's

interesting because there's a war of the meeting notet takers and I think they all have their subtle difference it's a real product marketing you know exercise of how all of these different AI note takers are differentiating but really like that granola does not obnoxiously sit in your Zoom call and Shout that it's there it just feels like a really sophisticated UI a lot of thoughtfulness in the way they designed it and so I've been appreciating that a lot I am aware of Libby I don't use it a ton but I'm definitely aware of it and granola that's I'll have to go back and try granola again because I ran into exactly the challenge you face which is all of these AI Nott taking tools came out and they would all announce themselves at the beginning of a call on zoom and I'm like this is the last thing I want is for everybody meaning to feel like I'm spying on them so it sounds like grol has started to figure this out and as

you said it's largely a product marketing challenge but that's interesting because it is it is such a fiercely competitive space right now so we'll see if they if they end up coming out on top in the end what's an example of a of a failure you experienced at notion and what did you and your team learn from I mean we had a lot of failures but one of the ones that was like really stood out is we were launching it's like a version of project management but we didn't want to call it project management because we didn't want to be in the project management category so we called it projects uh but it was one of the least successful launches we did at notion and it was supposed to be you know a very important launch and a very important entry into this type of category this really valuable category that like jir and assana and Monday all sit in but the challenge is I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that notion does have

such a horizontal audience and a lot of these groups they use they think about managing their projects differently and so we we weren't focused on Engineers like jro or marketers like assana or SMB like Monday and so you're really you end up doing this weird averaging out compromise so it's hard to be great when you're sort of trying to do a little bit for everybody and then a lot of the launch was a collection of features some of which already existed a few of which were new so it wasn't really a lot of net new stuff it was just a repackaging of things got it and you know the community is smart and they will call you out on it and they did call us out on it and the launch was a lot of work and it didn't have almost any impact on the company in terms of both engagement and in terms of Revenue there wasn't really a monetization strategy around it at all and so we felt like we needed to launch something we prioritized date

over probably product experience or having a really strong message and it didn't it didn't do a whole lot for oce so the good thing is the company learned from it and was like we're not going to do that again um but it it was a painful experience for everyone well I guess that's the other side of a of the coin of having such a strong and and highly vocal Community is that they will call you out on it when you come but in the end that's a good thing too because you learn from your mistakes and hopefully you get better the next time it is and it creates more authenticity you don't want your community to be you know kind of a version of G2 where only positive yeah and not very thumbs up there's no thumbs down yeah I I think one of the powers of it is that they are people who aren't at the company who are saying this is actually good and in order for that to be believable they have to also occasionally say this thing wasn't as

good so that you can kind of trust uh their voices yeah makes sense okay a couple more here so after leading marketing teams for 15 plus years you're now an adviser so like me you've you've jumped out of leading teams in house and you're now advising multiple companies what prompted that switch for you and what's one thing that you like better about being an adviser versus leading teams on the inside when I was leaving notion I really just wanted to take a break I did not want to jump back into another you know really intense all-encompassing startup and that's what these jobs are always like at these very fast growing compan they really take all of your time and your energy and I spent 15 years kind of jumping with one weekend in between company to company to company and I I just deliberately wanted to have a bit of a pause and make sure that I was going in the direction that I wanted to but at the same time I think

for a lot of us it's really hard to sit still so how do you keep yourself engaged how do you keep learning how do you keep your pulse on things and Advising is really interesting because you get to see across a lot of companies as I'm sure you do they all run slightly differently they all have really creative things they're doing things that you know you would recommend them not doing you see the repeated mistakes you see the things that work consistently and you sort of start to learn by comparing them what are sort of the best practices and sort of first principle things and what are just oneoff from the company and so that's been that's been really interesting and so I like that part of it candidly what you don't get is deep investment in a team and a company yeah and I really like that part of things as well so I am not convinced that advising is the you know it's probably not the forever thing

for me but it's a really nice change of pace and a really nice interlude and I'm grateful that I get to kind of take that break and take that time and you know if I ever do decide to jump back into a company you do it you know with all of the energy kind of back again yeah I mean you took the words right out of my mouth I feel like the number one thing I miss about being in house is just building teams and missing being in the trenches and then building those cultures but at the same time it's just so fun to work with lots of different companies at at the same time because you're able to develop pattern recognition and I think it it makes your intuition much sharper on what's going work at least if you've got companies that are all within the same Niche or the same vertical or business model so last question here and I know you said earlier it's obviously it's hard to have a crystal ball and everybody's trying to

figure out the future with AI right now but how do you think AI will change the world of productivity software in particular over the next one to two years I mean one thing is I think the space has always been competitive and it's just going to get 10x more competitive like the number of companies trying to do different things and they're all they start out in their lanes and they Edge into every other lane because sort of if you have to own the full workflow it's going to get really really brutal and differentiating yourself is going to become really difficult it's easier to to have that initial Spirit of growth it's harder to hang on to it which has been a really interesting pattern that I've observed with a lot of companies the growth rates are insane but the turn rates are also much higher than you tend to be and so that's been that's been interesting to see and you know kind of unsettling if

you if you work in this world it's like what is happening right now it's you know you can't tell where the winners and the losers are and something new comes out every week so that's really hard the other is that you know AI is you can see this happening it's going from being uh reactive and like you ask it for things to proactive where it's just doing things for you and hopefully that eliminates the whole goal of productivity software is to eliminate drudge work and sort of repetitive things and it feels like AI is going to be very good at that so you know what is the next evolution of productivity tools do when they're not just automating things but they're like very proactively going out and doing the work that hope you didn't want to do anyway yeah and then you know data in context as we all know is going to be any everything so it's the war for data for owning your own data everything has to all these AI

agents have to connect to each other but nobody wants to give up their you know primary and ownable data and so it's going to be interesting to see how that shakes out like everybody's trying to be the place that work gets created because that's such a huge advantage and so I see it you know if you're a meeting notes app you're like well you're in meetings all day long and this is where all the information is in the conversation if you're a CRM that's where your primary data is if you're you know document creation like notion that's where your primary data is so everybody's trying to claim that mle of like we at the core of where the work begins and is created and you know we'll see what ends up winning yeah well and one thing you touched on there is this data mode and I feel like a lot of the best consumer and prosumer businesses of the last decade have been one and lost on the basis of network effects between

users but now there's this second flywheel which is basically the data Network effect right the more people who use the product the more data the product generates and the smarter that product becomes and so it's if anything I think it could lead to even more of a winner take all scenario and a lot of these markets but right now it's hard to know who the winners are and there just so many companies competing over the same space AI not taking tools being one example that you talked about yeah well this has been a real pleasure thanks for coming on the podcast Rachel it was great talking to you and hearing a little bit more about how AI changed the trajectory of notion and about how you got to oversee some of that as the chief marketing officer any final thoughts or anything else you want to share with the audience before we wrap up here no I mean it's been really fun to have this conversation I'm uh always hanging out

on LinkedIn so if anybody else wants to chat more you can always find me there I'm very reachable but it was great to chat Bill awesome thanks for coming on Rachel