How Notion built a $10B business through community and content marketing

Executive overview

Most companies treat community as a nice-to-have. Notion treated it as a core growth engine — and it drove the ubiquity that de-risked enterprise adoption.

Camille Ricketts, Notion's first marketing hire, explains how community-led growth works in practice: identify people already evangelising your product, give them a special experience, and align your goals with theirs. She also covers content marketing fundamentals, from content-market fit to why quality takes ~10 hours per post.

The core insight: community works best when your product creates something people want to share — because sharing it signals something about who they are.

What community-led growth actually means

• Community-led growth is when your community creates enough ubiquity and name recognition to de-risk your product for enterprise buyers.
• The KPI that mattered most: net new visitors to the Notion website month-over-month — not engagement metrics.
• Discovery is more valuable than awareness: awareness is passive, discovery implies intent to learn more.
• Community works especially well for freemium, product-led products where users create shareable outputs (templates, workspaces, designs).
• The "atomic unit of sharing": if users share your product's outputs to self-express or signal competence, community amplifies that naturally.
• Analogous examples: Figma (shareable design files) and Canva follow the same dynamic.

When community is — and isn't — the right investment

• Best fit: freemium or prosumer products with organic word-of-mouth already happening.
• Poor fit: sales-led products with long cycles, high price points, and many required touch points before purchase.
• Community doesn't have to mean a large forum — it takes different forms depending on where you are on two axes: product-market fit (found vs. still exploring) and enterprise vs. consumer.
• Pre-PMF + enterprise: customer advisory boards — small circles of ideal-fit users who become early evangelists.
• Post-PMF + enterprise: champions (power users inside customer companies) and consultant communities (external implementers, like Salesforce's model).
• Post-PMF + consumer: ambassadors and influencers — individuals who spread organic awareness at scale.
• Don't make ROI metrics the be-all end-all early on; organic fervor is a signal, and cutting it because it's hard to measure is a mistake.

How Notion built its ambassador programme

• Started in 2019 with just 20 people — the most vocal Notion users on Twitter and other platforms.
• Not a transactional relationship: ambassadors are people who love building with Notion and want to share that with others.
• Early incentives: early feature access, feedback loops with the product team, AMAs with founders (Ivan Zhao, Akshay, Simon), and subsidised events.
• Growth was deliberately slow — ~20 new ambassadors inducted per month — to preserve the intimacy of interactions.
• Most of the conversation in the community happened between members, not between members and Notion.
• Community lived in Slack — not a separate destination — so it integrated into people's daily workflow.
• Ben Lang (head of community) spent significant time in 1:1 and small-group Zoom calls early on, asking: why are you here, what would make this better?

The template ecosystem and consultant community

• Ambassadors who wanted to create templates were channelled into that track; the communities were blended, not siloed.
• A creator made $35,000 in four months from a single template by mid-2021 — a common story from that point forward.
• Some consultants grew into businesses employing dozens of people; enterprise companies now rely on them for Notion implementation.
• Champions (power users inside customer companies) formed a separate Slack community — a key channel for customer success to ensure adoption was sticking.
• External communities Notion did not own also grew: the Notion Vietnam Facebook group has ~250,000 members; the subreddit has ~210,000.

Influencers and press

• Influencer marketing (led by Lexi Barnhorn) was highly measurable — one of the few community-adjacent efforts with tight attribution.
• Programme started in 2019; by the time of the interview it had become a major multi-channel effort.
• A single Wall Street Journal piece by David Pierce — "this is the one work-life productivity app you'll ever need" — was Notion's biggest break; it shows up clearly in the growth graphs.
• Product Hunt launches (Notion, Notion 2.0, and major product releases) were also significant traffic drivers.
• Maintaining good press relationships pays off: it provides a breadth and credibility that owned media alone cannot replicate.

Commandments for community builders

• Do not set hard growth metrics early — protect the organic energy.
• Listen first: understand what individuals actually want from the community before deciding what to build.
• Grow slowly and deliberately; a community of 5,000 feels like an auditorium — people stop speaking up.
• Share community activity internally (all-hands, Slack updates) to rally the whole company around who they're building for.
• Don't impose a one-size-fits-all programme; follow the lead of participants.

Content-market fit

• Treat content strategy the way you treat product strategy: start with the audience, understand their deep needs, then build.
• Vitamin vs. painkiller: content that relieves real pain (confusion, anxiety, imposter syndrome) always outperforms informational content.
• Content can also do emotional jobs — helping people feel less alone in hard situations was central to First Round Review's success.
• Four jobs a content product can do: help people make money, entertain, help people get better at their work or life, inform.
• Pick one bucket and aim to be the best in it.

What makes content marketing work

• Quality requires time — a typical First Round Review post took ~16 hours (8 hours prep + 8 hours writing); a typical Lenny newsletter post takes ~10 hours.
• The bar is high because volume is high; below-average quality gets ignored.
• The First Round Review landed credibility by securing a few big-name interviews early — then used those names to attract more.
• Draw connections across interviews; surface bigger themes rather than transcribing what one person said.
• Consistency matters: Jessie Craig-Schickman has now run the First Round Review longer than Camille did.

Founder-led social media

• Founder authenticity matters more than output volume; self-imposed quotas produce low-quality posts.
• Notion's social accounts got more traction by posting less — waiting until they had something genuinely valuable to say.
• Align the founder's communication style with their personality; forcing a format that doesn't fit rarely works.