How Notion's cofounders built a productivity platform through nine years of iteration

Executive overview

Notion spent years building the wrong product — a web app builder almost no one wanted — before pivoting to simple templates that let people do their jobs. Rebuilding from scratch in Kyoto with a skeleton crew was the reset that made Notion 2.0 possible.

Ship early, solve a real problem, and build for creators — not just consumers.

Early lessons from Pulse (2010)

• Releasing a half-finished app to the Stanford App Store led to explosive growth overnight
• Steve Jobs demoed Pulse at WWDC 2010; a class project became a company
• Bias toward shipping beats waiting for perfection
• Founders often fixate on being entrepreneurs rather than solving real problems — Pulse succeeded because it solved a real one (reading news on phones was broken)
• Distribution is half the product; building the best thing in a room nobody enters doesn't work

The first years of Notion: wrong product, right instinct

• Ivan Zhao's core belief: everyone can be a creator; computing should enable creation, not just consumption
• Notion v1 was a web/app builder — giving people building blocks to construct software
• The flaw: people don't wake up wanting to build software; they wake up to do their jobs
• The technical foundation was also unstable, making bugs impossible to diagnose
• After several years, the team accepted a full rewrite was necessary

The Kyoto reset

• With ~4–5 people, nearly out of money, the team laid off everyone and relocated to Kyoto
• Kyoto chosen for spacious older housing (unbombed in WWII), slower pace, lower cost
• The rebuilt product is the Notion that exists today
• Key mindset shift: stop building what you think the world wants; build what the world actually needs

The pivot that unlocked growth

• Notion 2.0 introduced databases and pre-built templates
• Moved from "build your own software" to "here's a knowledge base — use it now"
• Underlying flexibility remained; the marketing message changed to specific use cases
• Akshay Kothari joined as COO in fall 2018 when the company had 8 people
• In four years: 8 → ~500 people, revenue grew over 100×

Architecture and efficiency

• ~100 engineers support a product used by millions because the architecture is modular
• Engineers build building blocks (Lego bricks); marketing and community build templates for specific use cases
• Notion doesn't build a CRM or project management tool — it provides the blocks so users can
• This split keeps engineering lean and marketing flexible

Community as distribution

• A Korean Notion consultant discovered v2, shared templates on social media, and grew a 43,000-member community
• Similar communities have emerged globally — organic distribution Notion didn't engineer
• Community validates the model: give people powerful blocks, they create and teach others

Notion AI and the road ahead

• Notion AI lets users generate drafts, summarise long docs, and fill blank pages on demand
• Long-term mission: ubiquitous software toolmaking — a billion knowledge workers able to modify or create their own software
• Notion aims to be the third generation of productivity software, after Microsoft Office and Google Suite
• Getting there will take more than a decade

The four company values

1. Mission driven — owners of the mission to enable ubiquitous software toolmaking
2. Pace setters — move fast; speed is a competitive advantage
3. Truth seekers — rigorous thinking before committing to a decision
4. Kind and direct — honesty that pushes people to do their best work; not just niceness

Values 2 and 3 intentionally tension each other: some projects need speed, others need depth. The friction is the point.