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On the call you'll receive:
WHAT THIS IS: a breakdown of how Notion grew, built from public sources: company announcements, interviews and press coverage. Each part explains one growth mechanic, why it worked and how to copy it, with a ready prompt for Claude and a short template.
WHO IT'S FOR: founders, growth and marketing leads at SaaS, AI products and apps who want growth that comes from users, not only from ad spend.
A NOTE ON NUMBERS: we only use figures Notion or major press reported: 100M users (announced in 2024), $500M+ in annualized revenue (reported in 2025) and an $11B valuation (employee tender, early 2026). Anything else is described, not counted.
| # | Part | What you'll learn |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | The Kyoto restart | Why the founders rebuilt instead of patching |
| 02 | Templates as distribution | How every template became a way in |
| 03 | The creator economy | The creators who teach Notion and sell templates |
| 04 | Ambassadors | How power users became community leaders |
| 05 | Local communities | How communities took Notion into new markets |
| 06 | Bottom-up into teams | How one user brings in the whole team |
| 07 | What happened next | 100M users and $500M+ a year |
What happened: Notion was founded in 2013 and struggled to find a product people wanted. By 2015 the company was close to shutting down. The founders let the team go, moved to Kyoto, Japan, and rebuilt the product from scratch. The new version launched in 2016.
Why it worked: they stopped adding features to something that didn't work and rebuilt around one idea: flexible building blocks people can shape into their own tools. That flexibility is what later made templates, creators and communities possible.
How to apply it: before spending on growth, check that the product creates something users want to show others. Growth mechanics multiply what is already there.
PROMPT 01. Here are our retention numbers by cohort [paste], our top 20 user reviews [paste] and our feature list [paste]. Tell me: which part of the product users love enough to show others, which features almost nobody uses, and what a rebuilt "core" of the product would look like if we kept only what drives retention. Mark every assumption.
What happened: Notion made it easy to turn any page into a template anyone can duplicate. Templates for planners, wikis, content calendars and trackers spread through social media, YouTube and search. Later Notion added a marketplace where creators publish and sell templates.
Why it worked: a template is a finished result. Someone searching for "content calendar" finds one, duplicates it and becomes a user in a minute. Every template made by a user is another way in for the next one.
How to apply it: find the outputs of your product that people would want to copy, and make sharing and duplicating them one click.
PROMPT 02. Here is what our users create with our product [paste examples]. List 20 shareable "templates" we could offer: what it is, who searches for it, the search phrase they'd use and where it would spread (search, YouTube, TikTok, communities). Rank them by how many people want that result.
TEMPLATE PLAN
Template:
Who it's for:
The result it gives:
Search phrase:
Where it spreads:
Who makes it: [team / creator / user]
How users duplicate it:
How we track signups from it: