The Story of Notion 🧱

How do you go from this👇

🧱𝗣𝗟𝗔𝗡:
- Build the “LEGO of productivity tools”
- Raise $2M in seed funding
- Hire 4 employees
- Become the next unicorn🦄 

To this?👇

💥𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗬:
- CRASH 🤯
- Decide to run out of money or start over
- Lay off everybody
- Move to Kyoto
- Work 18h/day to rebuild Notion

This is how Ivan Zhao and Simon Last built a tool that is being used by more than 35 million people all over the world.

Let’s get into it. This is the Story of Notion 🧱🏗️

Ivan Zhao was born in China and grew up in Canada. He was interested in coding and programming since a young age and studied cognitive science and fine arts at the University of British Columbia. After graduating, he worked in product at Inkling.

Simon Last, meanwhile, graduated in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. Before founding Notion, he worked as a software engineer at Space Telescope Science Institute and Nebula.

Toby Schachman (who’s crucial for Notion’s early years) had just finished his Master’s at NYU, where he published his entire thesis on visual programming. This knowledge became crucial for Notion.

But how did these 3 get to know each other?👇

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The first idea for Notion came to Ivan because he tried to solve a problem for himself.

After graduating college, he was part of a close circle of fashion designers, artists, and creators — who asked him constantly to create 1-page portfolio websites for them.

So he had the idea of building a tool to give non-technical users like them the ability to make their own portfolio websites without writing code.

He had the itch — so he quit his job and team up with Toby Schachman to scratch it. In 2013, they raised a seed round and tried to bring in Simon Last who initially reached out to Toby over Twitter during his internship in SF to meet him.

During this first meeting, within a few hours, Simon was convinced enough to quit his internship and leave his apartment in Palo Alto to move into the office to live there for the rest of the summer.

To recruit him, Ivan had even tried to convince him to drop out of school, and went so far to meet his dad and sister to show them that he wasn’t a crazy person.

Now with the right team, the trio began to work on Concept - the first version of Notion. Here’s what it looked like:

But then things turned out differently than expected…

After Concept was released, Toby left, and Ivan and Simon added two other people to the team, Chris Prucha and Jessica Lam, who had just built Sugarbox — a dead-simple SDK that could make any website collaborative with just a single line of code. Pretty neat!

This was all around 2012-2013 — and the problem they faced at that time was that their vision of making programming easy for creative people wasn’t actually based on a frequent and big enough problem that their target audience of creative non-programmers faced. People were just not interested in a no-code programming application🤷🏻‍♂️

Their big audacious goal had an early positioning problem — so, the Trojan horse for their vision became creating documents.

So, while their mission was, and still is “to make it possible for everyone to shape the tools that shape their lives” by building LEGO-style software — they focused on a different approach to get there 👇

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At this stage, in 2015, they faced 2 big problems:

1. They built their app on a suboptimal tech stack → it was crashing constantly

2. Their seed cash was running out → while making 0 revenue

So they had to make the hard choice of either starting over or to run out of cash while trying...

So, Ivan and Simon set about rebuilding the tech. They left uber expensive San Fransisco and went to Kyoto, Tokyo — where their founder-friendly diet of ramen would be cheaper, and where they could sublet their SF apartment and live off the difference between SF & Kyoto rental costs.

They didn’t know anyone and couldn’t speak a lick of Japanese, so they spent 18 hours a day thinking, designing, programming, and creating Notion. A few months later, in 2016 — they released version 1.0 of the app.

In 2018, they released version 2.0 — and that’s were things started getting serious. They hit 1 million users with just their seed round and with only 18 people on the team.

They delayed taking on VC money while Silicon Valley was knocking and their user base and devoted community exploded.

They grew rapidly to their current $10 billion valuation, and through their domino approach to breaking into large companies — are now selling enterprise software through TikTok. Yup, TikTok.

In short, Notion is a unique Startup…

How do you explain what exact problem they solve? Where do you start? How do you price such a tool? These were all questions I had for a long time before digging deeper into it.

But one thing is clear, they are Masters at the GTM Strategy of Product-Led, Sales-Led and Community-Led with YouTube tutorials popping up left and right and creators getting rich by selling Notion templates.

Notion’s story is very inspiring and shows how sometimes being completely focused and obsessed about something for a short time in a foreign country can help you to build the next decacorn🦄

Thank you for taking the time to read the story of Notion.

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