How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business

Camille Ricketts, Notion's early first marketing hire (employee #11) and longtime marketing leader, previously ran content at First Round Capital and worked in PR at early Tesla. The conversation covers how Notion built community-led growth into a ubiquitous brand, including ambassador and champion programs, influencer marketing, and in-person events, along with how content marketing like the First Round Review can drive discovery.

01Key learnings

• Treat content like a product: define who the audience is and what painful job they need done before creating anything.
• Community-led growth works best when the product creates something users want to share, such as templates or creative workspaces.
• Measure brand discovery with net new visitors to your site month over month, rather than starting with rigid community ROI metrics.
• Don't cut a community off early for lacking immediate ROI; organic momentum can be the foundation for later monetization.
• Pick the community format by quadrant: advisory boards pre-product-market-fit for enterprise, champion networks post-PMF for enterprise, and ambassador or influencer programs for consumer products.
• Grow community cohorts at a healthy, controlled pace so members feel connected rather than speaking into an auditorium.
• Use existing channels like Slack where your audience already spends time, instead of asking them to visit a new destination.
• Spend substantial time on each content piece; strong content typically takes around 10 hours and correlates with performance.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.