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We hired one colleague for every department.
Last Tuesday, marketing asked Viktor to write the weekly campaign recap, pull performance from Google Ads and Meta, and format it as a PDF for the exec team. Done in four minutes.
That same afternoon, engineering asked Viktor to review three open pull requests on GitHub, cross-reference with the Linear sprint board, and flag anything blocking the release. Posted to private channel before standup.
At 9pm, ops asked Viktor to draft a vendor contract summary from three Notion docs and send it to the team. It was in #ops by morning.
None of them knew the others were using it.
Same colleague. Three departments. That's what changes when your AI coworker lives in Slack, where your whole company already works. It's not a tool one person logs into. It's a teammate everyone messages.
5,700+ teams. SOC 2 certified. Your data never trains models.
"Viktor is now an integral team member, and after weeks of use we still feel we haven't uncovered the full potential." - Patrick O'Doherty, Director, Yarra Web
My whole life is in Notion.
Client work, content ideas, personal notes, and reading lists. Everything is in there. I use it as a second brain, and honestly, I cannot imagine working without it at this point.
That is exactly why I started paying attention to how Notion grew. Because a product that people use this deeply does not just get discovered by accident.
Notion went from 1 million users in 2019 to 20 million in 2021 to 100 million by 2024, with fewer than 10 employees when they first hit 1 million. And almost no paid advertising in their early growth.
So how did they actually get there?
How did Notion get its first users?
In 2016, Notion launched on Product Hunt using Naval Ravikant's profile. He was an early investor with a large following on the platform. The launch became one of the biggest of that year and won the Golden Kitty Award.
That brought in the first wave of users who were designers, developers, and productivity enthusiasts. They were people who went deep into tools and talked about them publicly.
Two years later, in March 2018, they launched Notion 2.0. The Wall Street Journal published a review shortly after, which brought in a much wider audience beyond just the tech community.
These two moments gave Notion a base of genuinely passionate early users who already believed in the product.
And those early users became the reason Notion kept growing. Let’s see how!
Why did people start creating content around Notion without being asked?
Because the product gave them something worth showing off.
Notion is not just a note-taking app. You can manage projects, organise content, track work, and even run parts of a business from it.
Another thing you notice is the level of customisation. Over time, every setup starts to look different and matches how that person works.
When people build something useful for themselves, they tend to share it. That is what happened here. Early users created templates, which are ready-made pages for specific use cases, and shared them on Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. They shared them to show what they had built.
So what does this tell us?
People talk when the product gives them a reason to. A community grows when the product is worth sharing. This cannot be forced; it happens when people find real value in it.
So what did Notion do when this started happening?
They did not step in to control it. Instead, they paid attention to the people who were already talking about the product and brought them closer.
Their first marketing hire, Camille Ricketts, noticed early users sharing Notion on Twitter and saw them as the real community. One of them was Ben Lang, who was running NotionPages.com and a Facebook group called Notion Made Simple. He later joined Notion and helped build the community further.
They gave ambassadors early access to new features, funds to run local events, and direct access to the founders. At the same time, they were free to talk about Notion in their own way.
Notion's CRO, Olivia Nottebohm, later described this approach clearly: "Don't try to own or regulate your community engagement. Don't ask people to behave in a certain way or follow strict policies."
That is what allowed the community to grow on its own.
How did templates become their distribution engine?
When someone signs up for a tool as flexible as Notion, the first thing they feel is overwhelmed. A blank page with endless possibilities is not always a good thing. Templates solved that immediately. Someone could open a project management template, see exactly how the tool works in a context relevant to them, and get started in minutes.
But templates did something beyond that.
Every time someone shared a template on Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit, they were creating a new way for people to discover Notion. Someone searching for a content calendar on Google would land on a Notion template and end up on the site. Someone watching a productivity video would see a Notion workspace and want to try it themselves.
Notion then made a decision that many companies would not make. They let people sell their templates and did not take a percentage of what creators earned.
The results were significant. According to Notion's CRO, Olivia Nottebohm, Marie Poulin went from 100 Twitter followers to 22,000 and built a business around teaching people how to use Notion. August Bradley started with 6 YouTube subscribers and grew to over 42,000, becoming one of the most recognised voices in the Notion community and building a full course and consulting business around the product.
These creators had a strong reason to keep making content about Notion. And every piece of content they made brought new people to the product.
What does the flywheel actually look like from start to finish?
The sequence is straightforward once you see it.
Someone discovers Notion through a template or a video made by a community member. They sign up and start using it. Some go deep, build their own setup, and create their own templates. They share those. New people find Notion through those templates. Some of those new people create templates too.
Each person who creates and shares something becomes a new entry point for the next user. The community does not just keep people around. It brings new ones in.
Today, the hashtag #notiontemplate alone has over 117 million views on TikTok. None of it was paid for by Notion, but all of it was created by people who genuinely wanted to share what they built.
That number tells you everything about how far this went.
Could other brands build something like this?
ClickUp did something similar. They grew to $278.5 million in revenue by 2024 without relying on paid ads in their early years. They offered a generous free plan, shipped product updates constantly based on what users were asking for, and let satisfied users bring in their teams naturally. Word of mouth became their main distribution channel.
Asana went the opposite way and built their growth on paid advertising. Same market, but very different paths.
Both approaches worked. But one built something that kept running without the budget behind it.
Paid ads are not wrong. They are one of the most effective ways to test an offer and scale what is already working. The question is what you are building alongside them.
Many brands start running ads and never build anything that works without them. The moment the budget stops, the growth stops too.
Every brand should be building a longer-term channel from day one, before hitting a certain revenue number. Paid ads and community should be running at the same time.
The ones who figure this out early have two things compounding at once. Short-term results from ads and long-term growth from the community they built alongside it.
Can a service business build a flywheel like this?
Notion is a software product. Someone signs up, uses it, and shares it without anyone from Notion being involved. One template reaches thousands of people with no extra effort from the team.
A service business works differently. Every new client needs time, people, and delivery. You cannot scale a service the way you scale software.
But the underlying idea still applies.
Think about your most engaged clients. They might get strong results, which is something worth sharing. And when they share what is working, it does something no ad can replicate. It shows proof without you saying anything.
That is the version of the flywheel that works for a service business.
Final words
Notion did not run a single paid ad to get its first million users. They just made it easy for people who already loved the product to do what they were naturally going to do anyway.
That is a different way of thinking about growth.
You already have people who believe in what you do. Are you making it easy for them to bring others in? Reply and tell me what you think.
See you at the next edition, Arindam