What isThe Notion Story?When Notion first went mainstream in 2018 there was a lot of competition for their product because it wasn't very good at the time.
A billion-dollar company is hard to fight, but if you use the power of the community, you can get ahead.
Because they didn't have a lot of popular white-labeled community tools back then, Notion chose Reddit to start with.
Finally, the 164,000-strong community came out of their moat. There are a lot of things to think about, but let's start at the top.
The Ambassador Program
This is what Notion thought they had to do in order to start a community. They had to build a top of the funnel of the engine. In their case, they used people who made things as "Notion Ambassadors." Notion Ambassadors, which include creators like Ali Abdaal, helped Notion and their community grow to a good size. If you make a video for Notion, they pay you between $3k and $10k for each one. I know this because I worked with Notion on a video and asked what the 1 million+ YouTubers wanted; they were kind enough to tell me.
Once the community had been "seeded," they had enough "context" to start their own talks. Templates were a great way to set the scene, and that seems to be the case even now. With their Discordgroup, they used the idea of "education and skill" to set the stage. People would mostly talk to each other about code, design, sales, marketing, and other things that people would talk about a lot.
You don't need to post a lot of times a day or get a lot of feedback on each post to run a good community. The top three posts on the Notion community get just 100 likes each day, which is less than 0.061 percent of the people who use the site each day. This is normal for a small community like this one.
The Community As A Guidepost
One thing to keep in mind is that the community also has a say in the products that are made. Take a look at the most popular postson the community this year. The community is very clear that they want a "offline mode." This is a very simple way for the developers to decide what features to add:
Notion doesn't have a lot of people in the company who are in charge of the community. This means that the team is small enough to work on making a good product. Templates are also a great way to get people to spread the word about Notion. This creates a very efficient community flywheel.
Final Thoughts
Notion is a far superior day than Monday in every way. Notion is inferior to Evernote, Trello, ClickUp, and Airtable, which are all better alternatives. Evernote and Trello are both extremely limited applications. They are effective for one thing, but are ineffective for everything else. Even though Airtable is the closest thing to Notion that this article has to say about it, it fails to live up to the expectations of the rest of the article. Notion is half the price of Airtable when compared side by side. Even before you factor in all of the free credit Notion awards you for completing specific tasks, the cost is even lower.
Today is the day to give Notion a shot. If you want to customize Notion to your liking, there are a plethora of other articles that will walk you through the process.