Pod Insights Lenny's Podcast How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts About this episode Camille Ricketts began her career in journalism, at the Wall Street Journal, in 2006. In 2010 she joined Tesla, where she worked in communications alongside Elon Musk. She transitioned into marketing and became the Head of Content and Marketing at First Round Capital and then went on to become the very first marketing hire at Notion. In today’s episode, we dig into community-led growth—what it is, and when and how to pursue it. We get super-specific on how Notion championed their most loyal users and built a passionate community, and the incredible outcome it had for the company’s growth. We also talk about how to create great content, and how content can drive growth for your business and brand.
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Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-notion-leveraged-community-to
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Where to find Camille:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/camillericketts
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camillericketts/
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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People referenced:
• Ivan Zhao: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanhzhao/
• Simon Last: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-last-41404140/
• Lexie Barnhorn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexisbarnhorn/
• Ben Lang: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmlang/
• Claire Butler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairetbutler/
• Jessi Craige Shikman at First Round: https://firstround.com/person/jessi-craige-shikman/
• Brett Berson at First Round: https://firstround.com/person/brett-berson/
• Josh Kopelman at First Round: https://firstround.com/person/josh-kopelman/#mystory
• Shaun Young on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunyou/
• David Pierce at The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/authors/david-pierce
Additionally, Camille would love to shout out Nate Martins and Andrea Lim, who ran Notion’s content program:
• Nate Martins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nate-martins/
• Andrea Lim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawlim/
Content and companies referenced:
• Community & Content Resources: https://camnotes.notion.site/Community-Content-Resources-f18fb1db2d094ec2a4140a7737fae362
• Station F: https://stationf.co/
• Figma: https://www.figma.com/
• Canva: https://www.canva.com/
• Stripe: https://stripe.com/
• Stripe Atlas: https://stripe.com/atlas
• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/
• First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
• Jobs to be done framework: https://jobs-to-be-done.com/jobs-to-be-done-a-framework-for-customer-needs-c883cbf61c90
• The Only App You Need for Work-Life Productivity: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-only-app-you-need-for-work-life-productivity-1521640800
• Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/
Find all lightning round references at https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-notion-leveraged-community-to-build-a-10b-business-camille-ricketts-notion-first-round-capital
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Camille’s background
(05:43) What it was like working with Elon Musk
(07:38) Working at Notion in the early days
(12:16) What is community-led growth?
(15:48) How Notion measured the impact of marketing efforts
(16:35) The most successful community efforts at Notion
(18:24) Why metrics aren’t always necessary for community growth
(19:52) When it makes sense to invest in community-led growth
(21:34) How creators make money using Notion
(23:12) The Ambassador Program and Champions Program at Notion
(27:20) Why founders should consider investing in community and delay monetizing some features
(31:03) Companies that have done well in building community
(32:54) How to determine the level of community engagement appropriate for your company to invest in
(34:00) Using Camille’s 2x2 grid to implement community
(36:42) How to launch an ambassador program
(41:22) Advice for founders who want to build community
(47:17) How Lenny got his first 500 newsletter subscribers
(48:58) Examples of Camille’s most impactful content marketing
(51:20) Content-market fit: how to determine the needs of your reader
(53:37) Content categories and the time it takes to create top-notch content
(57:02) The future of comms and how the press helped Notion grow
(1:01:35) Lightning round
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Transcript 13,457 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 The way that you think about product market fit, you have to think about content market fit. So even though content feels like it's running adjacent to the actual product that you're putting out there, you still have to think about who is my audience? Who is the audience that I really want to have? Who is the audience that is going to be drawn to this most? Who are they? What is it that they really need in their lives? Like even abstracting content from it at all. What is it that they need to get promoted? Was it that they need to avoid failure? What is it that causes them a great deal of anxiety in the day to day of their lives or their work? And can you create some type of content product that is going to address this for them?
0:38 Lenny Rachitsky? Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Camille Ricketts. Camille was the first marketing hire at Notion and longtime head of marketing at Notion. Prior to that, she was head of content and marketing at First Round Capital, where amongst many other things, she launched the First Round Review, which holds a very special place in my heart because a guest post in the First Round Review essentially helped me launch my now career of newsletter and now podcast. Camille also did content marketing at Kiva and also comms and PR at early Tesla,
1:21 Lenny Rachitsky? where she sat right next to Elon Musk for about a year. And she shares some really fun stories about that. In this episode, we focus on two areas that Camille was very early in and has tremendous insights around. One, community-led growth, what it actually is, when it's something you should invest in, how to do it well, all based on her experience building Notion's early community, which was a huge part of Notion's early success. We also talk about content marketing, when it's worth investing in, how to do it well, and all kinds of tips for building a content marketing machine. It was a total blast chatting with Camille and I'm really excited for you to learn from her. With that, I bring you Camille Ricketts, right after we hear a word from our wonderful sponsors. This episode is brought to you by EPO.
2:05 Lenny Rachitsky? EPO is a next-generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful, and Cameo rely on EPO to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country, and by user stage. EPO does all that and more: delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover.
2:50 Lenny Rachitsky? EPO lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your North Star metrics like activation, retention, subscriptions, and payments. And EPO supports tests on the front end, the back end, email marketing, and even machine learning clients. Check out EPO at geteppo.com, get E-P-P-O dot com, and 10x your experiment velocity. Hey, Ashley, Head of Marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?
3:21 Speaker 02 At least 40%.
3:22 Lenny Rachitsky? And how many of them screw that up? And what happens when they do?
3:25 Speaker 02 Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock-full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.
3:44 Lenny Rachitsky? I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest-leverage opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.
3:59 Speaker 02 Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify, and Zora are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile. It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.
4:16 Lenny Rachitsky? If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny.
4:27 Lenny Rachitsky? Camille, welcome to the podcast.
4:29 Speaker 00 Hello there. Thank you so much for having me.
4:32 Lenny Rachitsky? Absolutely. My pleasure. You have such a fascinating background, working at so many world-class companies with so many fascinating people. Could you just take a minute to talk about some of the wonderful things you've done in your career, just to set a little context for folks?
4:47 Speaker 00 Yeah. Well, thank you for characterizing them as wonderful.
4:50 Lenny Rachitsky? It's true.
4:51 Speaker 00 I feel like it's been a quite circuitous path, but definitely it's taken me to some interesting places. I started off as a journalist at the Wall Street Journal and then found my way into communications and marketing at Tesla Motors, where part of my responsibility there was to sit to Elon's right and make sure he had all the data he needed at his fingertips when talking to the press, which was, you know, deep end of the pool on the PR learning. And then after that, found my way to First Round Capital, where I was really fortunate to be at the ground floor of First Round Review, if anyone out there watching this is familiar with those pieces. Was there for about five years, loved that team, really incredible folks. And then they had invested in Notion really early on, and so I was able to meet Ivan Zhao as a result
5:36 Speaker 00 of that, and him and Simon, and they gave me the opportunity to join as the first marketing hire at Notion. And that's what I was doing up until recently.
5:44 Lenny Rachitsky? I love that Elon did it. I like that it was on his right, like as a right-hand person. What was that like? And is there something that you learned, working alongside Elon, sitting next to Elon, about operating, working that maybe you've taken to other places you worked at?
5:59 Speaker 00 I mean, it was a long time ago, so I'll caveat that. This was before Model S came out even, so a lot of my work was, and this is a great opportunity, but driving around in the roadster and talking to journalists and letting reporters ride in the car, which was very seductive and I think maybe just a little unfair from a PR standpoint. But in terms of what I learned, I mean, that was really the first job that I had that was necessitating just being incredibly on point with all the information. So making sure that I knew everything that could possibly come up in a conversation, being incredibly well-versed in just the topics at hand. I think that served me really well, just like. I just have to be like really, really, really quick and on it.
6:42 Speaker 00 And then the other thing that Elon, I think, is very talented at, or definitely at the time, really made an impression on me, was painting an emotional picture of the vision that he was really going after and being able to convey the emotional quality of the mission to the people he talked to. So definitely at the time about the electric vehicle revolution and then space travel, I think he just knew how to make people feel about it that really enlisted a lot of hearts and minds. And that is something that I've taken with me for sure.
7:09 Lenny Rachitsky? Would you say that was the most stressful place you've worked? Or have you found more stress post Elon?
7:15 Speaker 00 I think that that was the place where you just needed to be so on your game, like game face every single day, which is a wonderful skill to learn. And then I think there were other moments in my career where just the stakes might have been a little bit higher, certainly at Notion. Every day felt like we're building this thing together and, you know, we're in this very special moment. So yeah, I think there was a mix there.
7:39 Lenny Rachitsky? So speaking of Notion, I think you mentioned this, that if not, you were the first marketing hire at Notion, is that right?
7:44 Speaker 00 Yes.
7:45 Lenny Rachitsky? What employee number was that?
7:47 Speaker 00 I was number 11.
7:48 Lenny Rachitsky? Wow.
7:49 Speaker 00 Yeah. So it was really a small squad of folks at the time.
7:52 Lenny Rachitsky? And how big are they now roughly, would you say?
7:55 Speaker 00 So the last I heard, I think that they were around 400, maybe a little over 400.
7:59 Lenny Rachitsky? Amazing. And I think they're worth, I don't know, last valuation was like $10 billion. So there's been a, quite the journey must have been quite the adventure being at Notion during this time. What's maybe the most, I don't know, tangible memory of working at Notion in the early days? What was it like, early day Notion?
8:15 Speaker 00 You know, I think a lot about just what the environment felt like. This was the first very small startup that I had worked for. When I left first round, I really wanted that experience. And the first office that I worked in was really just like a home. Like it literally had an apartment on top of this kind of loft space. And it just felt like we were a group of people who kind of lived there together during the day, but it had that kind of homespun, really warm quality. So we all took our shoes off. There was like beautiful furnishings and rugs and we would all just sit around and drink tea and work together. On these couches, so it really had that feeling to it. And then there were like little quirks, like I like to reminisce with my colleagues who were there at the time that we didn't have like a great HVAC system.
8:58 Speaker 00 So during the summer, it was really hot and then in the winter, it was really cold. And we would have these big industrial fans. And it was just, at the time, we were like, oh, this is really bizarre. But now it's like one of our favorite memories to talk about. Or for a while, we didn't have overhead lighting. So me and my colleagues who were there working really late at night, it would just get darker and darker and darker. And one of my favorite folks there actually had a headlamp that she would switch on at a certain point in the evening. So that's the stuff that really comes up for me. Like, we were all working really hard and like in this thing together, but it's like that team sort of familial quality that stands out to me.
9:35 Lenny Rachitsky? I love how some of these early moments where it feels like, what the hell are we doing? We have, we have to wear headlamps. We're like, it's like super hot. Like when you're in it, you're like, this, this isn't maybe how our startup should be going. And it feels like really painful and hard, but looking back, it's always like the best memories, those hardships.
9:51 Speaker 00 It truly is. And like the moments that we were there like late at night, like really trying to get something done before a big launch the next day. That's where like our hearts lie, I think, to a large extent, that crew that was there.
10:03 Lenny Rachitsky? On that note, and we were talking about stress, working with Elon, you talked about Notion at a different kind of stress. What's maybe the most stressful memory you have of working at Notion, whatever you could share?
10:14 Speaker 00 This is something that has long since been rectified, but the first day that we came back from break in 2021. So we had all been, you know, sort of away for the holidays. We reassemble, I think it's like January 3rd, 2021, perhaps had a massive outage that day. And so it was literally like all hands on deck. We're suddenly seeing all of these people on Twitter pop up, on the Reddit pop up, being like, oh my gosh, what am I gonna do? You know, and it really reinforced for us. How central Notion had become to so many people. So on one hand, it was kind of this amazing moment of realization of how vital this thing we were building was all the time, which I mean, adds to the stress in the moment, but also kind of like your motivation overall.
10:57 Speaker 00 And then we also saw on Twitter, and this is part of why community is such a core focus of mine, but people being like, they're trying really hard to get it back up. Give them a break or like sending hugs to the Notion team. We know you've got this. And we really appreciated that. And that was just like a very heartwarming aspect of it. But that day was definitely a scramble and we wanted to be as communicative as possible. So my team was really central to making sure that everybody knew what was going on, what the efforts were being made to fix it, time horizon, all of that. So they've long since hired like the best infrastructure people, I think in the industry and refactored the database and everything.
11:39 Speaker 00 So it's not an issue anymore, but certainly that was a moment of stress at the time.
11:45 Lenny Rachitsky? It's interesting looking at those times, like when you're in it, you're like, we are going to die. We're down. People will stop using Notion. We're in big trouble. When really people always come back if it's an awesome product, if it's not like, I think it last scene was down for like a week, Jira or Confluence. And people come back if it's an awesome product.
12:02 Speaker 00 I think that's a good tactical learning and hopefully a takeaway for folks who maybe will experience that moment is that truly there's more resilience built into the system than you might think.
12:11 Lenny Rachitsky? So speaking of community, you talked about just how important that was during this time and then just in general. I was doing research on you and things that you've done over your career to prep for this podcast. And I found there's two areas that you've kind of led the charge on and were ahead of the curve on and in part helped innovate. One is community led growth and two is content marketing in a big way. And so I wanted to focus a lot of our chat on these two areas. So community led growth, it feels like a very buzzy topic on Twitter. Everyone's always talking about how the future of growth is community. You got to build a community, got to be community led and all these things. And so I want to try to make this concept concrete and help people understand, should they invest in community? How can community help you? When does it make sense to?
12:56 Lenny Rachitsky? When does it not make sense to invest? And so maybe just as a first question, just what, what does community like growth? What does that actually mean as a concept?
13:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think it has become quite buzzy and it's certainly aspirational for a lot of product-led growth companies and even those that are maybe a little bit outside of the product-led growth orbit. And we're seeing like all of these startups, I think, also come out that are about community and how to enhance that effect. In terms of how I think about what it actually is, it's when your community helps you achieve such ubiquity and such name recognition that it actually allows you to start moving up market into the enterprise. And I know that might be very specific to enterprise-oriented companies, but that's how we defined it at Notion, was the fact that so many people were talking about this, sharing what they had built about it, honestly, starting businesses of their own around it
13:46 Speaker 00 to kind of formalize the relationship with teams, that I think it de-risked Notion as a choice for a lot of companies, just because they had heard about it through so many channels. They had seen it on social media, they've heard about it on a podcast, their friend told them about it, they saw a billboard. Like, all of that lended itself to larger and larger companies and teams buying more and more seats. So I think that's the power that the community had for us. And I see that also being analogous to what companies like Figma have been able to achieve.
14:17 Lenny Rachitsky? It sounds like a lot of, the way you're describing it is basically awareness, brand awareness is what you found to be maybe the most useful element of this community that you built around Notion.
14:26 Speaker 00 I love using the word discovery because I think that that is even a little bit like a step further than awareness. Where like, true discovery is when you have intent to find out more, right? Like, you've heard about it so many times, or you've been intrigued by something that someone has told you to the extent that you're actually going to take the step of now learning about it. And that's where we really wanted to play and to emphasize our work.
14:54 Lenny Rachitsky? Got it. So it sounded like the KPI slash OKR of your team was get more people aware and kind of excited to explore Notion.
15:03 Speaker 00 Yeah, and maybe this is a tactical or helpful tactical point. I think when people think about like acquisition or discovery or brand awareness or brand in general, they're like, what collection of metrics are actually going to give us insight into this? And the one that I found to be the most instructive was net new visitors to the Notion website. So month over month, how many new people who had never been there before were motivated enough to come and actually learn about the product? And that was really the responsibility of the brand team and the folks that worked with me on community and content and all of the awareness campaigns that we were putting out into the field was about getting more new people interested.
15:44 Lenny Rachitsky? So that begs the question, did you have any clever ways of attributing that new traffic to stuff your team did versus, I don't know, the SEO team or other teams?
15:54 Speaker 00 In particular, I'll call out the influencer marketing efforts that were really being run by this incredible woman, Lexi Barnhorn, where they were incredibly measurable, where we were like, okay, well, we're sponsoring people for this amount, these creators across these platforms. And we know that people came from that content directly to the Notion website. So we were able to draw really tight connections. So I think that some types of content lend themselves to that. And then also with community, there's certain things you can do around helping your community members report on how many people are attending, et cetera, to give you that sense.
16:31 Lenny Rachitsky? So you may be already answering this question, but I'm curious what efforts had the most impact to achieve these goals that you had of creating more awareness and discovery, motivation and things like that, like what actually worked?
16:43 Speaker 00 So I'd say that the community efforts that were very big for us were the ambassadors. Also, making sure that people were hosting in-person events. This really took off in 2019. Obviously, we paused for 2020, 2021, but now I just spent time with Notion's head of community, Ben Lang, who truly is the mastermind and genius behind so much of this. And he says that they're back up to 30 in-person events a month around the world. So that really helped on the international scale of spreading ubiquity and ended up lending itself to like relationships with Station F in France, which is the biggest startup campus in Paris. So really helping us work our way into those types of networks and then supporting
17:25 Speaker 00 those people to also start their own businesses and derive whatever reward they were looking for themselves. So we really wanted to align our goals with theirs. A lot of those folks actually started revenue generating businesses as consultants or course makers or influencers. Some of them just wanted to build their own platforms online. So all of our efforts there are like around building guides or counseling people one-on-one or making it easier for them to to actually achieve those goals for themselves was also a big part of this growth. And then, like I said, influencers, this was something that Ben started exploring in 2019 and we were so pleasantly overwhelmed with the amount of traction and traffic that
18:08 Speaker 00 was driven by working with some of these influencers. And now that program has exploded into sort of a multi-channel effort. That's that's huge for Notion.
18:19 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. The influencers makes a lot of sense. I want to learn more about this ambassador program and what that was about, but with events and maybe just broadly, I imagine a lot of founders might be listening and they're like, yeah, this all sounds awesome. But like, how do you know if it's doing anything? Like the sound of like events, that'd be great. But like, how much is it worth investing? How much time and attention does it take? How do we know if this is actually ROI positive? Is there anything you learned there about just like, like, is it a founder must believe in this as a thing that is probably going to work sort of thing? Or is there something you found to convince people like, yes, this is how you can know it's working?
18:53 Speaker 00 That's a great question. I think that we were really fortunate that Ivan saw the inherent value in community from the very beginning and was deeply supportive. And actually, one of my number one recommendations for anybody who suspects the community could be a big growth driver is to not make metrics the be all end all at the very beginning. So we didn't necessarily start measuring things very concretely until last year with community, mostly because we had already seen so much organic scale that we saw being like Tied to our community efforts in some way in terms of where we were geographically expanding, how people were reporting that they had discovered us whenever we surveyed
19:33 Speaker 00 them. So that type of motion. And I think for any company that is seeing this type of just organic fervor, one of the worst things you can do is say, let's cut this off at the knees if it's not generating ROI.
19:47 Lenny Rachitsky? I imagine internally, there's just like, obviously, this is good. We may not be able to measure it, but it feels like this is very good for Notion. It feels like especially for a prosumer product like Notion, it makes a lot of sense because it's driven by people using it and then they bring it into the company. Like you said, maybe it's less ROI positive for just like full on enterprise products. Do you have any thoughts there? Just is this like a great strategy for prosumer-y enterprise products more so than, I don't know, more enterprisy?
20:15 Speaker 00 Definitely. I think if you have a long sales cycle or a high price point where there has to be many, many, many touch points in order to get somebody to decide to buy, I'm not sure that community should be the number one thing that you invest in. Certainly for freemium products, I think for a lot of them, especially if they have what I'm going to call the atomic unit of sharing, which I will define out, it becomes kind of a no, a no brainer. Like I think that community lends itself particularly well. If you have something that your product creates that people want to share because it exhibits something about themselves. So at Notion, it was templates or even people
20:57 Speaker 00 just creating their own workspaces and being really excited to show them off. So Notion really benefited from being a creative product. But the same is true of Figma or Canva or any of these where showing people what it is that you've created is an aspirational thing to do because you are showing that you are. Really well versed in how to use the products, extremely organized, like you're self-expressing in some way. So if your product does have that element to it, I think that community is a great investment.
21:30 Lenny Rachitsky? You touched on this point, and I don't think people realize this, but you can make a lot of money creating templates on Notion, right? That's like a whole ecosystem. Can you talk about that? Because I don't think a lot of people know this.
21:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, so this is one of the reasons that I would advise any of the companies that feel like they fall into this category to start early. Because you need to nurture all of these different routes that people in your community can take. Certainly, early on, I think that the people that we initially recruited in the ambassadors didn't see themselves doing, you know, maybe even close to a million dollars in business around helping other teams succeed with the product or selling templates. I remember really early on, probably like mid 2021, we heard of one creator who had made like $35,000 in four months selling one template. And that was a very common story then from that point forward. And helping them do that, like actually creating the guide material and the networks,
22:25 Speaker 00 and also the connections between the people who are running similar businesses who could help each other, that all became really fundamental. But to your point about, oh, is this actually related to the enterprise motion for Notion? Like so many companies now of many sizes are relying on the consultants that first came up through our community. And some of those consultants are now employing dozens of other people.
22:48 Lenny Rachitsky? That's incredible. There's no better way to motivate someone to evangelize Notion than have their income rely on Notion.
22:55 Speaker 00 And it's also just inspiring for us, honestly. Like, there are so many people who started off with not very many followers, and now they are celebrities within this ecosystem.
23:07 Lenny Rachitsky? So maybe coming back to the ambassador program, that's separate from this. Selling Notion templates ecosystem, right? What is the ambassador program?
23:14 Speaker 00 They're actually like quite blended because the folks who are excited about Notion, it takes a lot of forms. Sometimes they want to host events. Sometimes they want to build templates. So we would actually have channels inside of our Slack instance for the ambassadors that had these areas of focus based on what people really were passionate about or wanted to do. And they were like a force multiplying flywheel for each other because a lot of folks would enter the ambassadors program. And then I'm happy to talk about champions as well, which is a little bit different. And then discover what it would mean for them to build templates. And it became motivating for that reason. So on the champions side of things, and this is maybe speaking a little bit more to the enterprise as well. We wondered if sort of the same DNA that existed among consumers, for the most part,
23:58 Speaker 00 and the ambassadors could work for folks who were inside of our customer companies. And so we launched a another community, another Slack instance for folks who were the most passionate or the most avid users of Notion inside of our customer companies, which has become just a wonderful channel for customer success to be more communicative with those companies. Make sure that things are sticking or obstacles are being overcome. And that's been designed very specifically that way. And it has been really, really valuable over time.
24:30 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, so let me try to understand this. So champions are basically the most active users of Notion. You put them in a Slack and help them become even more excited and make sure they're happy. Ambassador, I still don't totally understand what is an ambassador? That's like, is that someone you're paying to help promote Notion? What does, what does that actually mean when you're ambassador?
24:47 Speaker 00 They're people who are really just passionate about the product.
24:49 Lenny Rachitsky? I see.
24:50 Speaker 00 So it's not transactional. They're people who love building with Notion. They love sharing what they've built in order to help others. And they really just want it to be a bigger part of their lives. And I think that one of the points about community. Is that it's not just a one-to-one conversation with us, like the, the big draw over time. Maybe people joined because they would get early access to features. We would get their feedback. That became really important for our product team. Or because we would offer AMAs with some of our folks internally. But over time, it was really because they were forming these bonds with each other and learning so much from each other. That most of the time, someone would come in and say, I'm struggling with this, or I don't quite know how to use this.
25:34 Speaker 00 And it would be another member of the community that would help them more immediately. So it really allowed them to form these dense networks of friendships that I think became just like a positive part of people's lives.
25:46 Lenny Rachitsky? What I'm taking away from this partly is there's, you kind of identify a group of people that are interested in Notion, excited about Notion, and then just lean in to support them. There's like people that are buying Notion, just, and that are power users, help them be better power users. Influencers that are kind of excited about Notion, like pay them to promote Notion. Then the ambassadors that are people just like passionate about Notion, help them be more passionate. And then the people making templates, like help them be successful. Is that kind of roughly how you think about, just like identify something that's working and make it more effective?
26:17 Speaker 00 I think if it doesn't sound too reductive, yes. I would also say, uh, that one of the things that I think Ben was best at is not putting a one-size-fits-all experience on any of this. I think that some communities get built where people are like, okay, well, we have this community and it's going to be this and this and this. Or these are the types of programs we're going to offer, or these are the types of interactions we're going to have. As opposed to, I think, a lot of listening of the people who are actually participating. Really early on, one of the things that Ben did that I thought was really amazing was he'd spend a ton of time just on Zoom. Having conversations, one-on-one conversations, like semi-small group conversations, just saying, why are you here? Why do you like participating in this? What is it that would make it better?
27:03 Speaker 00 And really helping our entire team follow their lead. So that, that-
27:09 Speaker 00 I would recommend highly not necessarily coming in with preconceived notions about what a community needs to look like.
27:16 Lenny Rachitsky? It kind of touched on this, that like if the founder believes in the power of community, this becomes so much easier. A lot of founders are like, nah, it's just a, that's a waste of time. Do you think founders are convincible that building community and investing community is worth it? Have you seen that effective where a founder is just like comes into it being like, no, I don't think this is worth their time. And then they kind of get convinced later? Or is it just like, nah, forget it. Don't even try?
27:40 Speaker 00 I mean, I've talked to a lot of different people who come at this with different impressions and everybody, you know, knows more about their company than I do. But I do think that if ubiquity or just the sheer sort of word of mouth engine is something that is going to be valuable for your company over time, I would really urge people to sit down and really think carefully, like, what is going to be more conducive to our long-term success? Is it going to be that ubiquity or is it going to be revenue now? And I think if we look at a lot of the companies that have been just wildly successful from the start, there are people who have pushed off maybe monetizing every little thing if it's going
28:20 Speaker 00 to really put a damper on that type of enthusiasm and momentum that people have to share it, what it is they're doing. Because there's always opportunity, I think, later, once you have that big tide of people who are not just excited, but also legitimizing what it is that you do every single day, that gets mobilized in a lot of different directions and you have a lot more options then.
28:42 Lenny Rachitsky? What's interesting about Notion is it's, you have high LTVs when you sell to larger companies, but the initial users are often just regular folks. And so I think it's like in a unique place where you can, you have cash to spend on making it ubiquitous and getting the word out through all these community efforts because it'll pay off. And a lot of companies probably don't have that advantage. So would it feel right to say that this is really effective for kind of like product-led growthy freemium products most? Is that, is that a good way to think about it?
29:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, or I think if organic growth is something that you see being really beneficial, or if organic growth happens to be something you really have to crack because you don't always have everything you need for paid growth from, you know, either a resourcing standpoint, team standpoint, really figuring out how to get that organic flywheel going can serve you well. It becomes this buttress for any paid growth you explore in the future.
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31:00 Lenny Rachitsky? What other companies come to mind when you think about companies that effectively did community-led growth, did community well, and grew in large part because of community?
31:09 Speaker 00 I've mentioned Figma a couple of times here, so I don't want to belabor the point, but they were certainly a team that I've looked up to. Through my entire experience at Notion, we were kind of sibling companies in a way. Huge kudos to Claire Butler over there, who I knew led all of those efforts. And we would trade a lot of knowledge back and forth, which was so lovely to have that relationship. But they did an amazing job, I think, in a similar vein to Notion of saying, okay, people are really excited to create these things and then put them out there on the internet. So how can we just fuel that particular motion out there? The other example I'll give, which is a little bit of a different tack, is Stripe. And when Stripe launched Stripe Atlas, not necessarily core to the initial product line
31:53 Speaker 00 that Stripe was known for and what had been foundational for them, but allowed them to build this community among probably their core demographic at the time, which was founders and startups that were growing through the stages to mid-market. They were able to cultivate this huge audience of founders around giving advice and providing them with resources to actually get started and do that zero to one journey. So while it was adjacent to maybe what the company's core mission was, it allowed them to actually create community among their customer base. Because they were like, we're knowledgeable, we can share these things with you that we know are core to your journey. So I would encourage anyone who's thinking about community that way to be like,
32:35 Speaker 00 oh, maybe it doesn't have to be around our product so specifically. What other knowledge or resourcing can we offer to the people who we do want using our product? That's going to be really instrumental for them and can we convene them around that idea?
32:49 Lenny Rachitsky? I'm noticing a strong correlation between legendary generational companies, Figma, Stripe, Notion and community efforts and building community. That's interesting.
33:00 Speaker 00 Yes, I'm a big proponent. At the same time, I don't think the community is right for every company. I think that there's definitely an analysis to run on that. But hopefully this is helpful for those who can identify that those are attributes they have.
33:14 Lenny Rachitsky? To pull on a thread there, what are maybe thoughts for when it probably doesn't make sense to invest a lot of efforts into building a community around your product? We talked a little bit about just like, you know, high-end enterprise products. Is there anything else that just like, man, it's probably not worth your time?
33:29 Speaker 00 Like I said, if it's more of a sales-led culture that you have, which is definitely true of products that are a little bit pricier or that require longer contracts. So, understanding that. But I do think the community takes on different forms. And I think when you hear the word "community", you think of a big forum of some type, whether it's a Slack instance or something else, where people are chatting away all day long. And I don't think it has to be that. That's not the only representation of it. So if you think about what is going to be right for you at any given time, I actually created this two-by-two matrix, which maybe I'll share with you after this. And on the axes, you have whether you have hit product-market fit or if you're still exploring product-market fit,
34:14 Speaker 00 and then whether you're strongly enterprise or strongly consumer. And based on where you land, sort of in that two-by-two matrix, there's a form of community or like a community-related initiative that could be right for you. So just to give you an example of sort of like, maybe an extremely different form factor from Notion. Let's say that you're still on your way to product-market fit and you're a strongly enterprise-oriented product. I think that you have the opportunity to do customer advisory boards, which is really convening like even smaller circles of ideal-fit users and making sure that they are connected to each other as well as you, and then incentivized to provide you with feedback, understanding that they're really on the ground floor
34:59 Speaker 00 of this journey with you and that they're going to be able to have influence over whatever you do in the future. Those folks can end up growing into your biggest evangelists. And I've seen that happen a number of times. And I would still consider that community, even though maybe that is not what comes to mind for folks.
35:16 Lenny Rachitsky? Well, I imagine that becomes the seed of a community that you eventually build. Um, let's definitely link to this in the show notes. Can you give maybe a couple more examples of this grid? So that was pre-product market fit. And then what was the other?
35:27 Speaker 00 Strongly enterprise.
35:29 Lenny Rachitsky? Enterprise. Okay, cool. Yeah, what are a couple other of the elements of this grid?
35:32 Speaker 00 So if you're strongly enterprise and you have product market fit, let's say, this is something that Notion is really benefited from, but really emphasizing the champions and the consultants communities. So the folks who, like I said, may be inside of your customers, who really get it, like really get your value, really are excited to help you expand, land and expand perhaps inside of their companies. Making sure that they have a place to gather and a place to feel like they are more connected with your team than the average person gets to be, that they are special and that they have access. And then on the consultant side, uh, like I said, just making it really easy, removing friction, helping promote the folks who want to be out there,
36:17 Speaker 00 helping you succeed with more customers. Like Salesforce, I know that this is like a golden oldie of an example, but if you talk to anybody who was really early at Salesforce, they really went into this where they saw people emerging who wanted to help other companies, this layer of people who didn't work at Salesforce, but saw the opportunity to help other companies uh, actually succeed with it, implement it, grow with it. And that's become a massive part of Salesforce's model. So if you're in that quadrant, figuring out how to start moving people in your customer base into those categories.
36:53 Lenny Rachitsky? This is awesome. Maybe let's do one more of this grid and then we'll leave one for, for people to click into and check it out.
36:59 Speaker 00 So I'll talk about Notion's quadrant, which is the one that I would put like sort of up and to the right, which is you have product market fit and you're maybe a little bit closer to the consumer side of the spectrum. Obviously Notion runs the full gamut, but I would say especially early on, I think that that's where we saw things take root. And that's where I think ambassadors and influencers really take off. Individuals who are going to be extremely vocal, extremely excited, um, and where you're going to see sort of more of this like wildfire spread of at least trying the product, using the product, understanding what the product is. So if you can try to fuel that type of motion, if you're in that quadrant, that's helpful.
37:39 Lenny Rachitsky? I want to come back to this ambassador program real quick because it feels like something that a lot of people talk about and can do, and especially in this quadrant of product market fit and consumer. How does this work? Is it you select like here's like 100 ambassadors we're going to pick because we think they're awesome and they're great examples of people using say Notion and then we're just going to provide them with all the help they need to be successful in Notion. Is it like, how do you think about what is, how do you think about creating an ambassador program?
38:05 Speaker 00 I actually think it's pretty analogous to when you're thinking about positioning your company because I think the best first step for any positioning exercise is to think who are our best fit customers where it's like these are the people that seem to be really getting it, they're paying us more, they're talking about it just organically. So really figuring out everything about who they are and making sure that those are the people that you're actually inviting in early. So the initial base of the ambassadors program, which started back in 2019, was just 20 people and they were the 20 people who we happened to see be the most vocal already across Twitter and a couple of other social media platforms because they had that sort of shared quality
38:48 Speaker 00 of wanting to be really vocal and expressive about their experience with the product. So that would be my advice for how to get one of these rolling.
38:57 Lenny Rachitsky? And then what do you do for them?
38:59 Speaker 00 Definitely making sure that there's enough incentive built in, right? Because like we said, it's not meant to be a transactional relationship, but we want them to feel like they are having a special experience and they are connected with the company in a unique way. And it was so interesting to us how giving them the preview of features was so motivating to them and being able to use them and then give us feedback and feel really heard by the product team. So that was like a big area of focus and I know that that still is and it's become even more of a robust conversation between the community and the team at Notion itself.
39:38 Speaker 00 And then also, we would do these very special experiences where Ivan or Akshay or Simon or MLM, who's the head of engineering there, would be available for these conversations where they would answer questions and it would feel like a very proprietary space. I think that that was really interesting to people. And then, of course, the things that you would suspect around subsidizing events, making sure that people felt that they were actually supported by us to throw these events, and then also promoting their work. So if you look back at the social media channels, so much of the focus is on putting the creations of the people we were working with front and center as opposed to talking about just what the company was up to.
40:22 Lenny Rachitsky? Have you ever written about just like how to design an ambassador program? Or has anyone written about how Notion did this? Because this is really interesting.
40:28 Speaker 00 I don't know if anything has been written that went into all of this detail, but it was truly, truly one of the more magical, and I think still is one of the more magical parts of this entire endeavor.
40:41 Speaker 00 And now that team is three people. So Ben, who's still there doing amazing things, Francisco, who joined us in 2021, or sorry, at the end of 2020, and then Emma. And they are just all day, every day, talking to people around the whole world. Like, the international component of this is also just completely wild to see.
41:05 Lenny Rachitsky? This could be a future first round review post, which we'll talk a bit about.
41:08 Speaker 00 Yes.
41:09 Lenny Rachitsky? Last question about this segment. Say someone is convinced they want to start investing in community, and we talked about this two by two, but maybe just broadly, if you had to boil it down to two or three pieces of advice for founders, for teams thinking about investing in community-led growth and community in general, what would be some of those pieces of advice?
41:30 Speaker 00 I don't know if you want to link to this in the show notes as well, but I actually put together some commandments for community builders, some alliteration. So the thing that I think were very defining for us early on, I already mentioned something about this, but not trying to hit a number early on. So don't dilute the impact of what it is that you're trying to do in order to show growth. I think that that's very important to protect yourself early on. So making sure that you are learning what individuals really want out of this and making them feel like they're very seen and very heard. That was a big area of focus, and I think it's what kept people. Really engaged and like coming back and feeling like this was kind of a secondary family for them.
42:13 Speaker 00 And then one of the things that was most interesting to us that once we started sharing what was going on to the community with folks at Notion. So we would do this during all hands meetings or like on Slack, Ben would post these really incredible updates of just like all of the activities of people in the community and what they were up to every month. And it was just so inspiring for everybody inside the company that I think it all rallied us to, to do even more, I guess, day to day and really understand who it was we were building for.
42:46 Lenny Rachitsky? Is there any other commandments you would add for if you already have a community going, if you have something bubbling for things you should do to keep it healthy and consistently good and growing?
42:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, this is gonna be a little contrarian perhaps. And I, I mean, this is just one data point for me, but not growing it so big, so fast. Like one thing that we actually thought about pretty carefully was what a rate of healthy growth would be. So there actually is an application process for joining the ambassadors. It's a very light application process and it really is just so that we know how many people are interested in this. And then they're inducted around, I think it was, at the time it was 20 people at a time every month. So that it wouldn't feel like all of a sudden this had changed in terms of how the interactions were feeling, but rather like gave everybody time to welcome the new people in and get to know them.
43:41 Speaker 00 And one of Ben and I's favorite things ever about working at Notion, I think, was when we would induct new people into the ambassadors and they would introduce themselves and say like, hey, I'm from Venezuela and here's the ways in which Notion has changed my life. I'm from Hong Kong and here's how it's changed my life. And all of that was just like so fulfilling. That would be the number one thing I would say is, is give your community time to actually grow in what feels like an organic fashion as well. Because I think ironically, and then I'll stop rambling about this, but if you grow to something like, you know, oh, we have 5,000 ambassadors, which feels like really good to say, like on a website, the conversation is actually very muted.
44:29 Speaker 00 I think because people feel like they're speaking to an auditorium whenever they say anything, I think it's because you don't really have a sense of who else is there with you. So helping to defray those concerns, I think, is a good course of action.
44:43 Lenny Rachitsky? I've seen the same thing with the growth rate being really important with my newsletter Slack community. I don't know if, I think most listeners probably know this, but if you're a paid newsletter subscriber, you get access to the Slack community. There's about 10,000 people in there. And I find the filter of people that are willing to pay for content, like a newsletter, is a really good filter for awesome people. And so it ends up slowing growth in a really healthy way. And then just creating this filter of like, the people that really want to self-improve and value the sort of thing join and it becomes a really amazing group of people.
45:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, it just, it feels like such a, I don't know, there's some, there's an emotional quality to it, I think, when that's the case.
45:23 Lenny Rachitsky? Right.
45:24 Speaker 00 Yeah. And all of those people end up being so incredibly impactful. The last point I'll make about community at Notion is that a lot of those people, and we actually ended up launching, I think, a channel for folks who wanted to do this in particular, for run communities external to Notion's actual owned communities. So you end up with Facebook groups that have, I think Notion in Vietnam has like 250,000 members.
45:49 Speaker 00 Or the subreddit, which I now know has like 210,000 people in the Notion subreddit. And those are all run and moderated by community members who just love running their own communities.
46:00 Lenny Rachitsky? I feel like you've achieved your OKRs of ubiquity of Notion.
46:04 Speaker 00 Yes. Yes. It was always a goal, always a value at Notion, to make sure that we were reaching as many people as possible.
46:12 Lenny Rachitsky? It's working. One tactical question, where does the community, the own community of Notion live? Is it like a Slack? Is it an online thing you built yourself?
46:20 Speaker 00 It is in Slack. Yeah. And the thinking there, and it still is, was that we really just wanted to be in the course of people's everyday lives. We didn't want to be this other destination that you would have to make a point to going to every day.
46:31 Lenny Rachitsky? That's exactly how I thought about it with my newsletter Slack community, like PMs and founders, they're already in Slack all day. And just that badge being on the app, telling them there's something to check is such a powerful. Feature versus like download a whole new app or go to a whole new website. You're never going to go there, you know, it has to be like 10 times better to pull you to a whole new site and change your habits.
46:52 Speaker 00 I absolutely agree.
46:53 Lenny Rachitsky? Glad we're all on Slack. Slack's so underrated. I feel like people hate on Slack all the time, but it's such a good product.
46:57 Speaker 00 We all love it. It's just become sort of like something we take for granted in the background there.
47:03 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, exactly. Okay, so this is a good time to shift to our second topic, which is around content and content marketing. So you started the first round review, right, at first round?
47:13 Speaker 00 Yes.
47:13 Lenny Rachitsky? I don't know if you know this, but it was a first round review was a big part of my early trajectory with this newsletter life. I did a guest post in the first round review and that was like,
47:23 Speaker 00 I remember that.
47:24 Lenny Rachitsky? That was a huge deal for me. That was my first like 500 subscribers to my newsletter.
47:29 Speaker 00 Wow.
47:30 Lenny Rachitsky? And then I did another guest post down the road, but that was not as important. Yeah, it was like a big part of my early path down this life. And so thank you for creating that platform. It was, I was very honored to be, to be involved.
47:43 Speaker 00 That's fantastic to hear and exactly what we wanted to have happen. Just extraordinary operators being given a platform and then using it to do whatever it is that they wanted to do at like that's, that was part of the dream always.
47:56 Lenny Rachitsky? It's working.
47:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, I'm very, I'm thrilled because now people are learning so much from you.
48:01 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, it's an, it's an inspiration for where when I started to just like, I wish I could be as good as the first round review. And the stuff just keeps coming and coming. It's, it's amazing. And I know other folks run it now. I don't know if they want to be named. They like to be behind the scenes.
48:14 Speaker 00 They do, but I'm going to shout them out anyway, because they do such an extraordinary job. Yeah, I mean, Jesse Craig Schickman over there has been doing this now for longer than I did. And she is absolutely incredible and her team is extraordinary and I, I don't miss it every single time it comes out.
48:30 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, I tried to thank her in my, I tried to thank her in my post. She's like, don't mention that I'm involved.
48:36 Speaker 00 Maybe I'll ask her.
48:37 Lenny Rachitsky? No, I'm sure we have to, we have to give her some cred somehow.
48:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, absolutely. She deserves it.
48:44 Lenny Rachitsky? So kind of zooming out, content marketing.
48:48 Lenny Rachitsky? Maybe just to give some examples of just like, what are some of the most impactful things you've been a part of that come from content, creating content, whether it's Notion, First Round, anywhere else? What are some examples?
48:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'll give a few examples. I mean, obviously, First Round is a huge example. And so I'd be remiss in not going into some detail there. And truly, like, that was a team effort from the very beginning. So I joined in 2013. And again, I was just so fortunate to work with a leader who believed in it from the very beginning. Josh Kopelman, who's the partner there, who was just a massive supporter of mine, Finn Barnes on the partnership team. But then particularly Brett Berson, who was running the platform team, which is where all of these value-added services sort of live. So it was me and an events person and the talent person. And Brett just like gave us all of the runway and all of sort of the belief and support that we needed. And he was really bullish on content and
49:39 Speaker 00 really helped from the beginning, connecting me with incredible interview subjects. Because this whole thing, the only reason I think it survived and did as well as it did is that we were able to land a few really big names at the very beginning. And then, of course, that helps you down the road whenever you're trying to convince anyone else to do it, because you say so and so and so and so have already been featured. So that was, I think, just a big point of like confidence and also like tactically for anyone out there thinking about it, if they can leverage whatever connections they have in that vein.
50:13 Lenny Rachitsky? I was at dinner with Brett yesterday.
50:15 Speaker 00 Oh, my God. What a guy, right?
50:17 Lenny Rachitsky? First Round event. What a guy. That guy's amazing. I'm a huge fan. He's built an incredible platform and program at First Round.
50:24 Speaker 00 Yeah. And he's one of the people that I've learned the most from, certainly. But more specific to your question around what the content program was able to do there, certainly discovery of First Round. I think prior to that, it was it was a very successful VC fund, but I think we got in front of all kinds of people, particularly in non-traditional geographies or non-traditional founder types or all of that. People who are inside large companies like Google, Apple, Amazon. Whenever we would look at our list of subscribers, we had a disproportionate number of email addresses within those companies that were clearly curious about the startup experience. And I think First Round review was helpful in moving them more toward that mindset. And then them obviously understanding that First Round would be like a great first stop for them.
51:09 Lenny Rachitsky? What would you say is key to content being valuable? Like, so you're talking about The first round review became really effective for people learning about first round, working with first round, discovery of first round. But it's not just content. It's like you just write some stuff and it works. It doesn't work that way.
51:27 Speaker 00 Right.
51:28 Lenny Rachitsky? What have you learned about just what do you have to get right? You mentioned like have names people recognize. Is there anything else you've learned over the years of just like, here's what we need to get right? If you're trying to use content as a way to create discovery and awareness of your stuff.
51:40 Speaker 00 This is something that I think we chatted about briefly, but the way that you think about product market fit, you have to think about content market fit. So even though content feels like it's running adjacent to the actual product that you're putting out there, you still have to think about who is my audience? Who is the audience that I really want to have? Who's the audience that is going to be drawn to this most? Who are they? What is it that they really need in their lives? Like even abstracting content from it at all. What is it that they need to get promoted? Was it that they need to avoid failure? What is it that causes them a great deal of anxiety in the day to day of their lives or their work? And can you create some type of content product that is going to address this for them? And is actually going to have that value?
52:22 Speaker 00 So I think approaching content, the way that you would a product in a lot of ways is very instructive way to sort of start hashing out your strategy. Starting with your audience, understanding their big needs. You've heard this, I'm sure, and most of your audience has, but there's the vitamin versus painkiller sort of dichotomy and painkillers always win. So can your content be a painkiller? Can it help people out of situations that are causing them a lot of pain? Can it help people stop being so confused? Or can it make them even feel less alone in their experience? Like that was a big one for first round review is helping operators share failures
53:03 Speaker 00 or suboptimal situations in the spirit of helping many other people feel like that was normalized and that, you know, the experiences they were having weren't as dire as maybe they had thought.
53:13 Lenny Rachitsky? I love that. It connects so much with the way I think about writing. I use the jobs to be done framework a little bit here where I'm just like, what, what job am I doing when I'm writing a post? And you tell me if this makes sense to you, but I feel like there's kind of four jobs to be done of a newsletter. Either help people make money. There's like newsletters, here's how to invest, here's how to buy Bitcoin and win. Help people make money, entertain people. There's like, you know, a lot of funny things, memes and cartoons and things like that. Help people get better at their work or life, which is the category we're in. And then inform people like news.
53:48 Speaker 00 Yes, like what I didn't know before. Yeah.
53:51 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah. And it feels like you gotta do really well. You gotta pick which bucket you're in. And let me know if you think of any others, because this is the four that I always come back to. And then pick your bucket and then be the best at that thing in your category. That's the way I think about it.
54:04 Speaker 00 I love that. I love that listing out of those and also the acknowledgement that there are emotional jobs to be done. They're not just utilitarian jobs to be done. It's not just you didn't know this before and now you do. But it's like you felt this way before and now you don't or you do. And I think that that's underestimated. So I love that you called out like entertaining people. Cause we're all working in an industry where it's, it's wonderful to interact with some of that sparkle and levity. So I love that approach.
54:31 Lenny Rachitsky? And something else that goes unsaid, I think, in the way you talked about this is just putting in the time to make it really high quality. If you look at a first round post, like how much time would you say goes into every typical first round repost?
54:44 Speaker 00 Oh gosh, here's where I'm going to shout out my writing partner at first round, Sean Young, who was there with me for most of my time there. And he and I would always, always talk about this, but it would take like eight hours to just write the thing.
54:56 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, yeah.
54:57 Speaker 00 And that's after you had done all of the prep work of like, making sure that your interviewee was feeling really anchored and understanding a topic that you were both really excited about and making sure you were mining like all of the tactical gems from that, that conversation. And then you would start writing and that would be another eight hours. I don't know if that's your experience, but certainly was.
55:17 Lenny Rachitsky? Very similar. I generally, I don't time myself, but I feel like the median time to write a post for me is about 10 hours. So it's.
55:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
55:25 Lenny Rachitsky? And that's, I think, the key that a lot of people don't think about. One is they don't have the time and two, they don't realize they should spend this much time. Because the bar is so high for content on the internet. As we all know, there's so much stuff out there. And so to get above that noise, you have to really make it really good. And that just takes time. And I find this really strong correlation between the time it takes me to write a post and how well it does. It's like very highly correlated. And the advantage folks like say the first interview you have and I have is I do this full time and there's like a team doing this. And so people that are doing this on the side, it's much harder because they don't have that time.
56:00 Speaker 00 It is. I end up admiring those people a lot where I'm like, how are you doing?
56:04 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, they're sacrificing something.
56:06 Speaker 00 Yeah, but truly, that's, that's, it's a very shared experience with you. And I think that a lot of that was making connections between the information that you had available from these interviews. So not just straight like, here's what this person said, but how can you draw connections between those things, connect the dots, pull out bigger themes, all of that is really where I think a lot of the time went.
56:30 Lenny Rachitsky? So you said you had this content market fit questionnaire that you talked through. You're going to send me a link that we can point people to to check it out, right?
56:37 Speaker 00 Yes.
56:37 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, awesome.
56:38 Speaker 00 A lot of it is about getting to know your audience to an almost like beleaguered degree.
56:43 Lenny Rachitsky? Which is basically like, what job will you do for them? Like you said, and so that makes sense. Maybe a couple more questions. Something that I've noticed, and this is related to content and, and just PR and stuff like that. I've noticed a lot of people on Twitter and founders are kind of trying to pitch this idea that you don't need to think about comms and press and PR as much because now you can go direct, you can have a newsletter, you can write, you can tweet, you can LinkedIn. Do you feel like that is where the future is going for founder press and comms and things like that? Or do you think you still need to have a really strong comms, press, PR org within your company?
57:23 Speaker 00 That's a great question because I think that there's been just a lot of change in this space over the last five years and certainly very strong opinions from all over the ecosystem. I'm a big believer in comms and I don't just say that because I used to be a journalist or I used to work in comms, but I think that there are very few and far between incredible megaphones for what it is that you or your company is doing, where you get to reach such a breadth of people with that stamp of credibility and notice. Like, how do you get somebody to say, hey, this is really something you should pay attention to? Obviously, I support like all of the owned media efforts that are really working and bubbling
58:06 Speaker 00 up. And like I said, influencer, I think, is going to be like a massive shift in how we discover things. But maintaining a wonderful relationship with the press, being straightforward, being that brand that is going to be accessible, I really think that that pays off. And just to give you one example, David Pierce, who I think is one of the best working journalists in tech today, he's at The Verge now. He was covering personal tech for The Wall Street Journal early on at Notion and published a story that said, this is the one work-life productivity app that you'll ever need. And that was Notion's big break. Like, truly, if you look back at the graphs, like, that made a demonstrable difference. And I've
58:49 Speaker 00 seen that happen time and time again. And one of my sort of other efforts at First Round was helping companies in the portfolio figure out how to DIY comp strategies. And I saw this again and again, that the companies that did get stories that really told, you know, their mission, it made a big difference for just discovery awareness, the number of people who wanted to be involved with them as candidates, as investors, as customers.
59:15 Lenny Rachitsky? This gives me a new post idea of just what are the big breaks of companies? Like, what was the moment where they kind of started taking off? Note to self?
59:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, yes. I mean, the other big thing for Notion was Product Hunt. I want to give them.
59:26 Lenny Rachitsky? Oh, okay. So posting a product hunt, that was a big deal for Notion?
59:30 Speaker 00 It was. And it remains a big deal. If you go on Product Hunt and you type in Notion, you'll see just how many templates have been able to get noted because of Product Hunt.
59:40 Lenny Rachitsky? So it's the templates being posted, but then also like the launch of Notion on Product Hunt?
59:44 Speaker 00 Yes. And Notion 2.0. And then whenever we would have like a major sort of productized launch.
59:51 Lenny Rachitsky? Wow, that's awesome, man.
59:52 Speaker 00 Notion AI very recently for them, which couldn't be more exciting.
59:55 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, I have access to that. I've been playing around. It's awesome. Maybe a last question along these lines. I was thinking about the founders that you've worked with. So on the one hand, you have Elon, who is very direct on Twitter to his audience. And then Ivan feels much less so and more kind of under the radar and doesn't love tweeting a lot. And then for some of you somewhere in the middle, do you have any thoughts on how much a founder should invest in, say, tweeting and going and communicating to the direct to book? Or is it more just whatever the founder is, their personality, just go with that?
1:00:26 Speaker 00 I really do think it's about personality and what feels authentic. You know, like, I think that so much of a founder's strength comes from leaning into where they know that they they love to work, what they know about themselves. And I think that one of the biggest mistakes you can make on social media is giving yourself a quota that you have to hit and say, like, I have to say X number of scintillating things every week on these platforms. We've just seen so much more traction, even from like the main Notion accounts when we're a little bit more reserved and we wait until we have something to say that has value.
1:00:57 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. Any last closing thoughts before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
1:01:04 Speaker 00 Closing thoughts? No, this was a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for letting me share. Truly, I also want to make sure I'm giving a lot of credit away from all the people that I mentioned throughout. It was all just a major team effort and I've gotten very, very lucky to work with the best people.
1:01:17 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. We'll try to link to all of the people you mentioned in our show notes. We try to do that every time, so it'll be a long show notes. And we're not done yet. We've reached our very exciting lightning round. I'm going to ask you six questions real quick, whatever comes to mind. We'll go through it pretty fast. That sound good?
1:01:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, we'll see how it goes.
1:01:35 Lenny Rachitsky? Let's go. No pressure. What are two to three books that you recommend most, that you've recommended most to other people?
1:01:42 Speaker 00 Obviously Awesome by April Dunford. If you're looking to position your company, I don't know if you've read it, but it is like a step-by-step guide. It's like 100 pages long.
1:01:50 Lenny Rachitsky? I've read it. She's done a guest post on my newsletter. She's been on the podcast, so all over it.
1:01:56 Speaker 00 Fantastic. She's incredible.
1:01:59 Lenny Rachitsky? Yep.
1:01:59 Speaker 00 Yes. Oh, gosh, I'm going to have a hard time coming up with two other books that have had that sizable of an impact.
1:02:04 Lenny Rachitsky? We can keep it to one, too. It's all good.
1:02:06 Speaker 00 We keep it to one.
1:02:07 Lenny Rachitsky? Yes, just the one. All you need. What's a favorite other podcast that you listen to other than the one you're on currently?
1:02:15 Speaker 00 I mean, I love your podcast. Harry Stubbs never ceases to amaze me. We've gone on at Notion a couple of times and I just really appreciate his approach to mining a lot of incredible information and unexpected stuff.
1:02:30 Lenny Rachitsky? Harry Stubbs is the godfather of this podcast because I did his podcast. And at the end of it privately, he's like, Lenny, you need to do a podcast, you idiot. Why are you not doing a podcast? And that got me over the hump and that's, and look at us now. So, yeah, huge shout out.
1:02:44 Speaker 00 I love all of these connections that exist. That's wonderful.
1:02:47 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah. Next question, favorite recent movie or TV show that you've loved?
1:02:53 Speaker 00 Oh gosh, recent. So I went to go see Tar, which I know is going to be like, not everybody's cup of tea, but it was just incredible to watch this performance from Cate Blanchett. Like she learned German, she learned how to be a credible conductor of a major symphony orchestra. Like if you want to see a Bravura performance, that's the one to see. And then recent television show I'm watching Fleischmann is in Trouble. I love the book. And I just think that the detail and texture of that show is super well done.
1:03:22 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. My wife and I have been watching that and it's awesome. Last episode was less, less exciting. So I'm curious where it all goes, but I'm, I'm watching.
1:03:29 Speaker 00 Agreeing. But every time Claire Danes is on screen, I'm like, I'm riveted. Yeah.
1:03:35 Lenny Rachitsky? Favorite interview question that you like to ask folks, either when you're interviewing in a place, hiring, anything that comes to mind.
1:03:41 Speaker 00 Yeah. The one thing that was really helpful, because we used to do this thing at first round review, where we would like explore topics and be like, how do we get to a topic that's going to be unique or new knowledge or whatever it was. And it was, what is one thing that you think that led to your success that nobody else in your peer set has done? Like what was something that you did on a lark or that you were like, this is a big bet, or this isn't probably going to work, or it's a mistake that it even turned out this way, but it ended up being great? What is that one thing that was like unusually conceived that you want to share with people?
1:04:09 Lenny Rachitsky? I love that question. I just want to answer it, but let's move on.
1:04:12 Speaker 00 Okay.
1:04:13 Lenny Rachitsky? What are five SaaS products that you use or have used other than Notion that you found to be really good, other than maybe Slack, which everyone always mentions?
1:04:24 Speaker 00 I mean, I'm in love with Notion. The other thing, like the other great love of my life right now is Arc, the browser company.
1:04:29 Lenny Rachitsky? Oh my God, I love Arc. I just switched to it. I love it.
1:04:32 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:04:32 Lenny Rachitsky? Yes.
1:04:33 Speaker 00 It was something that I tried and within an hour I made it my default browser. And I just think it's beautiful and delightful in one of those intangible ways that a lot of these products are.
1:04:43 Lenny Rachitsky? Same.
1:04:43 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:04:44 Lenny Rachitsky? Cool.
1:04:44 Speaker 00 Um.
1:04:45 Lenny Rachitsky? Oh, there's more. Yeah.
1:04:45 Speaker 00 I already talked about Figma. I love Figma. I actually use it in my day to day life, which is one of the best parts of it is that folks who are not necessarily designers or highly technical can also get a lot out of it. Superhuman, couldn't live my life without Subrium. And whenever I have to go back into Gmail to like set an auto responder or whatever, I'm like, ugh, my eyes. So couldn't live without that. Gosh, I'm on sabbatical, so I don't know how many other SaaS products I'm actually using day to day. So I'm going to keep it at three.
1:05:11 Lenny Rachitsky? All right. Yeah. Use less SaaS products during your sabbatical. It's a good philosophy.
1:05:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, I don't know if that was your experience, but it just is.
1:05:18 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
1:05:19 Speaker 00 Oh, the other one I'll shout out, even though this is like a sneaky Notion plug is Kron. So if anybody isn't using the Kron calendar, which is now part of Notion, as some folks might know, it is in fact the best calendar product on the market.
1:05:32 Lenny Rachitsky? Sneaky, sneaky.
1:05:33 Speaker 00 That's.
1:05:34 Lenny Rachitsky? Last question. What's a favorite read or course or just like anything you recommend, you'd recommend for people to level up their community building skills to build a community, run a community? What would you point people to?
1:05:46 Speaker 00 I'm not aware of any courses that are necessarily offered. Ben Lang has done a number of now AMAs or interviews. So if you want to just Google Ben Lang and the word community or Notion, you're going to find just a lot of incredible insight and his experience has been, I think, in terms of like community, people operating in tech, Ben is top level. So find whatever he's said.
1:06:12 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. We will find it. We will link to it. Camille, I just met you an hour ago, but I feel like I've known you forever. This was amazing.
1:06:19 Speaker 00 Likewise.
1:06:20 Lenny Rachitsky? Thank you so much for making time for this. Two last questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, learn more? You're on sabbatical now. And so maybe share what you're thinking about next and what you could be, I don't know. And I guess this is the second question. How can listeners be useful to you?
1:06:34 Speaker 00 Thank you for that. You can find me on Twitter. I'm just at Camille Rickett, super straightforward, still sticking with it. And in terms of like where I'm at in my life, I'm just kind of interested in meeting as many fascinating new people and learning about things as possible. I've started going to these founders, you should know events for anybody who's interested, but F Y S K and just meeting as many cool people who are building just like incredible concepts. It's inspiring every time. And I just want my whole life to look like that. So get in touch if you're building something and think I could be helpful.
1:07:06 Lenny Rachitsky? Amazing. Camille, thank you so much for being here.
1:07:09 Speaker 00 Thank you so much. This was wonderful.
1:07:12 Lenny Rachitsky? Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
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