 Hi, everyone. My name is Olivia Nadebaum and it's lovely to be with you here today at Slush. I am the CRO of Notion and responsible for the go-to-market functions. Today I'm going to be talking about how you organize your company for scale around community. Not just how you engage your community externally, but also how you build your company from the inside out focused on community. For those of you unfamiliar with Notion, Notion's mission is to empower everyone to be a toolmaker, to make sure that anyone can create and manage projects, documents, tasks in the way that they want to do it. And this is very important to me as an individual, as someone who doesn't code themselves this spirit and mission of Notion, of truly empowering people to create the work flows that they need to do to get their work done is something that's truly inspirational. Notion's mission is also very international. So 80% of our users are outside of the United States. And here in Europe we see about 35% of our monthly active users here today. And we just opened our headquarters for Emia in Dublin, which is really exciting and I actually flew in from there yesterday visiting the team there. So let's dive in and talk about how you structure a company around community. Who here knows what this app is? Really? No one? TikTok, yes. Who here makes enterprise SaaS decisions based on this app? Yeah, right. So I'm going to try to weave this into the conversation today and talk to you about community. So growth is something I've thought a lot about. Actually, in 2014, I co-authored an article called Grow Fast or Die Slow. And there were four key insights at the time. Actually, now they seem rather obvious, but at the time we thought it was pretty revolutionary. The first was that growth begets great returns. So a company that's growing at over 60%, as they hit 100 million in ARR, are actually five times more likely to even make it to a billion dollars. And not only that, they're also valued at eight times companies who are growing at even a moderate pace of 20% to 60%. The other one that we saw is that growth is hard to maintain. So companies that were pacing over 60% growth were actually only able to make it through that gauntlet to a billion dollars at the same pace of growth about one fifth of the time. So a very small fraction of companies who are in hyperscale when they're young and small are actually able to maintain that growth. And then finally, what did we found? We found that one point of growth is worth two points of margin. So if you're making a trade-off between driving growth and earning margin, the takeaway is definitely drive growth, invest in growth. So that takes us still to, well, how do you drive growth? Four years later, there was a Silicon Valley episode titled Grow Fast or Die Slow, and here you see the founders realizing that they are about to have to run this growth gauntlet. And so let's look at some numbers. Right now, there are about 20,000 startups pre-IPO out there in the SaaS world. Only about 1,000 of those have made it to $150 million. Sorry that I'm using dollars and not Euro, but hopefully you get the gist. And then all the way through, you see there's 50 companies making it to a billion dollars in revenue. And if you look into the public markets, only nine companies have made it to $5 billion in revenue over the course of that period. So this really underscores the need to drive growth and continue to drive growth. I would posit there have been three waves of growth. First is top down. Second is bottom up, what's typically called product-led growth. And the third is community-led growth. And that's the one that I want to talk about today. All right, so top down, this is a classic sales model. Think of Salesforce, think of SAP. You go out, you convince a decision maker, whether it be a CIO or a business segment lead, to buy your product and they push it down to the users. This had its time, I would say now we're much more in a world of users having a voice in the tools that they use. In fact, now more so than ever, you see that users are coming into the enterprise and talking about the solution that they want to use and decision makers are listening. And they're actually basing their decisions off of what these users are telling them. But then there's the third wave. Does anyone know where this wave is? The biggest wave in the world, does anyone know? Off the coast of Nazaré in Portugal, the 100-foot wave. So I would posit that community-led growth is the most valuable wave of them all. So it's great that you can build a product, but more importantly, you need other people to be talking about how good it is to use your product. So community, how do you actually organize your company to leverage community and scale your product and your product reach around each stage of the funnel? I care deeply about the funnel. I'm responsible for go-to-market, so my life kind of goes in this order. So at the top, we have raising awareness. How do you use your ambassadors to actually extend your reach? Then we have, in the middle part of the funnel, actually making activation occur and conversion, so enabling your community to extend and educate and inspire. And then finally, driving expansion. So how do you actually have consultants out there in the world doing the implementation and doing the teaching about how to use your product in an effective way? So raising awareness, let's start at the top. Here, all of us are trying to write blogs, write posts, talk about how wonderful our product is. But we all know in our hearts that a raw Instagram video of someone talking about how amazing your product is is far more valuable than anything you'll write as a company. And if you think about that, that job of raising awareness, you're small, you don't have a ton of resources, you want to spend all your time writing articles so you'll get that SEO lift, or you want to spend money on SEM so you get that paid lift, or you're trying to tab events and get more and more people in the door. But actually, what you should be doing is building a community and scaling through a community. So let's talk about that. I'll give you a little bit of the history of Notion. So this was an early slack. Early on our head of community, Ben Lang, noticed that there were about 10 people who were passionate about Notion. And they were everywhere. One was in Paris, one was in Korea, all over the globe. And what he did was he reached out to them and he actually created an early ambassador community and created a scrappy slack channel and he started having them share with each other what they loved about the product, what were they doing, how were they driving people to engage with them. And what you see is here are some early pictures. This is a pop-up hangout of Notion lovers in Seoul, Korea. And then here's another one in Paris, France. And so what Notion did early on, and this was led by someone called Camille Ricketts, who's amazing, she's our current head of brand communications, and Ben Lang is on the community team and drives it with Francisco, is they leaned in and they found people who loved the product. Not only did they get to know these people, but they got to know what they cared about. What were they trying to do? What were their passions in life? And this became a full-time job. So it was a full-time job engaging people who were passionate about the Notion product. And what did it turn into? It turned into over 200 ambassadors, over 23 countries, who were out there telling the Notion story. And it was really rooted in two things. And it was all about getting to know the individual person. What were they trying to build? One of two things. They were either trying to build a platform so they wanted to have a voice in the world or they were trying to build a business and they were trying to monetize that. And that was equally exciting for us because for us that provided us an extension of our company and they were out there in the world driving Notion on our behalf. So here's another example of how not only is it the folks who are head of the community in your organization, but also the founders themselves. So Ivan and Simon are co-founders of Notion, two incredible people and just wonderful to work with. And they regularly tweeted when they were going somewhere to talk about who wants to engage with us, who wants to give us feedback on our products. This is an example of actually a tweet that our COO Akshay sent out saying, hey, we're gonna be in Singapore. And sure enough in the driving rain, 20 people gathered to give Ivan and Akshay feedback on how they could do better with the product. What were the things that excited them? What did it take? And this is back in 2019. And all of that was flowing into how we thought about product development, how we thought of engagement and how overall our users were coming through to us. Now, if you fast forward two years, our subreddit is about 162,000 people in our subreddit channel. And that's actually moderated not by people that we pay, but actually by ambassadors who have raised their hand and said, this is what I wanna do. And it's because we've been with them all those years and really leaned into them that's gotten them to support us in this way. You see it globally all over the world. Here's our Facebook group in Korea. And this is actually an interesting story. We launched a localized app in Korea last year. We don't have anyone on the ground in Korea. And in fact, it was people in the community who were doing all the press interviews. So there were ambassadors in Korea answering questions for 8,000 people live during these press interviews just as an extension of the company that was Notion. And here's another example of our Facebook group in Vietnam numbering over 186,000 people. Okay, so I promised I would bring it back to TikTok. Can you hear this? No, okay. Well, I'll voice it over. This is, it was a very passionate student talking about how they use Notion to do everything they need to do. And the fun part about this is last night when I was checking into events, someone's like, oh, Olivia Notabomb, Notion, I love Notion. I use it to do absolutely everything. And that was someone I was like, oh, really? Where are you? They're like, wow, I'm a student, right? So that voice, that passion has just met the world to us and we're so grateful for people who are every day talking about Notion and making TikTok videos of Notion with over a million views, really incredible. Okay, so here's another example of someone who helps us on the top part of the funnel. So again, driving awareness. This is Marie Poulin. She has 25,000 followers on YouTube and she makes a living out of tutorials on Notion. We take no cut of that. We don't try to monetize that in any way. In fact, the opposite. We advocate for her. We extend her messaging. We make sure people know when she's putting on events and we really try to act as a force behind her because we know that she's gonna be the strongest voice for Notion on behalf of Notion rather than Notion trying to convince people ourselves. All right, so getting into the mid part of the funnel. So increasing conversion and activation. I think we all know that when someone lands on our website, the next thing we have to do is actually to show value, right? It's very easy for someone to land and then turn off and you'll probably never see them again. So how do you quickly show users value? For this, the example here is tutorials. I'm sure many of you have tutorials somewhere on your website, right? This is pretty standard. In fact, we're not the first people to think of this. Google used this very early days in the era of search, of cloud search and crowd-based answers, but this is taking it to a whole new level. So here you have, again, someone out there telling others how to use your product. This is August Bradley. He has 44,000 YouTube followers and he actually sells workshops and makes hundreds of thousands of dollars teaching people how to use Notion. And what's great about that is you can search how I use Notion and up-pop these various people who are helping users day-to-day actually drive an understanding and value of our product. And then here's the next level, which is teachers teaching teachers. So here's an example of a tutorial on how you teach others how to use Notion. So it's really reached a whole new heights and we could not be more grateful for our community and what they're doing there. And you see it in various forms. So here you see it on the product marketing side and then you see it really in the world of startups. So this is our template gallery. We relaunched this last month and we've had over a million downloads of these templates. And the beautiful thing about this is, yes, we put in some templates ourselves, but actually it's creators and members of our community who are putting in these templates and monetizing them. So you can go buy a Notion template on Etsy. How cool is that, right? And we don't try to take a cut of it. We are excited and delighted when people are making money on the back of Notion because we know that they'll continue to do that. It's aligned with their interests and our interests and it really helps us drive the business and scale overall. And here's a final example of someone who's made tens of thousands of dollars just on a newsletter template and she's done a magnificent job and she continues to be able to monetize it. Okay, next part of the funnel. So driving upgrade and expansion. So this is all about how do you make sure that once folks are using your product, how do they continue to get value out of it? How do they do the right implementations? How do they vary the use cases? And how do you make sure that it can extend wall-to-wall in the places that you've land? For this, we actually use consultants. So not our own professional services team. We have no one in professional services at Notion. It's purely this global ecosystem of consultants. And if you go to our homepage, we provide their names. We provide their way to access them. And actually we are more than delighted to connect our customers to these folks. And I would say every week I meet another small boutique firm who's deciding that they're gonna build their business on the back of Notion, which is just wonderful to see. And we've been launching sales plays of certain things that we're trying to put into the market. And these boutiques are saying like, absolutely we'll work with you and we're feeding them customers, right? So it's a very symbiotic relationship. And then finally we have the global team champions. And that's a very important part of the puzzle for us in helping us scale. These are the people inside the companies where we've landed who are our advocates. Often they're the ones who have actually brought Notion into the company. And they're there to explain and assist all of the users of Notion at their company. Now they also have a day job, but we make it very, very easy for them to have access to new information, to have access to the things that they care about and the users that the company care about. So they feel like they can really always be the one that's in the know and taking that uses to the next level. Okay, so to recap, there are three steps that I'd love to make sure that you leave with today. The one is top of funnel. So how do you use a community and a set of people that are not actually within your own company to extend your story? First you have to identify those people and you have to make sure that you really leaned into them, that you understand what it is that they care about and you are engaging in the topics that they care about. And this really goes so far as to know their dog's name, whether they're married, where they live. Every time we add a new ambassador at Notion, they get introduced the entire company, of which we only have 200 people and there's a big celebration that these new folks are part of the extended family of Notion. So it's really something to be treasured and something we're deeply, deeply appreciative of. The second part is the mid funnel. This is where you extend your distribution in terms of teaching people use cases and making sure that people know how to use your product. For us it is template gallery and for other people it might be other things depending on where you are in your life cycle. But this has been a very important step for us overall. We only have less than 10 customer success people. We do not have an army of go-to-market people and yet we have 20 million users worldwide. So this community has really offered an amazing, amazing amplification of everything that you need to be thinking about in convincing people that your product is valuable and that you can drive valuable use cases through it. And then bottom of the funnel. So here giving your community the tools to make sure that they can really get the most out of your product and again in our case it took the form of consultants and ambassadors and champions but it might take the form of something different depending where you are in your life cycle. And more importantly it's really about choosing the community that's right for you. So Notion is a product that spans consumer all the way to teams, right? So you have individual use cases but you also have team use cases and so it's been really important that we identify folks who are using it across that spectrum. And in fact there's a simple paradigm that I like to think about when thinking about how you use community to scale your company. And not surprisingly I spent 13 years at McKinsey's so it's a quadrant with two axes and if you think about the B to C part of it, right? If you are early in your pre-product market fit and you're more of a B to C oriented company here you think about focus groups. So really getting out there and understanding what is it that users of your product would like to see more from your product. This was a very powerful tool in the early days of Notion. Every tweet that was sent to Notion was recorded and tagged and that still occurs today. So actually every time we go to do a feature launch we are sending out personalized notes to every single person who is asked for that feature. That's how deeply interested and curious we are in that feedback. And it's also the beauty of these uncurated forums, right? Because people know that we're listening to them and because they know that we're not forcing only a positive conversation, they actually really do voice the things that they'd like to see about the product and they give helpful suggestions. And we take that very seriously. So this element of using community as your extension we have no research team, this is our research team, this is how we scale. These focus groups are the ones telling us what we need to do in order for them to get value out of the product. Then next if your post product market fits so you're kind of on a roll and people seem to love the product and you're still more B2C oriented is this ambassadors point that I've spoken about but also creators, right? So enabling these creators to create these templates and then monetize is something that's really special. We have them as part of our ecosystem but really as part of our extended company and they are monetizing and making money and again, we take no cut of that. We're just enabling them. And then we are early in this, frankly as we go more into B2B and more into enterprise something like a customer advisory board is also an extension of your community. We're very early in that but classically you have a set of CIOs who are there who are willing to spend the time to talk about what they need to see out of that enterprise tool so it can fit in their enterprise environment. And this is something to wade into very importantly and we have now what we call a lighthouse account group and we have customers who have over a thousand users telling us, okay, what is it that they need as they use our product at scale? And then finally, if again, you've post product market and you're on the larger enterprise side leaning into those consultants and leaning into those champions because the champions are the one in those companies that are there to tell you what else you need to do in order to still drive value and consultants are truly an extension of your company because they're the ones actually helping with implementations, helping with imports from one tool to another and it's been a lovely way to actually leverage that broader community. Okay, finally, lessons from the road. The first is community drives the rapid adoption for you if you want your product led company to scale. So I think about you have to build a beautiful product but what does it actually take to win? What it takes to win is to have someone else talking about how great your product is because you need to drown out the noise of everything else that's going on in the market and what could be more compelling than a user out there telling the world what they love about your product. The second is to really align your interests with the interests of your community members, right? So what is it that they're trying to get done? Are they trying to build a platform? Are they trying to build a business? How do you actually help them? So an example of this is I showed the picture of someone in Korea, that group in Korea. Well, every time they wanted to host a pop-up we paid for the venue, we paid for the drinks or whatever it may be, right? This is not a huge expense but at the end of the day not something they could pay for themselves but as a result they continue to do that and they continue to host friends, they continue to host people they knew and they in fact were hosting events on our behalf and all we were doing were this like pretty minor investment in terms of funding it and making sure they had access to information. The third is building distribution networks for education and inspiration. So this education part is really important. We always make sure that our community has more information than the average user. So we give them early access to roadmaps. We have AMAs so ask me anything with Ivan and Simon who are the co-founders and Michael Manapat who's our excellent head of engineering. So we are providing them access and early access to everything that we're thinking about at Notion. And that is really important for them to be able to turn around and then educate the market. The fourth point is empowering your community members to actually serve your customers. So this is an example of our community members working directly with our customers and us not insisting on being the middleman. We are just trying to provide this beautiful tool that enables everyone and empowers everyone to be a tool maker. We don't need to be the middleman in making sure that the implementation that they want to do with a consultant goes perfectly well. We leave that up to the high quality consultants that have built their businesses around it. And then another point here is don't try to regulate your community. Don't try to censor it. So one of the things that I think is very true today more than ever is how valuable it is to be genuine. So the second users feel like they're being exposed to a channel or a narrative that's overly curated where no opposing voice is allowed, they drop out. They're no longer interested because then they feel what they're engaging is completely manufactured and fake. So it's really, really important to allow these forums to really have every voice that they want to have and be a listener into that forum and not try to control it. And finally, start and stay scrappy. So an example there was, okay, we found 10 people who love Notion. Ben Lang did this smart thing of putting them all in a Slack channel so that they could learn from each other so that they could exchange ideas, constantly be innovating and thinking about that. So someone thought of doing this template gallery. That's valuable too. And we link to creators who are then selling it on Etsy and in other places as well. So really trying new ideas and making sure that you're always bubbling them up to your community. And then finally, it's all about being grateful. We could not be more grateful for our community. It's truly as a result of our community that Notion has 20 million users today. It's something that's pretty awe-inspiring. And when you see what people do with your product, ways that you could have never possibly imagined yourself as you're sitting in a team room thinking about use cases, it's really allowing that to really bloom and flower and then being incredibly, incredibly appreciative of everything that your community has done. So with that, I wish you all the best. It's very hard being in startup land. It's not always easy to get it right, but I definitely recommend leaning into community. It's something that we hold very dear at Notion. Thank you.