How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital)
Camille Ricketts, former Head of Marketing at Notion and First Round Capital, discusses community-led growth and content marketing. She shares insights from building Notion's early community and launching the First Round Review, offering tips for effective strategies.
Deep Dive Analysis
20 Topic Outline
Camille's Career Journey and Early Experiences
Lessons from Working with Elon Musk at Tesla
Early Days at Notion: Culture and Challenges
Defining Community-Led Growth
Measuring Marketing Impact: Net New Website Visitors
Successful Community Efforts at Notion: Ambassadors, Events, Influencers
Why Metrics Aren't Always Necessary for Early Community Growth
When to Invest in Community-Led Growth
How Notion Creators Monetize Through Templates and Consulting
Notion's Ambassador and Champions Programs
Why Founders Should Prioritize Ubiquity Over Immediate Monetization
Companies Excelling in Community Building
Camille's 2x2 Grid for Community Investment
Launching an Ambassador Program
Advice for Founders Building Community
Content Marketing: First Round Review's Impact
Content Market Fit: Understanding Audience Needs
Content Quality and Time Investment
The Future of Comms and Press Relations
Lightning Round
5 Key Concepts
Community-Led Growth
This occurs when a product's community helps it achieve such widespread recognition and usage that it enables the company to expand into larger markets, such as the enterprise, by de-risking the product choice for new customers.
Discovery (vs. Awareness)
Discovery is a more active form of engagement than mere awareness, characterized by a user's intent to actively seek out more information about a product or service after being intrigued or hearing about it multiple times.
Atomic Unit of Sharing
This refers to a product characteristic where it creates something users are inherently excited to share because it allows for self-expression, demonstrates their organization, or showcases their skill, like Notion templates or Figma designs.
Content Market Fit
This concept involves approaching content creation with the same strategic rigor as product development. It requires deeply understanding the target audience's needs, anxieties, and aspirations, then creating content that directly addresses those 'pain points' or 'jobs to be done' to provide genuine value.
Painkiller Content
Content that effectively solves a significant problem, alleviates a major anxiety, or helps people overcome confusion, making it highly valuable and often preferred over 'vitamin' content, which is merely beneficial but not essential.
10 Questions Answered
Community-led growth is when a product's community helps it achieve such widespread recognition and usage that it enables the company to expand into larger markets, like the enterprise, by de-risking the product choice for new customers.
Notion primarily tracked net new visitors to its website month over month, considering this the most instructive metric for understanding increased interest and discovery driven by brand, community, and content efforts.
It's particularly effective for freemium or product-led growth companies, especially if the product has an 'atomic unit of sharing' (something users create and want to show off) or if organic growth is a critical strategy for the business.
Many Notion creators build revenue-generating businesses by becoming consultants, selling templates, or creating courses around Notion, with some earning significant income, which Notion supports through guides and networks.
Champions are the most passionate users within customer companies, gathered in a Slack instance to foster communication and support, while Ambassadors are passionate individual users who love building with and sharing Notion, often hosting events or creating content.
If ubiquity and word-of-mouth are crucial for long-term success, founders should consider delaying monetization of every small feature to foster enthusiasm and momentum within the community, as this can lead to more options later.
Camille Ricketts' 2x2 matrix suggests: pre-product market fit/enterprise might use customer advisory boards; product market fit/enterprise might focus on champions and consultants; and product market fit/consumer might emphasize ambassadors and influencers.
For a First Round Review post, it typically took around eight hours just for the writing phase, after extensive prep work, highlighting the significant time investment required for impactful content that connects dots and pulls out bigger themes.
Yes, because traditional press outlets offer incredible megaphones for reaching a broad audience with a stamp of credibility and notice that direct channels often cannot replicate, making a significant difference for discovery and awareness.
A founder's social media communication should align with their personality and what feels authentic, rather than trying to meet a quota of 'scintillating things' to say, as authenticity often leads to more traction.
19 Actionable Insights
1. Align Content with Audience Needs
Approach content creation like product development by deeply understanding your target audience’s needs, anxieties, and aspirations, then create content that acts as a “painkiller” to address those specific issues.
2. Prioritize Ubiquity Over Monetization
For long-term success, consider prioritizing ubiquity and word-of-mouth momentum over immediate monetization of every aspect, as a large, enthusiastic user base creates more options later.
3. Community for Freemium/Sharing Products
Invest in community if your product is freemium or has an “atomic unit of sharing” (e.g., templates, creations) that users are proud to showcase, as this fuels aspirational self-expression.
4. Tailor Community to PMF & Market
Depending on your product market fit (PMF) and market (enterprise vs. consumer), tailor your community strategy: use customer advisory boards pre-PMF enterprise, foster champions/consultants post-PMF enterprise, and empower ambassadors/influencers post-PMF consumer.
5. Listen to Community Needs
Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach; instead, actively listen to community members through one-on-one or small group conversations to understand their motivations and how to improve their experience, then follow their lead.
6. Support Community Entrepreneurs
Nurture and support community members who build businesses (e.g., consultants, template creators) around your product by providing guides, networks, and connections, aligning their success with yours.
7. Manage Community Growth Rate
Implement a controlled growth rate for community programs (e.g., inducting 20 new ambassadors per month via a light application) to ensure new members are properly welcomed, maintain engagement, and prevent conversations from becoming muted.
8. Provide Exclusive Ambassador Value
Offer ambassadors unique incentives like early access to features, direct feedback channels with product teams, exclusive Q&A sessions with leadership, event subsidies, and promotion of their work to foster a special, non-transactional relationship.
9. Invest Significantly in Content Quality
Dedicate substantial time (e.g., 8+ hours per piece) to content creation, including thorough preparation, interviewing, and writing, to ensure high quality that stands out amidst internet noise.
10. Synthesize Content for Deeper Value
Beyond reporting facts, focus on drawing connections, connecting dots, and extracting bigger themes from your content sources (e.g., interviews) to provide more profound and valuable insights.
11. Maintain Strong Press Relationships
Invest in public relations and maintain strong, straightforward relationships with the press, as they provide an invaluable megaphone for reaching a broad audience with credibility and notice.
12. Track Net New Visitors
Measure the success of brand, community, and awareness campaigns by tracking month-over-month net new visitors to your website, indicating genuine interest and discovery.
13. Share Community Wins Internally
Regularly share updates and activities from your community with the entire company (e.g., during all-hands, on Slack) to inspire employees, reinforce who they are building for, and rally internal support.
14. Choose Accessible Community Platforms
Host your community on platforms already integrated into users’ daily routines (e.g., Slack) rather than requiring them to visit a new destination, to ensure higher engagement and reduce friction.
15. Master Your Subject Matter
Be incredibly well-versed and quick-thinking on all topics that might arise in conversations, ensuring you have all necessary information at your fingertips.
16. Convey Emotional Vision
Learn to paint an emotional picture of your vision and mission to deeply connect with people, enlisting their hearts and minds.
17. Communicate During Outages
During critical outages, prioritize clear and constant communication with users about the situation, fix efforts, and timelines, as this builds trust and highlights product vitality.
18. Authentic Founder Communication
Founders should communicate in a style that feels authentic to their personality, avoiding social media quotas and instead waiting to share valuable insights, as this often leads to more traction.
19. Learn from Community Experts
To level up community building skills, seek out resources and interviews from top-level community experts like Ben Lang (Notion’s Head of Community) for invaluable insights.
5 Key Quotes
The way that you think about product market fit, you have to think about content market fit.
Camille Ricketts
True discovery is when you have intent to find out more, right? 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.
Camille Ricketts
I think that one of the worst things you can do is say, let's cut this off at the knees if it's not generating ROI.
Camille Ricketts
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. I think because people feel like they're speaking to an auditorium whenever they say anything.
Camille Ricketts
What is one thing that you think that led to your success that nobody else in your peer set has done?
Camille Ricketts
2 Protocols
Launching an Ambassador Program
Camille Ricketts- Identify best-fit customers who are already vocal and organically talking about the product on social media and other platforms.
- Start with a small, manageable group (e.g., 20 people initially) to ensure a high-quality experience.
- Build in incentives that make ambassadors feel special and uniquely connected to the company, such as early access to features, direct feedback channels, and AMAs with internal team members.
- Subsidize events and actively promote ambassadors' work to support their efforts and amplify their creations.
- Allow the community to grow at a healthy, organic pace (e.g., inducting 20 new people per month) to avoid muting conversations and ensure new members are properly welcomed and integrated.
Content Market Fit Strategy
Camille Ricketts- Approach content creation with the same rigor as product development, starting by deeply understanding your target audience.
- Identify what your audience truly needs in their lives, focusing on their anxieties, aspirations (e.g., getting promoted, avoiding failure), and daily challenges.
- Create 'painkiller' content that directly addresses these core needs, confusion, or feelings of isolation, aiming to provide tangible value.
- Invest significant time to ensure the content is high-quality, going beyond simple information delivery to draw connections, connect dots, and pull out bigger themes.