Building a Zero to One Community at Your Company?

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Hiring contractors is a really great way to fill that gap as you try to understand who it is you're trying to hire, bring on to the team. Our template gallery, our moderation efforts and publishing was something that we felt made a lot of sense to contract out. We actually oftentimes we would find really great people in our community. And we would just kind of ask people if they wanted to apply for certain opportunities. Localizing our templates required people who spoke specific language proficiently and also at a good high level of notion usage. So it was another place where kind of looking towards our community made a lots of sense.

Our guest today is Ben Lang, Head of Community at Notion.

Since joining the company in 2019, Ben has had his hand in several high-impact projects at Notion that has grown its tight-knit community of passionate Notion evangelists into millions of users today.

But before he was doing this as a full-time job, Ben was already spreading his love for Notion in his free time as a voracious product user. After discovering the tool on Product Hunt, he became obsessed. He got on the company’s radar after launching his own Notion template gallery on Product Hunt and joined as one of the first 15 employees.

In our conversation today, we focus on the nuts and bolts of building a global community that drives user growth. Ben shares tactical advice on:

Tackling community organically from the bottom-up, and why you shouldn’t go top-down
What companies are best suited to a centralized vs. decentralized community approach
Partnering with YouTubers and other creators
His advice to founders on finding your own first community hire

You can follow Ben on Twitter at @benln. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.