How Notion’s Community Helped it Win in AI

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Mar 6, 2025

Rachel Hepworth, former CMO at Notion and growth marketing expert from Slack and LinkedIn, shares her insights on how community engagement spurred Notion's success in AI. She reveals how the company pivoted towards AI Writer by leveraging user-generated content like templates and demos. She discusses the challenges of catering to both individual users and businesses while scaling internationally. Additionally, Rachel highlights the importance of community champions for advocacy and navigating feedback to enhance authenticity in brand perception.

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ANECDOTE

Notion's Rapid AI Writer Launch

Notion's founders foresaw AI's impact early, prototyped AI Writer during a company offsite.
The whole company was told to scrap roadmaps and rush AI Writer's launch, emphasizing speed and innovation.

INSIGHT

Community Eases AI Activation

AI Writer's novelty drew huge interest but had an activation challenge due to vast horizontal use cases.
Leveraging Notion’s community to share templates and demo videos helped users find valuable, repeatable use cases.

ADVICE

Empower Community Early

Give early access and education to your community to prepare them to amplify product launches.
Empower your community with tips and feedback loops to enable broad, effective influence.

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Rachel Hepworth is the former CMO at Notion, where she helped the company expand internationally, move upmarket, and grow by 10x. Prior to Notion, she was part of the marketing leadership team at Slack, founding the Growth Marketing function and scaling the company through IPO. Rachel is now a full-time marketing and growth advisor, helping companies like Clay, Luma AI, and Attio reach their full potential.

Key Takeaways

After a pivotal company offsite in 2022, Notion’s founders recognized that AI was the future and directed the company’s entire 60-person team to throw out their roadmaps and focus all of their attention on launching AI Writer.
As a horizontal product with a lot of different use cases, Notion has always relied on its highly engaged community to educate other users on how to get the most out of its product. When Notion moved into AI, it leveraged its community to raise awareness of AI Writer and help other people understand how to use it.
Specifically, Notion crowdsourced templates and demo videos from users to help people understand the most powerful ways to use AI Writer, and it has continued using this strategy as Notion AI has evolved into an entire suite of AI tools.
Notion’s community has helped it overcome the challenge of building a business that is distributed both functionally (~80% of customers are individual users but ~80% of revenue comes from businesses) and internationally (roughly a third of the company’s users come from North America, EMEA, and APAC, respectively).
Roughly 25% of Notion’s B2B workspaces came from individual “champions” who were then able to convince their companies to invest in Notion as an enterprise. The company got very good at using data to identify these champions and then empower them to spread Notion to other people within their companies.
Over the last couple years, Notion AI has expanded into Q&A, database creation, and a suite of many other tools. These investments have had a tremendous impact on the company’s growth trajectory.

Rachel Hepworth

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelhepworth/
X: https://x.com/rachelhepworth

Phil Carter

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io