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.
Notion pivoted its strategy to prioritize the rapid development of AI Writer, demonstrating agility in responding to emerging AI technologies.
The company leveraged its engaged community to drive awareness and education around AI Writer, using user-generated content like templates and demos.
Notion's unique user base, comprised largely of individuals yet largely funded by businesses, demands tailored marketing strategies for both demographics.
Deep dives
Strategic Shift to AI Development
Notion responded to an urgent shift in focus by pivoting their strategy to prioritize the rapid development of AI Writer, following a company-wide directive to abandon prior roadmaps. This decision underscored the importance of agility in tech development, particularly in response to emerging AI capabilities like GPT-4, which Notion's founders recognized early on. The team set an ambitious timeline, demonstrating that speed in product development could lead to significant competitive advantages. By efficiently leveraging community feedback and pre-launch excitement, Notion managed to roll out this new feature quickly and effectively.
Leveraging Community for User Engagement
The engagement strategy at Notion relied heavily on harnessing the power of its user community to educate and inspire new interactions with features like AI Writer. Community members played a critical role in creating templates, demos, and sharing usage experiences, which helped drive organic growth and awareness. This grassroots approach allowed Notion to cultivate a robust ecosystem where users could explore creative applications of the AI features. Additionally, facilitating peer-to-peer learning helped address the activation challenges posed by the product's versatility.
Navigating Hybrid Consumer-Business Dynamics
Notion operates within a unique framework where approximately 80% of its users are individual consumers, yet over 80% of its revenue stems from business subscriptions. This duality presents distinct marketing challenges, particularly in crafting tailored strategies that appeal to both demographics. The marketing approach required balancing efforts to onboard students and individual users with more targeted campaigns aimed at enterprise stakeholders. Ultimately, Notion recognized the value of building a strong community to foster advocates who transition from consumer to business usage.
Community-Driven Marketing Strategies
The effectiveness of community-driven marketing became apparent as Notion sought to leverage its user base for product adoption and advocacy. By creating structured programs for power users, such as ambassadors and champions within organizations, Notion could incentivize word-of-mouth promotion while gathering valuable feedback. These community leaders not only amplified the brand message but also aided in user onboarding and education around more complex features. This strategy highlighted the need for a symbiotic relationship between user engagement and effective marketing.
Ongoing Evolution of Notion AI
Notion AI has evolved significantly since its initial launch, expanding from AI Writer to a comprehensive suite of AI tools that aim to enhance user productivity. Features like Q&A have redefined how users interact with their content and seek information, offering a more intuitive alternative to traditional search functions. As Notion continues to innovate, embedding AI more deeply across its platform, there is a focus on creating seamless experiences that proactively address user needs. The challenge remains to cultivate habitual use and build user familiarity with AI capabilities in a continually advancing technological landscape.
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.
