How Notion grew without much marketing?
For me Notion went directly from being an alien name to a $800 million valuation in no time. Never saw any of their ads. It got me thinking, How Notion grew without high decibel marketing?
A micro analysis of their growth strategies threw some light on it.
Turned out that their organic growth has been fueled by product, design, community, migrations & key channels.
Analysis here - https://thoughtlytics.substack.com/p/9-breaking-down-notions-organic-growth
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I read the article. While it discussed how Notion grew from the time they posted to Product Hunt to 1 Million users, its not clear to me how they found the first 100 users. Did they ask their friends and family to try the new app? Did they post on any forums line reddit, Indie Hackers, Hacker news, etc? If yes, great but was it sufficient? Did they post on linkedin or connect with some startups and asked them to try their product? Are there any avenues I am missing?
For what its worth, If I was the CEO, I would
6)Hangout in startup forums and ask users to try my software.
There are probably many others which I don't know but this is how I would do.
Product led growth strong! Camille Ricketts, Head of Marketing at Notion shared her opinions at OpenView's podcast recently. Great content. @AT
Went through the podcast's transcript. It talks of scaling AFTER finding product market fit, not about the (crucial) first hundred users.
Thank you :)
Will check out the podcast!
I went through the article and here is what I concluded - the company had a good product, it evolved its product, it tried many approaches and some of them worked well.
The takeaway - we hackers keep looking for that silver bullet but such a thing does not exist. Just keep trying different things and if your product is useful it will be successful.
Thanks for doing the research though :-)
Welcome :)
Agreed! I work on the growth dev team at the company I'm with. Huge growth, got sold, and I'm deep into their analytics trying to figure out what their silver bullet was. There wasn't one. It's a good product, and people beat down the door to use it. Almost all traffic is direct or branded organic search just like it seems like Notion is.
They throw more money at advertising now (they never used to) but honestly it's all a drop in the bucket compared to their direct and branded organic search. People like to share great products.