I spent a weekend studying Notion's ambassador program - here are 5 learnings for anyone looking to build a community-led product 👇

Ambassadors go one level deeper than affiliates or influencers. An ambassador resonates with your brand so much that they organically share your products. 
Creating an ambassador program is a powerful way to get your brand out there, especially if you're a mission-driven company with raving fans.

If you use Notion daily, I'm sure you've heard of their ambassador program, or come across one of their ambassadors on social media. They're popular!

But this popularity could not be an accident, so I decided to look into it. Here are some things I found in my research that even indie SaaS apps can leverage to go from nobody to superstar in their niche:

➡️ Start with your audience

It's tempting to go in the influencer route and start cold DMing popular influencers in your niche. But in doing this, you miss out on another valuable asset - your own community!  💜

Notion's marketing team noticed a few tweets doing the rounds about how people are falling in love with their product. They reached out to these superfine and started off their ambassador program with raving fans as their first ambassadors.

➡️ Build closely with early fans

You will not get it right in the first go.

As your program builds some early momentum, stay close to your early ambassadors and take their input on how you can improve the program. 
Notion added their first dozen or so ambassadors in a Slack group chat and built each part of the program closely with them. This helped them tailor an attractive experience for future ambassadors.

Build small, scale later.

➡️ Clarity and exclusivity

You can still find this on their ambassador landing page today. Notion is pretty clear on who they want as an ambassador and who they don't want to work with ⚡️

They've outlined requirements such as being able to teach Notion, devoting 2-3 hours per quarter in service of the community, creating content, templates... and so on.

Not every casual Notion fan can become an ambassador as it comes with a set of commitments. It is important for you to know this for your brand. This way you attract less people, but you attract the right ones.

➡️ Special perks

Your ambassadors are more than just customers or influencers. They're a closer part of your brand, so treat them that way.

You can't just have expectations and requirements from them and not give anything in return 🤷‍♂️

Notion sends swag, has ambassador forums, and does other small things to make them feel special.

You can too. Send your ambassadors special notes, give them discount codes (for themselves or their audience), invite them to an office tour, and so on. Be creative!

➡️ Activating the community

Notion is good at fostering community, so Notion fans can meet each other. 
Chances are, if someone is aligned with your brand mission, they share a lot of other things in common. For example, if someone uses Notion, they're likely to be into tangential topics like productivity, journalling, reading, self-improvement, etc.

Notion has forums by geography and persona which the right people can join to get value beyond just using and sharing the tool 🤝

This is key for the long term health of your ambassador program, make the community stick to each other - your brand is just an excuse to come together.

I know this was a lot, feel free to save this post and come back to it later. 
I wrote this detailed breakdown of their program if you're interested in learning more!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, especially if you (plan to) run an ambassador/influencer program.