Notion’s Community-Led Growth Playbook with Camille Ricketts

‍Camille Ricketts wasn’t an obvious choice to lead marketing at a rocket-ship scale-up like Notion.

In fact, nothing about her career has been obvious. A former journalist for The Wall Street Journal, she worked under Elon Musk at Tesla back in 2010, led content for micro-financing NGO Kiva for 2 years, and even did a stint at the White House. 

She caught the eye of Notion co-founder Ivan Zhao for her work at First Round Capital, where she started the iconic startup publication, First Round Review. 

In 2019, she joined Notion as the Head of Marketing — and 11th employee — and began building the foundation for an extraordinary growth story.

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Top takeaways from Camille:

• Start small and learn from your community. Notion focused on creating a small, highly engaged community and used their feedback to scale efforts organically.
• Be your fans’ biggest fans. By connecting directly with users and supporting their initiatives, Notion turned early adopters into enthusiastic global ambassadors.
• Market to people, not roles. To sell a product with unlimited use cases, focus on finding and catering to your best-fit customers across the B2B and B2C spectrum. 
• Aim to be ubiquitous. Notion’s “surround sound” marketing strategy ensured the brand felt omnipresent, de-risking early enterprise deals. 

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How to build a community-led marketing strategy

Notion went all-in on community as a primary growth driver very early on, bringing in Ben Lang as Head of Community just a month after they hired Camille as the Head of Marketing. 

Here’s what Camille learned about building a startup community: 

Develop the community that helps you learn the most

For Camille and the team at Notion, their community wasn’t something they created — it was where they learned what their users were doing with the software, what they wanted to be able to do in the future, and what they loved about Notion. 

“We tried to follow people as much as possible. Whenever we saw a new behavior emerge among them, we’d figure out what the life of that would look like and how we could invest in it more…I think that we really tried to concentrate on what we were seeing people do, without us necessarily pushing them in a direction.” 

To understand the community you should be focusing on, Camille recommends looking at your own positioning — where you fall on the B2C-B2B spectrum and where you are in your journey to product-market fit. Then, look at building a community that will “help you learn as fast as you possibly can about what people want and need,” whether that’s a formal customer advisory board, a focus group, or a community of buyer champions to advocate for you inside their organizations. 

For Notion, their community started as an informal Slack group, “that was just a lot of really talkative folks that were constantly helping each other troubleshoot, coming to the group with opportunities, wanting to expand their involvement with us.”

Over time, it evolved to include an ambassador program: 

“Ben invited 20 people who we saw being really vocal across Twitter and YouTube etc. into the Slack space. Then he just jumped on Zoom for an hour with each of them and was like, ‘Why are you here? Why is this exciting? Why have you started being so vocal about this product? What would you ideally like this space to become?’ We learned so much there about what people wanted to do, and why they wanted to meet one another, and what they wanted to learn.” 

Notion’s early fans were keen to host local meetups — so they built a playbook and assigned funding to support events around the world. 

“If you want to host a small coffee chat, this is what that looks like. If you want to host a workshop, here's what that looks like. So it's just easy for people to replicate. Then supporting them to order pizza for everybody, or find the right venue, or generate an invite list, that type of thing.” 

Start small 

There’s no need to be too ambitious about the size and scope of your initial community. The Notion team found it was far better to have a small, highly engaged community, especially in the early days: 

“I see a lot of folks who believe that their success metric is, ‘We brought together many thousands of people in this space.’ But there might not be that same sort of velocity of engagement or active use, because folks are not sure who else is in that room with them. 

“Give yourself the permission to start small and then learn from that group, and then move out to that next concentric circle and learn from them, and then move out from there.” 

Foster a close relationship between community and development 

Notion didn’t have product managers for a very long time. In the early years, the engineers were right there in the community Slack group, “able to see what the chatter was whenever they shared something new.” 

Notion evangelists weren’t compensated financially, but they were given early access to new features. The development team had strict feature flagging in place to make sure they always gave previews to their ambassadors before shipping to the broader user base. 

This early-access model also gave Marketing and Product valuable insights about “what was going to be exciting and what rough edges we should sand off before shipping.” 

Be your fans’ biggest fans 

Notion didn’t just support their customers via their official channels. They took a surprisingly flexible stance towards fans who wanted to run their own programs or groups, outside the official “walled garden” of the Notion ambassadors program. 

Not only did Notion allow fans to do what they wanted — from setting up an unofficial Notion Facebook group to running a massively popular Subreddit — they tried to “remove any friction and connect them with resources to become even better at community management.” 

Today, people are making a living from selling Notion products, without being affiliated with the organization. Far from frowning at this, Camille and the team would celebrate their users’ achievements. 

“We would Slack each other and be like, ‘Another one quit their job to do this full-time!’”

Use your community to accelerate global reach 

A benefit of this supportive approach was that their enthusiastic global fanbase let Notion internationalize far earlier than most start-ups could dream of. 

Their first localization launch was in South Korea in August 2020, when they’d been on the market for a year and a half and had a team of just 11. 

The challenge was to “be really scrappy but at the same time really polished” — a goal easily accomplished with the help of their South Korean ambassadors, who hosted a launch live stream attended by over 8,000 people. 

Create a virtuous cycle of content and community 

Where Camille’s content strategy at First Round Capital had been all about brand awareness through thought leadership, Notion’s approach to content was more pragmatic and focused on immediate impact.

Camille and the team prioritized creating educational content to help convert free users into customers. Again, the Notion community provided the ideal fuel, creating a constant supply of templates, walkthroughs, and unusual or compelling use cases that the company would then “amplify” via storytelling on social media.  

Beyond this, the community itself was also “an excellent distribution powerhouse.” Camille sees the relationship between community and content as an “incredible virtuous cycle”. 

How to position a product that straddles B2B and B2C

One of the challenges for Notion is that it has almost unlimited use cases. You can use Notion’s set of planning and note-taking tools to organize anything from your wedding to your brand campaign to your onboarding program for new hires.  

With a tiny team, how could Notion target both B2B and B2C markets, and still establish a single, coherent brand? What should they prioritize? Where should they invest? 

Here’s how they tackled it: 

Start with your ideal customer profile

Notion’s community engagement efforts were paying off and their B2C market was taking off on its own. So they decided to prioritize the enterprise market in their messaging and web copy, instead of trying to be all things to all people

They used an onboarding form on their website to gather zero-party data on their early B2B leads, and learned that they were most interesting to teams of engineers, designers, and product marketers. 

With that information, they created targeted website landing pages for each of these personas showcasing the most relevant use cases and features — roadmapping for engineers, documentation for product managers, and so on. They also ran PR campaigns for each of those audiences, appearing in relevant events and industry newsletters. 

Market to people, not roles

Notion was early to capitalize on the fact that work and life were increasingly blending, especially during the pandemic. While they did lean their website messaging more towards B2B use cases, and their community efforts more towards the B2C market, they also created brand campaigns straddling both B2B and B2C. 

They recognized that people who loved Notion would want to use it both at work and at home. 

Take, for instance, the Notion demo video “For small steps. And giant leaps.” which shows a job-seeker using the platform to track applications, plan their relocation, and then start collaborating with their new team. 

Camille is a fan of April Dunford’s positioning framework, especially her concept of best-fit customers. While there may be many potential buyers for your product, your best-fit customers are those who are particularly excited about the things that make your product unique. Focusing on those customers who were most likely to become raving fans helped Notion create messaging that would work for both B2B and B2C. 

Aim for ubiquity to de-risk enterprise deals

Social media played a huge role in Notion’s early success — particularly user-generated content. One video showing a student’s Notion set-up gained over a million views in just two days. 

While you might not expect going viral with teens on TikTok to help with enterprise sales, it gave B2B software buyers the reassuring sense that Notion was everywhere. 

“They saw a billboard. They saw it on Twitter. They heard about it from a friend. We wanted to surround-sound as much as we possibly could. I think TikTok did that to such a degree that it ended up de-risking a lot of these enterprise interactions. Folks were like, ’Oh, I've heard about that from so many people at this point. Yes, I do feel comfortable entering into this size of deal, just because it's obviously so established and so vibrant.’” 

Notion's sales team often discovered C-suite buyers first heard about them from their teenager at dinner. “It's amazing how some of those interactions still remain so human and are not just cut and dry the way you might think that they are.” 

Plan for the future 

Camille was advised not to bother with a free student-licensing program. Students churn easily. Notion would never get a return on their investment. 

Luckily for Notion, they ignored this advice — and students are now their most vocal social media advocates. They also turned out to be a great source of referrals: 

“We’ve validated since that time that they do, in fact, enter the workforce and then pound the table and demand to use the tools they love. We've heard about a few rogue movements inside of larger companies where people have said, ‘No, we really have to use Notion. We refuse to use Google Docs.’ Their IT departments end up bending to their will. So we're very thankful to the folks who went through that arc with us.” 

They took a similar approach to startup discounts, partnering with VC firms, AWS and Stripe to offer Notion at a reduced rate, “and then seeing how it just took root in a lot of places that have now since scaled massively.” 

Again, this helps support the feeling that Notion is everywhere — as well as seeding long-term business growth. 

Develop a strong brand aesthetic to create consistency

If you’re aiming for omnipresence, you need a strong brand to make sure you’re always recognizable. One of Notion’s most successful early brand messages was “Software should be beautiful,” and they were strict about maintaining their aesthetic across all channels. 

For example: 

• They developed a design playbook very early on, with help from Roman Muradov, an illustrator who happened to rent a room in Notion’s first office space and became a key part of the team. Camille recalls, “Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and would just be like, ‘How is Roman? I have to make sure that he's having the best time ever.’ Because he was so important.” 
• They realized that visual story-telling was key to succeeding on social media. Instead of churning out generic GIFs to show new features, every Notion post tells a story that lets you imagine the person using the product. 
• They only advertised on websites that “dovetailed with the monochromatic, elegant, elevated, cultured concept we wanted to perpetuate, like the MoMA website or the New Yorker website. We would really go for high design, the prioritization of beauty and craft.” 

Find your own community, too

Leading marketing at a startup can be a seriously challenging time. 

“It's a really ‘dig deep’ experience. How can I scale myself as fast as humanly possible while continuing to get things done? Then you add management into the mix and a lot of folks who are going through this type of high-growth, personal stretch experience too.” 

Just as she did with Notion’s marketing strategy, Camille turned to her community to support her own growth. 

“Something that I did not know was going to play such a big role was being able to field this cohort of mentors that helped me on a daily basis.  I could text them and be like, ‘How do you buy a billboard? Do I call the 1-800 number?’ They’d be like, ‘No, here's my friend, Sam, at Clear Channel. I'll set you up.” 

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