Lessons from Notion on building a thriving decentralized community — Ben Lang

 Well, Ben, thank you so much for joining us.

 Maybe a place to start would be the broad topic of community. It's something you've kind of been obsessed with and really pioneered at Notion for a long time, and I think it's one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot, at least most recently. 

So do you think most, and let's just talk about maybe B2B companies should strongly consider community being a part of their strategy, or is it only right for a subset of companies or businesses?

 I definitely think most companies should consider it as, as a pretty, you know, important strategy for them. Um, I think it really depends on how you plan to kind of, Attack that at your company. Um, but I think there's obviously a lot of value to becoming this center point, this, place that enables people to connect around whatever it is you're trying to build.

and so I, I think, you know, for, for any B2B company, there's, a lot of value in that. And, and that, and that could be, um, you know, it could be something as basic as, some topic newsletter based forum that folks resonate with. Or it could be something much more, you know, much more in depth and, um, more of like a platform based community, right?

Like there's, there's so many, so many different angles to take on that front. And, I do think there's a ton of value to like, capture for B2B companies when they're kind of thinking about this early on.

 On, on that point. Can you talk more about tangible value to the business? When you think about this topic of community, again, it's so squishy in, in some ways it's a little bit like brand marketing. Like, you know, you build a go-to market team or a sales team, it's clear.

Kind of what the metrics of the team are and how it impacts the business. My guess is with community, it's much more multifaceted where it can impact everything from retention to distribution and all sorts of other things. And so when you think about the topic of community or you think about community efforts in a company, how do you get at what the value back to the business is, what the ROI is or sort of those types of things?

 Yeah. I, I think that's actually like the number one challenge with community for companies, especially on the B2B side. Like you said, it can be fluffy and it can be difficult to measure and not as obvious as like with performance marketing or, you know, other areas in the go to market side.

So it's definitely, it's definitely a challenge. the way we looked at it at Notion kind of early on was like, hey, this is something that we really believe in, something that is more of like a long tail investment and we might not see kind of clear metrics from day one, but as a company investment, as a, a potential moat that we can create that our competitors might not have.

Um, this is something that's worth investing in, you know, early on. Um, and I think if you're able to like, kind of see it that way, um, I think it, it might be difficult because obviously a lot of early stage companies want to see Metrics from day one. they want to kind of understand like very early on how it's impacting the business.

Is there, there's no doubt this is, this is more of a long tail investment that you're, um, that you're making. I think there are ways, you know, in the, the shorter run to like kind of get a sense of how it is impacting your business. And, um, and we've, you know, we've experimented with different things over the years to do that.

Um, but I would say like if you're only looking at it from that lens, it's gonna be challenging because it's not gonna be as obvious as other functions on the go-to-market side. Um, so you do need to have kind of this long-term outlook of. Hey, this is kind of going to be this differentiator between us, and other companies.

And we're, we're building, something that involves like the, you know, it's pretty complex relationships with people and, uh, and programs that involve, you know, different personas, right? there's, there's a lot that goes into it. Um, so my, my recommendation when, like talking to early stage companies generally is look at this as a long term investment.

Think of ways that you can kind of tie this into your early business goals, from day one, but don't, make the decision on whether you're going to invest in this or not based entirely on.

 So now that you've been sort of executing the strategy for a number of years, could you kind of bring the r o ROI or value to the organization to life? And maybe if you think about the last three months, six months, a year, and somewhere to ask you, how has the community work at Notion meaningfully impacted the business?

What are the types of things you would tell the person? What are the stories that come to mind for.

so I think the way we've been looking at it has been more on like a per community program basis. So on our team, we run a couple different programs geared towards engaging and empowering our community 

so just to give you maybe a couple examples, um, one of the programs that we kicked off probably about two years ago was, um, a certified consultants program.

We had seen a couple folks in our community who were starting to onboard companies to notion and Creating services around it. And so we thought, Hey, why not build a directory around that? and so we built this directory. We built a certification process to get listed in it and started off with maybe two or three of these folks who were doing it.

And today, if you check out this directory, I think there are maybe 60 plus companies who are doing this. And, it's really kind of graduated into this incredible, very robust program, where our customers are now able to submit their projects and needs into here and get access to folks who frankly use notion in ways that we probably never, never would've imagined.

And, uh, and are able to provide services at a really high level. 

so I think when you're looking at like this ecosystem built around notion and seeing, two years ago there were just a couple people doing this. Now there's 70 people doing this, and they're obviously bringing their own customers here. They're helping our customers, right? there's a lot of value being unlocked by these people who are just deeply passionate about notion and now building their businesses around it.

another. A good example might be, our ambassador program, which is something that I started working on pretty early on when I joined, not, and we had seen a couple folks around the world who were just really big notion fans.

There was just a couple, like a handful of people who were just super passionate about what we were building. And we thought, Hey, Why not connect them and create a little group around them and see what happens if we kind of bring them all together and you know, where we can go from there.

and to this day, now there are a couple hundred folks in this group. Um, and they. Posting notion events and running notion groups and, uh, doing all kinds of incredible things to the point where there's a community led notion event almost every day around the world.

it's really powerful because, our customers are able to go and check out like what, what's happening on the ground? our fans are able to go and meet other notion fans and it's not something that we're doing ourselves, right?

This is something that our community members are kind of initiating on, on, on their own. Um, so, you know, there's, there's a lot of ways we're able to like plug these different outputs from these community programs into the business.

 So appreciate you sharing a little bit about kind of where community is today, and we're gonna kind of pick that apart in a few minutes. But I thought it might be interesting to go back to when you first joined Notion. Kind of what was the state of community efforts at the time and maybe what did your first few months look like?

 yeah. So the way I, I joined not, was actually pretty funny. I had seen not on Product Hunt in, I think around 2018 and I tried it a couple times I think on the, maybe third or fourth time it clicked. And I was like, whoa, this is, this is incredible.

with Notion, I felt like I could visualize my brain and it was like a game changer for me and I, I tweeted about it and. , I shared my setup and I had a bunch of people asking me like, oh, can you share other pages or how you built this, how you built that?

And I realized there was a lot of interest in kind of, in what I had built with Notion. So I, as a side project built a website, uh, called notion pages.com, where people could share how they were using Notion. And this was before you could even duplicate pages on Notion. So it was basically just screenshots of people's notion, uh, and you could just check out like all the creative ways people were were already using Notion.

So, um, so I launched that on Product Hunt, and it got a, like, it, I think it got pretty good traction. I think maybe there were 20, 30, 40,000 people a month visiting it. This was kind of when Notion was starting to take off, and I was just so enamored by Notion. I, I was kind of going all in. And so I started buying other domain names like.

Ev all the domain names I could think of with notion. with someone else, I started a Facebook group about Notion. I started just telling people, Hey, like I'll hop on calls and help you get started with your Notion Workspace for you or your team. And I was doing this for fun. I was purely out of passion.

you know, I, I had a job back then, but I just really was enjoying this. So, um, I think at a certain point I reached out to Ivan and Akshay the two of the founders of Notion and told them, Hey, I'll be in San Francisco. Do you wanna meet up? And they, they had seen kind of the, the work I was doing.

And so I went into their office a couple weeks later, uh, in the mission and I met, um, Camille Ricketts, who, I think it was her second or third day at Notion. And we just spent time kind of jamming. Uh, and I started working with her a few days later. So it was, it was a really. Uh, seamless, seamless transition into working at Notion.

Um, there was never a, a role for it or, you know, a job posting. I started off part-time for a bit and then eventually joined, joined full-time. And, you know, I've been here for the past four years, so it's been a really, amazing journey. So, in terms of where we started, when I started working with Camille, I think the, the two, the two things we were thinking about were one, one was templates.

Uh, I had been working on this website Notion pages, and it obviously made sense for notion to have their own hosted, template gallery. And I think at that point, notion had launched, a way to duplicate pages. So we built kind of the initial template gallery. It was hosted on a notion page, and 

you could see all these notion built templates as well as community built templates. And I think that was a real, big moment for Notion because people at that point started producing templates and there was just a lot more of this content being created with Notion and, and obviously enabled more people to get started in a much, you know, in a, in a much faster, easier way.

and the second thing was we kind of, like I mentioned before, had seen a couple folks who were just really, really passionate about Notion. I was one of them. There were a couple people in other cities who were kind of similar and just all in on Notion. And so we thought, hey, if we could, if we could bring these people together, um, put them in one place, connect them more closely to the Notion team.

See if they can inspire each other, see if we can encourage more people to get involved. Could we create this group of top tier advocates who, are able to like spread notion exponentially. And so that was kind of the initial seeds for our ambassador program and something that we've been building into, to this day.

 So how did you figure out, it sounds like templates and kind of engaging early super users is where you started. did you figure out that that was the right thing to do and were there, was it sort of more intuition at the time? Was it completely obvious?

 Um, so I think one thing that we've done, at least on the community side at Notion pretty consistently since I started, has been. , basically identifying trends within notions, user base, and building on top of that. we were never this tops down, Hey, we're building this, this space for the community and like this is, this is where it's at and this is the only thing people can do.

Our approach has always been like, Hey, we wanna encourage people to do amazing things with notion and, and empower people to, to share notion and to be a part of this with us. so I think, templates and the super users were two of their earliest things we had noticed templates was, was pretty clear to us.

you know, it could be challenging to just hop into Notion and see, you know, these, these building blocks without having a clear idea of what kind of potential there is. and, um, and on the super user side, the ambassador side that we spoke about, I had seen a couple people like this doing this already in other cities.

And so we, I think pretty early on at that point we just tweeted a forum and said like, Hey, if you wanna get involved and become an ambassador of notion and you want to. Contribute to notion somehow by either hosting notion events or or starting a YouTube channel about notion or localizing content or producing templates like Apply here.

And we had probably a thousand something people apply, within the first few weeks of us, of us sharing that. And it just came to show like how passionate people were about the product and excited to get involved. So, you know, I think, I think it goes back to kind of this theme of like identifying what people wanted kind of in our, within our user base and how they were excited to be involved.

and throughout the years, a lot of the programs we've built on the community side have been very similar in that they've just been things that either people have started doing on their own and we started to put some fuel on that fire, um, and build out more resources and tooling to do that.

 When you think back to the early days, or maybe even more recently, and you're talking to community members to try to get inspired in terms of what to do or what to build, are there specific questions you tend to ask them, or does it tend to be just more open-ended convers.

 I remember just hopping on Zoom with a lot of these people and trying to understand like, what was it that drew them into notion, right? why were they writing a book about notion or why did they wanna start a YouTube channel about notion? what was it about it that that got them so, excited?

and what was cool about that was I was one of them, right? Like, I, I had felt the same way. So I would, I would hop onto Zoom with these people and like, I would feel like an instant connection with them because it, it just resonated so much. And, what I was trying to do was just figure out like, what could I be doing or what could Notion be doing to better support you, right?

this person is so passionate, so excited, about the product. these folks had never met anyone from the Notion team. They didn't really know, the backstory. they didn't know other people were doing this in other cities.

it was just them, on their own doing this, uh, out of pure passion. so it was us building these building blocks for them to really empower them to take things to the next level. and what's been really cool to see is like a lot of these people started with.

Very small audiences, and many of them have become like notion celebrities or, have YouTube channels with 50,000 subscribers or are making hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not a million dollars plus a year, doing this, right? Like it's really become a platform for a lot of these people to kind of kick off, their brand, their career, which, which I think is, you know, is, is, is really, really special to be a part of that.

 So you mentioned this a few minutes ago when you joined, in the early days, you started to create opportunities for these super users to get together, and that sort of eventually became the ambassador program that you run today. Can you talk in a little bit more detail about some of those first few events or tools or ways that you supported those super users?

 Yeah, for sure. naturally we built a Notion, workspace for them, and we started putting together resources that we thought might be helpful, so different ways to reach the team, AMAs with different folks from like the Notion team. 

and a lot of it wasjust listening. Listening to them, understanding their needs. I would spend a lot of time. Talking to these people, chatting with them. we spun up a Slack group as well pretty early on. And, just trying to understand what could I be doing on notions and to be, to be as helpful as possible.

Uh, and you know, the arranged from anything it could, that could be product feedback, sharing their feedback, making them feel heard, to eventually providing grants for people to host local events, to just validating people and kind of sharing testimonials from like the notion team to show that this person was doing incredible work.

Um, so there, there were just, there were a lot of ways and, and, and oftentimes it didn't come from us as much as it came from them. It came from them asking for things, them building things, and us just responding and being like, Hey, like. It's amazing that you're doing this. Like, we would love to support you, we'll provide you with this, we want to help you with this.

That was, that was really where most, most of it came from. And, and over time we tried to kind of take a lot of these processes and, and build them into more kind of scalable processes just so that we could do them with hundreds of people and, and, you know, hopefully eventually thousands of people, uh, and uh, and have like this really kind of tight ongoing relationship with them.

 One of the things you just mentioned was setting up a Slack group, and I feel like when anybody thinks of community, they tend to think, oh, we just launched a Slack group and now community's taken care of. And what ends up happening basically every time is it just becomes a ghost town and another slack group that no one uses.

Um, so I, I'm interested in, in what you all did to sort of create a thriving virtual community in Slack. Or maybe if somebody's gonna go and, utilize Slack or something similar for their community in the early days, what are some things they should consider doing so that they don't end up with sort of the normal ghost town?

 Yeah. So our approach I think has, has been pretty unique because we took a more, what I would call decentralized approach. So what ha what happened was we, we started bringing on these ambassadors into our program and many of them would start their own notion groups. They would start you know, maybe notion Korea on Facebook or notion for artists on, on telegram or, um, notion for solopreneurs on Twitter communities.

It got to the point where there were actually, there's, there's more than 150 of these groups today and, and they're all run by our ambassadors, and we don't have one kind of tops down community. That notion runs. Rather what we do is we enable and support the ambassadors who are running these groups.

So, so the Slack group that we have with our ambassadors it's more of like this kind of bottoms up, view into kind of how these ambassadors are running their own groups. And, and so I think, I think first of all, I would give them ambassadors all the credit for, for what they've done.

I mean, some of these, some of the, the groups that they've started around notion are incredible and so vibrant and active. Like, to give you another example, we have a couple ambassadors who run r slash notion on Reddit. It has more than 260,000 subscribers. And, uh, and it's, it's, it's incredible just seeing the amount, just how helpful people are, the really cool and creative things people are sharing on there.

And, and we're just really lucky that these folks in our ambassador program are so, you know, deeply caring and passionate about notion to, to, to, to do this, uh, with their, with their free time. Um, so, our Slack group for our ambassadors is, is obviously much smaller and, and we pay, you know, very close attention to like the feedback that people share and, uh, and get a, we have a lot of one-on-one conversations with ambassadors.

We treat them, you know, almost as if they're an extension of the Notion team. And, and I, I think that's in how that's played out is I think like the kind of top things are, um, The ambassadors being able to share their feedback and, and bugs and things that they encounter with notion. Um, just sharing cool things that are happening in the notion community, like different events, different milestones, achievements, um, and then just best practices around community building, around workshops, around teaching notion, around building courses.

They, these, these folks in our ambassador program are so active, they're doing so much and they, they learn a lot, obviously along the way. And we try to encourage them to share their, their best practices, their learnings, uh, in order to enable other folks, other ambassadors in this program to get better at what they're doing.

through our ambassador program we're supporting a couple hundred people who are then supporting about a million notion users on their own through the notion groups that they run.

 So in terms of the, the actual sort of ambassador, um, Slack instance that you've built for the ambassador program? are there any rituals or channels or things you do in there that if other people are creating their own sort of super user Slack group, they might get inspiration from?

 Yeah. So we, we do, we do some. Pretty, you know, what I would consider like standard things like having weekly threads around, you know, what did you do last weekend or, or sharing your pets or plants, things that, um, just a allowing people to like kind of see the more human side of like other participants.

And it's always really fun to just kind of get a glimpse at like these people's lives and, and their, their personal lives and what's going on. Um, and then in, in terms of the feedback side, it's, it's less us kind of creating rituals, more just us trying to figure out ways to like respond to that and, and show that we care and we're listening and, and I think some of the things that we've done that have been helpful in the, in, uh, have, have been getting our product and engineering team involved.

And, and they'll just jump in sometimes and like share. Deeper explanations as to like why we built something some way, or how we did it or what's going on. And I think the, the folks in our ambassador program really appreciate that because they're getting, uh, an inside glimpse of like what is happening at Notion.

Um, and then something that we, we do quite a bit of is providing early access to new features or new things we're building. And we have a, we have kind of processes for sharing like new beta testing opportunities and ways to share feedback on those new things that we're building. And I, and people love in, in this ambassador program, people really love seeing that because they feel like they get, uh, they're getting kind of like the, you know, the rawest look at like, what is happening at Ocean?

What are we building? And, and, and we try to, we try to do as much of, as much as possible, um, of that. Um, and then outside of that, I think, I think a lot of it is, is really just kind of. The, the ambassadors or super users, if you will, just kind of sharing things on their own, sharing things that they're doing.

We try to encourage people to share, milestones they're hitting or any events that they're hosting or, um, anything o oftentimes what I'll, what I'll do is when I see folks in our ambassador program tweeting something related to notion that's exciting, something that they achieved, something that they, uh, that they've set up.

I'll, if they didn't share it in the ambassador stock, I'll just send them a DM being like, Hey, this is so cool. Like, would you wanna share this with everyone in, in the group? And obviously people are always really excited to see what's going on and, you know, they, they appreciate that. So, um, even, you know, years later, like I still remind people to do that.

And I think, it can be helpful to like, get people in the rhythm of just like sharing and, a Slack group that, you know, in other cases some people might forget about sometimes.

 you mentioned that at Notion you've taken a more decentralized approach to building out your community. Can you talk a little bit more about how a company might think about whether they should take a, an approach that's a little bit more decentralized versus centralized?

 so when, when you're looking at like decentralized versus centralized community, I think there are advantages and disadvantages to both. I don't think there's like one perfect route. I think the, the decentralized approach works better when people are very, very excited about, what you're building.

And, um, I think it's, it's obviously very hard to like force the decentralized approach. I think that ha that that happens more naturally, more organically. And, you know, you might see in like some industries there's, there's a lot of that. Like I think in AI right now, like there's a bunch of places, 

in that industry where there's just so much like interest and so much like creativity and cool things people are building that you do have this ability to create this more like decentralized approach. Whereas, if you're building something that, you know, even if people are excited about, but maybe, maybe like not to the same extent, uh, and if you wanna have more of a tie in into your metrics.

I, I think like the centralized approach is, is, is also. , I don't think there's like one Right. Or, or one, one wrong approach. I think with us, it, it just happened very organically and, and it kind of became this like philosophy for us, uh, just because of how things played out. Um, but what I would look at is really like, is this happening on its own already or are we kind of like initiating it and kind of creating this space or program or, place for our community And, and if, and if so, there's really nothing.

 So I wanted to pick up the thread that we started a little bit ago. Which was sort of the progression of how you approach building out community at Notion. You talked about the first few months that you came in, you started with templates and laying the groundwork for what eventually became the ambassador program.

Can you kind of continue going down that journey and explain some of the different tactics, programs and other things that you built to sort of nurture the community?

 Yeah, absolutely. So I think the kind of general theme over time was what is it that people are asking for or starting to do on their own? And, and how could we kind of tap into that? And that, that, that happened a bunch of times and I can give you a couple examples of kind of how that happened in practice. So

I think a good, a good place to start might be with like our first user conference. this was during the pandemic, so this all happened virtually. And there was, I, I think at that point there was just a lot of critical mass around. People wanting to connect around notion and a lot of intrigue around who was building notion and hearing the story more broadly.

And, and so we decided, uh, and this was a cross-functional effort. Um, we decided to organize like our first user conference and bring our team to share kind of what was happening on the notion side, bring folks from our community to share what they were building and creating with Notion.

And it was, it was a really wonderful, wonderful experiment. Um, there were a bunch of teams involved and I think, you know, I can't remember exactly how many people signed up, but I, I, I think there were probably more than 15,000 people who signed up for this just to show like how much interest there was in doing this and.

We, um, we had Ivan come and, share his story and, and kind of his, his vision for notion. And, and we had a bunch of folks from our ambassador program talk about what they were building and this was like kind of, I think this was like a really pivotal moment for us because we realized, wow, this is so global, right?

There were, there were people from all over the world, almost every country at that point, I think. and they were all just so excited to like connect in this one place over the course of a couple hours and, and, you know, and talk about notion. Uh, and that was something that we did the year after as well and kind of has, has evolved from there into like more of a tradition.

I think another example might be, our work with, influencers. Pretty early on had, I had noticed a couple YouTubers talking about Notion and how they were using it for, to manage their, their YouTube channels. And I thought, wow, this is so cool. Like, why don't we reach out to them and ask them if they would, produce another video about how they use Notion where maybe the entire video would be like their workflow and notion.

And so we started with a couple, of these YouTubers and in the course of like the next few months, started scaling it out a bit and working with five one month, 10 the next month, 20 the following month. And, uh, and realized like it was such a powerful channel for us because these creators really enjoyed using Notion to manage their YouTube channel and their business 

and it created this flywheel where other YouTubers would see these, these creators talking about it, and then they would start to use Notion themselves. And, our philosophy was like, we only wanna work with people who genuinely love notion. So we were making sure that our, our sponsorships were, with creators who were using Notion, themselves.

and this was over the course of like the next year and a half, two years, uh, I ended up bringing in a couple contractors to help us scale this. And we were, you know, continually increasing this. And, what was really interesting about this was it became this really powerful channel for us To build ground swell in, in new countries and new geos where we didn't have as much of a, of a user base yet. And because we were doing this globally in, in any language really, we noticed that certain creators who were really influential in a certain country would be able to like totally change the baseline number of people signing up for notion in, in that place.

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Ben Lang, Head of Community at Notion, shares his playbook for how to tap into your product evangelists and build a powerful community that grows from dozens to millions.  

Lessons from Notion on building a thriving decentralized community

Ben Lang, Head of Community at Notion, shares his playbook for how to tap into your product evangelists and build a powerful community that grows from dozens to millions. 