How Notion’s Community Helped it Win in AI

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.
  
  

Rachel Hepworth

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelhepworth/
• X: https://x.com/rachelhepworth
  
  

Phil Carter

• Website: philgcarter.com
• Substack: philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: x.com/philgcarter
  
  

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Chapters

• 3:24 Rachel’s previous experience at Slack and LinkedIn
• 7:07 Notion’s early investment in AI
• 9:21 How Notion educated early adopters of AI Writer
• 13:05 How Notion leveraged community to fuel growth
• 17:09 How Notion partnered with AI influencers and thought leaders
• 19:14 How Notion’s community team was structured
• 22:01 How Notion became a global product
• 24:52 How Notion used “champions” to expand within enterprises
• 31:35 The challenges of serving both consumer and enterprise audiences
• 35:33 How Notion’s consumer brand created a “halo effect” with enterprises
• 37:40 How Notion AI has evolved over time
• 42:17 Lightning round