In only a decade since its inception, Notion has attracted over 35M users and more than 4M paying customers while raising $350 million in funding. The rapid growth has propelled the company to an extraordinary valuation of $10 billion.

Today, many businesses heavily rely on Notion, and it has become the most advanced and talked about productivity tool, mostly by strong word-of-mouth. In this article, we will discuss how a humble startup aimed to combine workspace and note-taking abilities became a $10B company and the world's most favored and essential collaborative workspace interface.

Dynamic Duo Founders

Notion was brought to life by co-founders Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, who were by no means newcomers to the tech world. Before Notion came into the picture, both founders already had significant experience in the tech world, and this deeply influenced how they approached building the platform.

Ivan Zhao came from a design background that particularly focused on user experience and interaction design. Throughout his career, he worked on projects with the goal of taking complicated processes and making them simple and beautiful. This philosophy of making things intuitive and streamlined is central to how Notion feels and functions today.

On the other hand, Simon Last brought serious expertise in software engineering to the table. He had a reputation for working on high-profile projects that demanded scalable, user-focused solutions. His technical skills gave Notion a strong backbone, ensuring the app could handle whatever users threw at it as the community continued to grow.

Humble Beginnings

Notion's story began in 2013 with a straightforward yet powerful concept: to create a unified workspace that could seamlessly combine notes, tasks, and databases, making information management more streamlined and user-friendly. This vision stemmed from the founders’ dissatisfaction with the disjointed nature of existing digital tools, which forced people to juggle multiple apps and platforms.

Adapting to the Market

Ivan Zhao and Simon Last wanted Notion to be an offline-first tool, meaning it could work without an internet connection, which made sense for users who wanted access to their workspace at all times — even without connectivity. 

In 2014, Notion's development was hampered because it was being built on the wrong tech stack. In its earliest stages, Notion was built on WebKit, a browser engine used by platforms like Safari, with the intent to make it an offline-first application. 

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Specifically, the founders envisioned a tool where users could work without needing a constant internet connection, which meant they heavily relied on CouchDB, a database designed for offline-first functionality. CouchDB allows users to store their data locally and sync it later once connected to the internet. Notion's initial technology stack also involved using the Electron framework, which provides a way to build desktop applications using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

However, Notion struggled to sync properly with the cloud and offered a poor user experience when handling the complex and interactive features they wanted to support, like embedding databases, real-time collaboration, and constant updates.

Only later did Zhao say that they were "trying to reinvent the wheel." The combination of CouchDB and WebKit was seriously crippling. Core performance issues plagued the tool; it was clunky, particularly when the subjective action of syncing between devices or to the cloud came into question. 

However, scalability and real-time collaboration were a problem—two critical features that became vital once Ivan Zhao and Simon Last realized their goal wasn't just offline note-taking but building a powerful, flexible, and connected workspace. Then follows the tough decision to rebuild the whole platform from scratch using modern web technologies that would be able to handle online collaboration and real-time data synchronization.

Tough Decisions & Bigger Risks: Tech Pivot

In 2015, Notion took a drastic step to restructure the company. They parted ways with all four employees, returning to square one. In this challenging period, Ivan turned to his family for support, borrowing $150,000 from his mother to keep the dream alive. To eliminate distractions, the team relocated to Kyoto, Japan, where they could pour their focus entirely into redeveloping Notion.

When Ivan Zhao and the team recognized that they were building on the wrong technical stack and the product wasn't going to serve their purposes, they fired all of their early employees. Pretty bold, especially for a young startup. It gave them a clean slate.

The Payoff: Getting Accepted

Notion 1.0 was launched in March 2016, and boy, did it get a splash from day one. The app created a record as the #1 Product on Product Hunt, not for the day or the week but even for the whole month. Such respect taught the team a great lesson and gave them morale after a few hard years.

Focusing on Product Development & Organic Growth

Notion gained its first 1,000 users organically, through word-of-mouth alone. Without spending on marketing or advertising, Notion focused on cultivating a group of early, enthusiastic adopters who were impressed by the product and eager to share it. 

The team utilized social networks like Twitter, Reddit, and Product Hunt to increase awareness and gather user feedback. This approach fostered a strong community of fans who created tutorials, templates, and various use cases for Notion. Additionally, Notion connected with influencers to help introduce the product to their audiences.

A year later, in 2017, Notion expanded to Windows and iOS, thus opening the product to an even bigger market. Word of mouth became the strong driver at this point when people started sharing how they were living inside the app: everything was fully customizable and interconnected. It was grassroots buzz that helped bring into being what finally materialized today—the community of users.

Improving Every Step of The Way

However, things started to get really interesting when the Notion 2.0 was released in March 2018. The second version was a huge jump forward, rounding off the user interface and making the platform much more powerful and intuitive. For the second time in the company's history, it reached the top position on Product Hunt yet again as #1 Product of the Day, Week, and Month. This version significantly expanded Notion's reach.

Upward Rally

By September 2019, Notion had reached a critical milestone: 1 million users worldwide. This accomplishment began Notion’s emergence as a major player in the productivity tool market. The platform gained recognition from individuals to small teams for its versatility and ability to adapt to a wide range of use cases.

The year 2020 turned transformational with respect to Notion. In less than eight months, they saw an explosion in the user base. The company saw jaw-dropping growth of 400%, and at the end of the year, Notion hit a gobsmacking $2 billion valuation—presumably sticking the unicorn horn right on its forehead. 

Partially, this is due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated demand for remote work solutions. Teams of all sizes reached for its all-in-one workspace for project management, collaboration, and document sharing.

2021: Unicorn Status Solidified

October 2021 turned out to be yet another milestone-marking month for the company. Notion raised $275 million in funding, with an increased valuation of $10 billion. Its global user base, which had grown to more than 20 million people by then, positioned Notion as one of the fastest-scaling productivity tools in the world.

Enter Notion AI

2023 saw Notion continuing its upward trajectory with the introduction of Notion AI, adding powerful tools that let users automate creating and managing content. It also reworked its template gallery for further flexibility, empowering users to create and share creative workflows. 

Third-party developers are assisted by a robust official community comprising hundreds of creators, which offers feedback that is very valuable to them in the continuous refinement and extension of Notion. Notion is committed to the process of improvement, providing both creators and users with the ability to perform regular updates and add new features to make the most out of it.

What Worked for Notion as a Product?

A huge reason why Notion became so successful is the strong product and diverse use case that made it go viral by word-of-mouth. 

Versatility & Adaptability

Ivan Zhao and Simon Last aimed to create a "thinking tool": a flexible, customizable space for organizing thoughts, ideas, and projects. This ambition drove their design to serve a wide spectrum of users, from large organizations to individual freelancers, by focusing on versatility and user empowerment. 

From the start, Zhao and Last built Notion to be highly modular. With databases, task lists, and customizable pages, users could structure workflows that fit their needs, making Notion adaptable to nearly any use case. This flexibility explains its broad adoption: businesses use it for complex project management, while freelancers, solopreneurs, and individuals find it equally effective for personal organization, goal tracking, and creative projects.

The Freemium Model and Democratizing Access

Staying true to its vision, Notion’s commitment to a freemium model aims to make powerful tools accessible to all. Zhao believed information organizations shouldn’t be privileged for large companies with large budgets. 

So, Notion offers a free tier, benefiting individual users, students, and small businesses while also generating revenue from larger teams and enterprises needing advanced features and scalability. This model also spurred organic growth, with users starting with the free version and naturally upgrading as their needs expanded, turning them into brand advocates who introduced Notion to their workplaces and networks.

Community-Driven Ecosystem Vision

Beyond the product itself, Notion’s founders wanted to build a platform that nurtured community and collaboration. By making Notion flexible and accessible, they made it easy for users to create templates, share workflows, and teach others how to use the product. This approach helped Notion evolve into a community-driven ecosystem, where users benefited from the platform and contributed by sharing innovative ways to use it.

Final Thoughts

The first thing that worked with Notion was the solid foundation of its founder duo, who brought their individual strengths and combined their complementary experiences and knowledge to build the product.

Founded by Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, Notion benefitted early on from the synergy of its founders’ different strengths. Zhao brought a strong design and product vision, while Last contributed technical expertise.

What's even more amazing is how adaptable, flexible, and resilient they were. They stayed consistent enough with their initial tech stack, but after a couple of years of hard work, they realized what they were doing wrong. Instead of giving up, they took a bet on themselves and the idea again and started from scratch. This time, their bets worked, and their favor and success finally came to the company after years of work!

The delayed but lasting success of Notion is a reminder that perseverance, coupled with a willingness to pivot, can lead to breakthrough results. All these skills, combined with a strong and steady product development journey over the years, led them to success. 

Their journey signifies the importance of sticking with a long-term vision while being open to rethinking the route to get there. 

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