Startup accelerator Y Combinator, in particular, proved to be an extremely valuable customer acquisition channel.Īnother reason for Notion’s rapid ascend was the simultaneous downfall of Evernote. By being directly engaged with users, he would gain a substantially better understanding of the product itself.ĭirectly engaging with users also meant that Zhao would often meet with startup founders who would become one of Notion’s early business adopters. In those early days, Zhao was doing a lot of double shifts and helped the customer support team. Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList and one of Notion’s early investors, also activated his seven-digit Twitter following. Zhao’s mother, as a result, had to loan him $150,000 to keep the young company and its founders afloat.Ī few weeks later, they listed Notion on the discovery platform Product Hunt to get some buzz going. To attract users, they kept the product free. In order to extend their runway, they moved from San Francisco to Kyoto in Japan where they coded for 18 hours a day.įinally, in March 2016, they released the first version of what is now known as Notion. For the first two years, they worked on a no-code tool called Concept that after being released to the public no one seemed to want to use.Īt the time, in 2015, Zhao and Last employed a small team of two more engineers, which they consequently had to let go. Soon after, in 2013, the two managed to raise around $2 million in seed funding from angel investors, including family and friends. After Last was offered an internship, he actually decided to drop out of college and joined Zhao as a full-time co-founder. One of the first people he recruited was Simon Last who at the time was still enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park. Right after graduation, he started working for the e-book startup Inkling, but ultimately was too enamored with the idea of visually oriented programming that he decided to quit after a year. Zhao, after reading a 1962 paper by Douglas Engelbart called “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework”, came to the conclusion that he wanted to build tools that would help humans to be more creative and imaginative in their work. He even began helping his art student friends to create portfolio websites and subsequently realized that “those people have taste they just don’t have good tools.” When Zhao was attending high school, his mother decided to move the small family to Vancouver, Canada where he wound up attending the University of British Columbia.īeing already a competent programmer, Zhao actually focused his studies on cognitive science and art. He grew up learning how to code and even participated in competitions such as the International Olympiad in Informatics. His transformative years were spent in China, where he was born and discovered his love for programming. To say that CEO Zhao is living and breathing computer science is probably quite an understatement. Notion, headquartered in San Francisco, California, was founded in 2013 by Ivan Zhao and Simon Last. Members can use the product via the browser (both by logging in or downloading its plugin) and by downloading its mobile app (available for Android and iOS devices). Notion itself can be accessed in a variety of ways. Users can plug Notion into other software products like Asana, Jira, GitHub, Slack, and many more. One aspect that makes Notion so powerful for individuals and businesses alike is the integrations it offers. The firm has been able to attract customers such as MatchGroup, Monzo, Pixar, and hundreds of others. Notion even features a variety of use cases its business customers have built. Its users create templates, which are then advertised on the firm’s own template gallery. One of Notion’s biggest strengths is the community it has amassed. Habit, financial, or subscription trackers.An internal wiki detailing all that’s important.Members have replicated various use cases within the app, including creating: The platform calls itself the all-in-one workspace and allows its business and individual users to conduct all types of tasks. Notion is a productivity app that helps individuals and teams organize their life and manage their projects.
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