Breaking Down Notion’s Organic Growth Strategies
Notion is valued at more than $800 million, has one million users, and upvoted by more than 6000 Product Hunt users.
This over the top growth is a lesson for early-stage SaaS startups.
Why?
Because almost all of Notion’s growth has been organic.
Originally started in 2014 with a seed round and a team of 4, Notion has survived, pivoted, and reinvented itself to become one of the most looked after SaaS companies today.
Notion is a note-taking app that calls itself “All In One Workspace”. You can do a lot of things on Notion and replace multiple apps generally used for notes, wikis, tasks, projects, spreadsheets, CRM, and much more. Evernote is the Notion’s nearest rival.
For all its success, Notion’s growth activities remained almost surgical. In this issue, I am taking you deep into Notion’s organic growth strategies.
Product
Notion’s story is a true product lead growth story. It is an “all-in-one” productivity app. Ease of use fueled by drag and drop functionality impresses its users.
This decade has been different from its predecessor in terms of the role the design has played to the success of internet companies. This decade saw deep research into user journeys and ease of use. The design has come to play a key role and became a differentiation. A lot of Notion’s users talk highly of its product design.
Notion as a product is built largely as a “one-stop solution”. Once you are in its ecosystem you do not really talk to other services significantly. Hence they have not built multiple integrations as Zoom or Slack has done. However, to make it easy for users to adopt the Notion, they have built easy integrations. These integrations are limited to those services from which users are expected to migrate.
Traffic Analysis
Over 93% of Notion’s traffic is organic which largely constitute of direct and search traffic.
This means the majority of visitors are coming to Notion directly using their URL. This indicates that visitors were aware of the Notion beforehand. A highly targeted community-based engagement has the potential to result in such traffic.
Notion is in fact engaged in building a community. They organize meetups across countries and have built location-wise local groups.
They curate apps created by users in Notion Template Gallary.
Here are the Notion’s top keywords which are all branded keywords:
Having Github as a major traffic source is an indicator of developers building apps on Notion.
Why is YCombinator sending the traffic? We will find out soon.
Key Takeaways:
- If your product is such where developers, designers, etc can create their own work, give them a platform to showcase it.
- Build local chapters and communities. These high touch engagements go a long way in improving customer lifetime value (LTV).
Distribution
Over half of the startups from YCombinator’s most recent batch are Notion’s customers. Notion has also approached accelerators like 500 Startups and TechStars offering their startups $1000 in free credits.
AWS does this too. They readily sponsor startup competitions and offer $1000 in free credits. I had once received such a coupon. It is a different matter that even after more than 18 months I have used only $113 out of it as I find AWS too complicated for me.
Targeting startups so early in their journey is a very smart play. Notion counts companies with 100 or fewer employees as their core users. Becoming an ‘operating system’ for startups when they are still in incubator programs is an easy way to ensure the continuous flow of new users for years to come.
Key Takeaways:
- Clearly define who your customers are and where they are found en masse. Target those channels with all you have got.
Users’ Journey To Value Discovery — Help In Decision Making
In issue #7 of the Organic SaaS Growth newsletter, I had discussed Shortening the Users’ Journey To Value Discovery. A key step in user journey confusion and decision making. Every company must try to help users at this stage. Helping users fight confusion and make a decision in their favor.
On its homepage, Notion features multiple gifs showing the usage of its product. These gifs quickly help in showing the value of the product to visitors.
Some companies do it using images and explainer videos. I personally favor gifs as they are lightweight, non-intrusive, and quickly show the value.
Notion also creatively poach customers from its competitors. Notion does this by boldly calling out unsatisfied users of Evernote. They have built a dedicated resource to help such users migrate to Notion in just a few clicks.
Key Takeaways:
- Shorten the Users’ Journey to Value Discovery: Build resources to help them fight confusion and take a decision in your favor.
- Make it super easy for unsatisfied users of competitors to migrate to your product. Entice the ones sitting on fence. This will require building efficient single click tools. It is an engineering activity.
WSJ Article and PH Launch
Notion saw explosive growth in 2018 with the launch of Notion 2.0. In March 2018, they launched on Product Hunt. Team Notion had experience launching on PH. Back in 2016, they launched Notion 1.0 on PH which got hunted by Naval Ravikant. Since then they have been launching updates and products every year on PH.
During the same month, David Pierce published an article praising the app on the Wall Street Journal.
Though I could not find any back story, my hunch is an article on WSJ and successful PH launch did not happen by themselves. Media article had helped Zoom too, to gain initial traction. However, to make this happen, the Zoom team systematically engaged Walt Mossberg over months, even meeting him in person for a demo.
Key Takeaways:
- Research well on the Product Hunt launch. To gain first-hand experience, launch a product every time you have a new version. Also, launch a blog or any other resource you have built to help users. All with the same brand name.
- Engage with superstar users on social or email. Canva in its early days found out that Guy Kawasaki is using their product. They met him in person and roped him as their evangelist. Guy loved the product so it was an easy deal. Someone with following like Guy Kawasaki talking about your product in high spirits is worth his weight in gold. I am very sure that being hunted by Naval Ravikant in 2016 had helped Notion build credibility.
- Engage with industry analysts and journalists. This is easier than it sounds. By nature of their work, they are on the lookout for interesting stories. If you reach out to them to share your product months before you want to get published and keep them engaged with stories, chances are they will write about you. I for once chanced upon a journalist who had changed cities and was between jobs. She happened to write on something related to the domain of one of my businesses. I readily helped her with domain research as well as offered her a free copy of an ebook I had written. We ended up being covered in one of her articles later.
Paid Advertising
I could not find any of Notion’s Google ads. However, they are running a handful of Facebook ads with a single funnel:
Facebook Ad > Free Notion For Students
To be very honest, there is nothing exciting in their Facebook ads neither the company seems to be going big on ads.
This should act as a reminder that paid advertising has nothing to do with SaaS companies at least for the first few years.
In issue #3 of this newsletter, I have argued for using Facebook ads to determine the positioning by generating statistically significant data. Using ads for growth experiments is different from using ads as acquisition channels.
Key Takeaways:
- If you are a new company, stay away from paid ads. Improve product and positioning, build a repository of user research, and build as many organic channels of growth as possible.
- Use ads for growth experiments if required.
Two truths about SaaS growth Strategies
- A growth strategy is as good as the insights it is based on.
- A bad strategy takes almost the same effort to execute as it takes for a good strategy
To discover the most compelling growth insights for your SaaS business, analyze the data like website traffic, new signups, free user activation, and paid plan-wise customers. Even if you are a new business, you can still discover impactful growth insights from just a few months of data.
Use the SaaS Growth Growth Model — a spreadsheet-based model that analyzes the data using more than eight different analyses, discovers hidden growth levers, and suggests top growth strategies for your business.
Get it here : SaaS Growth Strategy Model
Thank you for reading!
This post was originally published in the Organic SaaS Growth newsletter.
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