Скачать или смотреть $10 Billion Productivity Startup Notion Wants To Build Your AI Everything

Ivan Zhao had started the company based on the idea that you should be able to do as much with a word processor as you can with a blank piece of paper. Josh Kopelman, frequent Midas Lister and cofounder of First Round Capital, was so impressed by Zhao’s unusual pitch, which involved a lengthy digression into the origins of paper, he wrote the biggest check in the $2 million seed round in 2013.“I remember walking out and thinking, ‘This is different from any founder pitch I’ve ever taken,’ ” Kopelman says. “There was no screenshot, no mockup. It was very conceptual, but I felt like I understood at the highest level what he wanted to do.”But Kopelman was in the minority. Two years later, people didn’t understand Notion, the software editor Zhao had built, and he hadn’t figured out a compelling way to explain it. Few saw a need for a tool to design personalized computer programs. When he saw First Round employees using Notion, it seemed to Zhao that they were doing it “out of pity,” he recalls.“The software wasn’t good enough yet,” he admits. “You know you can get better. You know what better feels like. But you don’t quite know how to get there.”In a last-ditch attempt to save the company, Zhao and cofounder Simon Last laid off all their employees, sublet their San Francisco office and moved to Kyoto, Japan, to cut costs. A $150,000 emergency loan from Zhao’s mother gave them enough time to reboot with “Notion 1.0.” The software editor was still there, but now Notion looked like a productivity tool on the surface—a minimalist twist on Google Docs that also let you easily make wikis and manage your to-do lists. In August 2016, they released it on app discovery site Product Hunt. It was the site’s most popular product of the day, then week, then month. Within weeks, Notion, which is free but charges power users upward of $8 a month, was turning a profit and had become one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups. In October, Zhao and Last returned to San Francisco triumphant. Notion was spreading globally (80% of users are outside the U. S.) on word of mouth alone. It hit its first million users in 2019. Students liked it for making to-do lists and taking class notes. Design-minded entrepreneurs used it to replace the traditional pitch deck, and artists to show off their portfolios. “How I use Notion” tutorials flooded YouTube. People needed those videos because while Notion is powerful, the customization options for something as simple as a to-do list can make it overwhelming. One of the most popular is a relatively simple walkthrough of the software that shows how to get started using it “without losing your mind.” But it was precisely this level of customization that made Notion so useful for work. Employees at DoorDash and Nike adopted it to manage projects or share notes. It caught on among some teams at McKinsey after a partner began using it at home to organize his pizza reci­pes.


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Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickc...


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