Notion's lost years, near collapse during COVID, staying small to move fast, building horizontal

The way you described the early years of Notion, you described the first three to four years as the lost years.

We try many different version. The first version, okay, everybody can make and create their software, so let's just build a developer tool that's so easy that more people can do that. We try that like a couple years and learn that actually most people just don't care. The... Our realization is actually let's hide our vision, which is everybody can create their software, in the form factor that people do care. So what kind of tool do people use every day? Productivity software. It took us two year to realize we need to build a productivity tool. We call the sugar, called the broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar, so give them the sugar and hide the broccoli inside of it.

What other elements do you think are key to you finding something that actually ended up working?

What is the building a product or business? One user, you want revenue. That's a product business, and building for something you want the world to have is building for your value. You have some taste. You have some aesthetic. They are different energy. You need to create a balance. Too much of yourself, then there's no users. Then you're just doing art project, and too much for business, you're building a commodity.

The way you think about Notion, it's almost like a philosophy of how to work and be, versus just a productivity tool, and so I'm just curious how you think about the relationship between tools and human potential.

Tools are extensions of us, and once they extends us, once we shape them, once we bring them to, to world, they can come back to shape us.

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Ivan Zhao. Ivan is the co-founder and CEO of Notion. Ivan is a really unique and also a deeply philosophical founder who doesn't do a lot of podcasts, so I'm really excited to share a glimpse into how he built one of the most beloved and most popular products in the world. We talk about the first three to four years of Notion that he describes as the lost years, how he was able to get into a great school in China by winning a programming contest, the joy and suffering of building a successful horizontal product, plus his approach to staying lean and craft and making trade-offs, and also leadership. Also, a wild story about how Notion almost died during COVID because the one database that everything lived in almost ran out of space. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a paid annual subscriber of my newsletter, you now get a year free of Notion Pro and Perplexity Pro and Superhuman and Linear and Granola. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Ivan Zhao. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Airtable Product Central, the unified system that brings your entire product org together in one place. No more scattered tools, no more misaligned teams. If you're like most product leaders, you're tired of constant context switching between tools. That's why Airtable built Product Central after decades of working with world-class product companies. Think of it as mission control for your entire product organization. Unlike rigid point solutions, Product Central powers everything from resourcing to voice of customer to road mapping to launch execution, and because it's built on Airtable's no-code platform, you can customize every workflow to match exactly how your team works. No limitations, no compromises. Ready to see it in action? Head to airtable.com/lenny to book a demo. That's airtable.com/lenny. (instrumental music) Ivan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.