How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts

... way that you think about product market fit, you have to think about content market fit. So even though content feels like it's running adjacent to the actual product that you're putting out there, you still have to think about, who is my audience? Who is the audience that I really want to have? Who's the audience that is going to be drawn to this most? Who are they? What is it that they really need in their lives? Like, even abstracting content from it all, what is it that they need to get promoted? What is it that they need to avoid failure? What is it that causes them a great deal of (laughs) anxiety in the day-to-day of their lives or their work, and can you create some type of content product that is going to address this for them?

(Instrumental music.) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny, and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Camille Ricketts. Camille was the first marketing hire at Notion, and longtime head of marketing at Notion. Prior to that, she was head of content and marketing at First Round Capital, where, amongst many other things, she launched the First Round Review, which holds a very special place in my heart because a guest post in the First Round Review essentially helped me launch my now career of newsletter and now podcast. Camille also did content marketing at Kiva, and also comms and PR at early Tesla, where she sat right next to Elon Musk for about a year, and she shares some really fun stories about that. In this episode, we focus on two areas that Camille was very early in, and has tremendous insights around. One, community-led growth: what it actually is, when it's something you should invest in, how to do it well, all based on her experience building Notion's early community, which was a huge part of Notion's early success. We also talk about content marketing: when it's worth investing in, how to do it well, and all kinds of tips for building a content marketing machine. It was a total blast chatting with Camille, and I'm really excited for you to learn from her. With that, I bring you Camille Ricketts right after we hear a word from our wonderful sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools, or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country, and by user stage. Eppo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytic cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics, and instead use your North Star metrics like activation, retention, subscriptions, and payments. And Eppo supports tests on the front end, the back end, email marketing, and even machine learning clients. Check out Eppo at GetEppo.com. Get, E-P-P-O.com, and 10X your experiment velocity. Hey, Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?