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Ben Lang

I'm Ben Lang, Head of Community at Notion. AMA 👇

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Back in 2018, I launched Notion Pages on Product Hunt, it was the #2 product of the week. Shortly after, I joined Notion to support the community. Our community has written books about Notion, created mascots, hosted hundreds of events, started full-time businesses around Notion, and much more. Many of the highest-ranking products on Product Hunt in the past two years have been Notion templates. Going back in time, Notion launched on Product Hunt in 2016 as one of the most upvoted products of all time. More than 20 million people use Notion today. I was user #1880 on Product Hunt and I've hunted more than 360 products. AMA!

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Iván Fanego
Hi Ben! I am curious, how did you manage to explain what Notion was in its early days? I mean, I use Notion, but at it was difficult for me at the beginning to understand what was it (and to be honest, I am still missing 95% of its potential!) What I mean, how did you start communicating its value proposition?
Ben Lang
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@ivan_fanego This is something we think about a lot. Candidly, early on, the best way to describe our value was to talk about how Notion combined the functionality of many other tools together - this is a common way just to anchor a product in people's minds. As collaboration tools have become more critical for all teams, this messaging has evolved and become more sophisticated. Today, we call Notion collaboration software, and when it comes to value props, we underscore the benefits of speed and alignment that get unlocked when people have the ability to tailor their own tools to fit their needs. Still, though, the most helpful description tends to be the one that just says outright that it combines docs, wikis, and project management in a single, customizable space.
Iván Fanego
@benln Thanks a lot. The value of the analogy (docs, wikis, and project management) is underrated hehe.
Elie Steinbock
Hi Ben! Love what you’re doing at Notion. What tip would give you founders starting a community today?
Ben Lang
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@eliezer_steinbock1 Hi Eliezer 👋 First, try to understand what exactly your core users want. - Where could you provide value - What could they learn from each other - What could they learn from you - What do they love about your product Set up as many calls with your early fans and users to build this framework together.
Nina Hödlmayr
Hi Ben! Wat I'm curious about is - why do you think Notion has such an impact on the Product Hunt community? What are the common similarities within the community that Notion received such wide positive responses? Cheers!
Ben Lang
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@ninayodel Hi Nina! I think there are a few reasons Notion has resonated strongly with the Product Hunt community - You can build powerful tools/products - It's quick and easy to build - There's a growing ecosystem of early adopters using Notion The team and I have been amazed to see so many talented makers here launching template packs, individual templates, and apps built on Notion ✨
Donia Ahmed
Hi Ben I love notion and would like to get some tips as I started my community management career in Premast. How could you keep the flow of the community and how to increase members number .. Thanks in advance and your help is appreciated
Ben Lang
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@donia_ahmed I'd highly recommend checking out communities and resources for community managers, there are some great ones - https://www.community.club/ - https://www.community.club/c-school - https://cmxhub.com/
Sofia Silva
Ben, hi Thank you so much for doing this, congrats on the incredible work. For early-stage startups that want to build communities, what are the: - top 3 do, - top 3 don´t - 3 main differences between B2B & B2C communities - what stack would you use today to build a community Thank you! _SMB
Ben Lang
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@sofia_de_mello_barreto @dawn_veltri1 Hi Sofia! Good question! Do - Talk to your power users, get to know them - Listen to what your users want, empower them - Test and iterate all the time Don't - Force adoption of a certain tool without getting feedback - Try to do everything yourself, outsource/delegate where possible - Move too slowly Differences - Platforms, where users hang out - Purpose of connection with others Tools I love - Notion 🙃 - Swagup - Zapier - Slack - Commsor - Luma
Roi Ziko
Hi Ben 👋 Can you pick a project you've been involved in that you're especially proud of?
Ben Lang
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@roiziko Hey Roi! I'm quite proud of International Hummus Day http://hummusday.com. It's been a lot of fun seeing so many people celebrate hummus over the years.
Johann Molinari
Hi Ben, when did you feel that Notion had the right product market feel? What was the key difference vs what you had before?
Ben Lang
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@johann_molinari That's a great question! I joined Notion after we had product market fit, so I missed that part of the company growth. I will investigate and see what I can find out 🕵️
Ben Lang
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@johann_molinari Thanks Johann! Appreciate it.
Dafni Chontou
Hi Ben 👋 I’m a big fan of Notion and the engagement of the community is really impressive! How do the very early days of community building look like and what are key points founders/ community builders should keep in mind as they’re growing them? This is particularly interesting from the angle of product+community (eg Notion community) vs. community as a product company (eg Product Hunt). Many thanks!
Ben Lang
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@dafnihnd Hi Dafni, I'd say having as many conversations as possible would be tremendously valuable early on. Talk to power users, anyone who's really excited about what you're building and try to understand: - What do they love about your product - What kind of value are you unlocking for them - How could they learn more from you and other users As you understand and learn more, you could start to build a framework to grow your community.
Dafni Chontou
@benln thanks, Ben! We recently starting onboarding our users via short 1-1 calls and collect so much valuable feedback. These are some great questions to bring into these conversations.
Jordi Mon Companys
Ben please do ask how your Product Marketing colleagues manage their remit with Notion and, hey, if they want to open their templates that would help any product marketer big time! 😉
Ben Lang
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@jordimonpmm Hey Jordi! I don't quite know what you mean by remit?
Jordi Mon Companys
@benln Me neither, to be fair. I'm on holidays and probably switched all systems off. I just want to know how Product Marketing at Notion uses Notion templates and workspaces internally. That's all.
Ben Lang
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@jordimonpmm Ah good question! Have you seen this post? https://www.notion.so/blog/how-n... We share how we use Notion at Notion.
Jordi Mon Companys
@benln Thanks! I did. It's not specific enough. I'm thinking of message houses, positioning frameworks and stuff like that that typically product marketers manage and update.
Ben Lang
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@jordimonpmm Got it! Will share with our blog team, that would be fantastic material for a future post.
Goutham
Hey Ben. Notion's got diamond hands! Was curious how Notion got its first 100 users? And what was the main value proposition at that time?
Ben Lang
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@gouthamj That's a great question! I wasn't working at Notion at that time, so I'd be curious to find out as well. Will investigate 🕵️
Atul Ghorpade
Notion is really amazing. Hope so I will create something valuable of it. Let's see.
Thomas Frank
Hey Ben! I'd love to know the story behind how Notion decided on a productivity approach in the beginning with respect to marketing, since the tool can be a lot more flexible than that!
Ben Lang
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@tomfrankly Hey Thomas, great to see you here! Your content and everything you do in the Notion community is a big part of what I love so much about working at Notion :) That's a good question, I don't actually think we focused primarily on marketing to productivity oriented users, I think it just happened to resonate very strongly with productivity folks and in related communities. If you look at our website, the Solutions pages are Design, Engineering, Product, Managers, Startups, Students, Remote. Would be very curious to hear why you think Notion has resonated so much for productivity focused people.
Margarita Shvetsova
Hi Ben! When one works on something for several years, it often happens that one gets kind of bored with it. Could you share what keeps you excited after working with Notion for several years? And also, what makes you excited about hunting products here on PH? I am one of those people who failed to get you as a hunter (sorry if I mentioned that several times today 😇), but I am really interested, why it keeps being interesting to be a hunter. The platform goes through changes, the person (hunter) changes... Would be cool to hear about your motivation ✌
Ben Lang
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@margarita_s88 Hi Margarita! That's a great question, I think with Notion it comes to down to the product and community. I love using Notion, I think it's a revolutionary product and it keeps getting better. And I love the community, I'm so inspired by everyone involved in the Notion ecosystem, it really blows my mind each day when I wake up. As for Product Hunt, I generally hunt things I'm excited about using myself. I often miss things, but I try my best! So sorry for not hunting your product.
Margarita Shvetsova
@benln thank you for your reply, Ben. That's awesome that the product keeps you excited. In fact, I encountered many Notion plans for a Product Hunt launch and I thought to myself - hey, this Notion looks great, I can probably use it too! Just need to give me some time about what it can do :) Interesting product and inspiring community - what a great mix! Appreciate your comment on why you launch certain products :) I know you receive lots of messages about PH launches daily - so I wasn't surprised I didn't get a reply. But we did end up getting to #4 Product of the day on Monday - even without a hunter, so I am happy anyway 😀
Ben Lang
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@margarita_s88 Very happy to hear you ended up as #4, that's wonderful!
Emily Hodgins
Hey Ben! 👋 What are some of the best Notion hacks/tips or tricks that power users love, but newbies might not know about?
Ben Lang
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@ejsnowdon Hi Emily, such a good question, so many hacks/tips come to mind. A few that popped in my head - CMD+Shift+H for last used color is so useful - Simple tables launched yesterday, love these! (/table) - Embed is very useful, try pasting a link from TikTok and choosing "embed" - Synced blocks are great for the same block to appear multiple times in Notion So many more tips come to mind, but I'll save those for another time :)
Emily Hodgins
@benln didn't know about CMD+Shift+H! 🤯 Great tips, thanks Ben 🙌🏻
Francesco Bellanca
Hey Ben, I have been a huge fan of Notion since the very beginning and here at Sifted we are using notion a LOT. We are now at the beginning of our Community building journey, trying to get founders together and leveraging our fantastic journalistic content to attract more and more people into our community. We discussed internally and we have two questions: - People At what point of the community journey did you start to have dedicated resources to "community"? How did you scale the team and what is the current team structure around the Community product? - Empowering your users Could you share more about the initial steps of empowering your users to become creators? Did you identify a specific user need and started building a group of ambassadors or did you monitor what people were creating and kept on building around your power users? Thanks so much for your time and for the amazing Community you managed to create @ Notion
Ben Lang
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@bellanca_f Hi Francesco! Great questions! - I joined to focus on community when there were about 10 people on the team. I worked closely with Camille, our marketing leader. About 1.5 years later we hired Francisco, an incredible community manager to join our team. We've also hired a few contractors along the way to help manage different functions of our community operations. - We went with the most organic approach possible, we monitoring what people were doing/creating and built resources around that. For example, when we saw people organizing events, we put together a budget and guide for hosting Notion meetups. Anytime we saw an opportunity to help/empower we took it.
Andrii Kpyto
Hi Ben! Two short questions :) 1) What is your longest "day streak" on PH? 2) When Notion team accidentally release promo code for startups (1500$) on public, what was your strategy to communicate with a community?
Ben Lang
Top Product
@kpyto 1) Good question, I don't know! Is there a way to check? If I had to guess, 50+ days 2) Our Customer Experience team did a fantastic job communicating with our users when that happened. It was definitely a learning experience for everyone involved!
Sam C
What platforms did you use initially to build a community? Any recommendations for starters (esp. in B2C space)?
Ben Lang
Top Product
@saurabhc We took a different approach and saw our users launching their own communities early on, you can find the list here https://www.notion.so/community They exist on Facebook, Slack, Telegram, Reddit, Discord, all over!
Farokh Shahabi
Hi Ben, What do you think would be the next breakthrough in the no-code industry?
Chris
When are you going to answer the questions?
Ben Lang
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@user_of_products In 45 minutes from now :)
Sharath Kuruganty
Hey Ben! Thanks for doing this AMA. Notion has one of the best communities in tech and I'm glad I was one of the early adopters. What do you think about community-led product growth and how Notion as a company considers it?
Ben Lang
Top Product
@5harath Hi Sharath, so happy to hear you use Notion :) I think community-led product growth gives us the ability to incorporate our community at every stage of the funnel. This can be tremendously impactful from top of funnel growth, all the way to signing enterprise customers. There's a great talk from Olivia, our CRO, on this, definitely recommend checking it out!