Why Notion Became a $10B Tool

In 2015, Ivan Zhao had nothing left.

Three years into building Notion. All his investors' money spent. His team of five — gone. The entire codebase he'd been working on since 2013 — scrapped.

He'd built on the wrong tech stack. The product crashed constantly. Users couldn't rely on it. And now, with barely enough runway to survive, Ivan made the most counterintuitive decision of his life.

He didn't shut down.

He didn't pivot to something easier.

He moved to Kyoto, Japan — because the rent was half the price of San Francisco — rented a small two-story house with co-founder Simon Last, and started over.

For the next year, they coded 18-hour days. They didn't dress. They barely cooked. Ivan, originally from China, could read enough Kanji on menus to tell the difference between beef and chicken. That was enough.

He calls those years "the lost years."

No product-market fit. No growth. Sometimes no money.

And yet — they are the years that built everything that came after.

What Ivan understood that his competitors didn't

Before Notion, productivity software had a predictable structure.

Evernote was for notes. Trello was for task boards. Google Docs was for documents. Confluence was for wikis. If you ran a startup, you had four or five tools just to keep track of your own work.

Ivan's original vision was to replace all of them — with a single flexible system built from blocks. Text. Tables. Databases. Images. You stack them together and build whatever you need.

The first version of that vision failed. What he'd built was a developer tool — a way for technically minded people to create their own apps without code. The problem, as he admitted later, was brutal in its simplicity:

"Most people just don't care."

They didn't want to build tools. They wanted to get work done.

So Ivan hid the vision inside something people already understood.

He called it "sugar-coated broccoli." A familiar surface — notes, documents, wikis — with the flexible infrastructure underneath. You could use it like a simple note-taking app on day one. Months later, you'd discover you could build your entire business inside it.

Notion 2.0 launched in March 2018. That was the real starting gun.

The three loops that turned a productivity app into a $10 billion platform

Loop 1: The template loop.

Something unexpected happened after the 2018 launch.

Users started sharing the systems they'd built inside Notion. A student published her study dashboard. A startup founder shared his fundraising tracker. A designer posted a content planning board.

Other users could duplicate these with one click.

That single mechanic changed everything.

Every template published became distribution. Someone searching "Notion habit tracker" or "Notion startup OS" would find their way to Notion not through an ad — but through another user's work. By the time Notion hit $10 billion, there were hundreds of thousands of templates scattered across YouTube, blogs, Twitter, and independent marketplaces.

Notion never paid for most of that content. The community created it.

Loop 2: The creator economy loop.

Some users went further. They realized they could sell templates.

Within a few years, there were creators earning $5,000, $10,000, $30,000 a month selling Notion systems on Gumroad and independent stores. Every template sold required the buyer to use Notion. So every creator with a financial interest in selling templates also had a financial interest in growing Notion's audience.

The platform gained an unpaid salesforce of thousands. No commissions. No contracts. Just aligned incentives.

Loop 3: The collaboration loop.

The moment someone built something useful in Notion, they shared it with a teammate.

That teammate needed an account to edit.

One user brought in a team. One team brought in a company. Sequoia partner Mike Vernal noticed the pattern — startups were showing up to investor meetings running their entire operations inside Notion. Memos, roadmaps, hiring pipelines, investor decks — all in one workspace.

By 2021, Notion had over 20 million users. They'd done it with a team of fewer than 50 people and almost no traditional sales.

The near-death moment nobody talks about

Even with all three loops spinning, Notion almost didn't make it.

Year 2020.

The pandemic hits. Remote work explodes overnight. Notion's user numbers surge — faster than anyone had planned for.

The problem: Notion's entire infrastructure ran on a single database.

Within weeks, it was near capacity.

Ivan halted all feature development. Every engineer redirected to scaling. They were weeks from total collapse — a company at the peak of its growth, almost destroyed by it.

They fixed it. But the lesson matters:

A growth loop only creates value if the infrastructure can hold the load. The engine and the chassis have to scale together.

What this actually means for your business

Here's where the Notion story stops being about productivity software.

Ivan's loops worked because of one thing that most founders overlook: every action a user took inside the product naturally brought in more users.

Sharing a template = distribution. Inviting a teammate = acquisition. Selling a course built around the tool = marketing.

None of this required Ivan to spend money. He just had to design conditions where the natural behavior of satisfied users created growth.

That is the opposite of what most online businesses do.

Most businesses build a funnel, pump traffic into the top, and assume the leaks are acceptable. They spend more on acquisition instead of fixing why users aren't converting, aren't sticking, aren't sharing.

Ivan spent his "lost years" rebuilding the product until it was worth sharing. Not until it looked worth sharing. Until it actually was.

The question for you is simpler than it sounds:

Are your best customers bringing in more customers? Or are they converting, using once, and going quiet?

If it's the latter — the issue isn't the product. It's the funnel. Something between the moment they found you and the moment they became advocates is leaking.

That leak is costing you compounding revenue. Not just today — every month that passes without fixing it.

Most founders can't see it from the inside. They're too close to the funnel they built, the emails they wrote, the offer they've iterated on for months.

That's exactly what the audit is for.

Apply for a funnel audit here →

Tell me where you are — revenue, traffic, where people are falling off — and I'll give you a straight answer: whether there's a leak worth fixing, what it is, and what it would take to close it.

In 15 years of doing this — scaling Mindvalley from $30M to $150M, helping drive over $1 billion in client results at We Conquer Media — I have never run a proper audit and found nothing.

There is always something.

The only question is how long you want to leave it running.

Apply here.

— Marisha

CGO, Mindvalley | Advisor, We Conquer Media LinkedIn | Instagram

P.S. Ivan Zhao's original mission was to let anyone build software without code. He called it "sugar-coated broccoli." The boring surface that hid the powerful engine underneath. Your funnel works the same way. What you show people matters less than what's happening inside it.