In 2013, two young entrepreneurs launched Notion with the vision of transforming software development. Today, the company is valued at $10 billion. Breaking into the Software as a Service (SaaS) market, dominated by large corporations controlling three-fourths of the industry, was no easy feat. However, Notion made its place among the conglomerates, and the company’s founders are true inspirations of resilience as they never gave up despite hurdles and nuances.
In this article, we will unveil the success story of Notion, a startup that carved out its niche in the Saas industry.
Notion – A Startup Success Story
Notion is an all-in-one workspace that blends note-taking, task management, and project tracking in one tool. It lets users create and organize notes, databases, wikis, tasks, and calendars all in one place. Founded in 2013 by Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, Notion Labs has grown a lot since then, and the app is now a favorite for both individuals and teams to manage their work and personal lives.
The founders of Notion focused on creating a tool that would improve user experience and simplify workflows to boost productivity. Their hard work paid off when Notion 1.0 won Product Hunt’s #1 Product of the Day in 2016.
Notion: The First Fall in Market
Soon after launching the product, Zhao realized that the market wasn’t open for the product. He was confident in his vision but the reality was different in industry. The first version of Notion was a tool for non-coders to create their apps. However, even though they were friends of Zhao and Last, non-coders didn’t want app-building software. “It wasn’t a product,” Zhao admits.
“It didn’t work because most people didn’t understand it. It was more for tech enthusiasts. We realized that to become a big software tool, we needed to start with something familiar to everyone and make the tool invisible, like sugarcoating broccoli. Nobody wakes up wanting to build software—well, very few people.”
Notion 2.0 – The Wall Street Journal Report
Notion’s community grew rapidly in March 2018 after David Pierce, then a personal tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal wrote a glowing review of Notion 2.0. The headline read: “The Only App You Need for Work-Life Productivity.” The article praised the update as a “rare renaissance app.”
The new version included project management features and relational databases, like tables and spreadsheets that power many projects and businesses. Notion’s innovation was allowing users to customize how they view those databases, so different people could see the same data in different ways. They started charging a monthly fee of $4 to $10 and began making a profit.
Success Story of Notion
With smart funding and focused marketing efforts, Notion expanded into new markets and reached a larger audience. In 2020, the company’s growth soared, hitting a $2 billion valuation just 8 months after a major milestone. The company’s focus on innovation and constant improvement paid off big time. Notion saw huge growth in both revenue and users. In October 2021, it raised an impressive $275 million in Series C funding, bringing its valuation to $10 billion.
With the rise of AI in 2022, Notion took advantage of the opportunity to upgrade its platform, becoming one of the fastest-growing apps of the year. What started as a small startup has now become a leader in the SaaS industry, with a global reach and a $10 billion valuation.
Founders and Their Early Life
Notion Labs, Inc. was founded by Ivan Zhao, Simon Last, and Akshay Kothari. All three come from different backgrounds but share the same amount of enthusiasm, curiosity, and dedication towards the work. Zhao is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Notion. Zhao grew up in Ürümqi, a city of 4 million in China’s Xinjiang region, with his mom. It was there he learned to code through the International Olympiad in Informatics, a competition for math and computer science students.
Zhao later attended the University of British Columbia, where he focused on cognitive science and art, having taken up photography in high school. His artist friends helped him refine his aesthetic sense—watching films, helping with fashion portfolios, and more. In 2012, as graduation approached, many friends needed online portfolios. “I’m the nerd in the group,” Zhao said, so he started coding websites for them. “But there were no good tools,” he added. “They were all kind of ugly.” He made about five websites before realizing, “It doesn’t make sense. These people have taste, they just don’t have good tools.”
What’s Ahead for Notion?
Zhao’s goal for Notion is to make it everywhere, aiming for it to be an all-in-one app that not only replaces work tools but also helps organize people’s lives. He knows that his pitch to investors ten years ago about taking down giants like Microsoft and Google was a bit of a “romantic” idea—but only to a certain point.
Zhao has kept Notion lean, relying on word-of-mouth growth to avoid a big sales team. But those days are behind him. The company now has 650 employees across offices in the U.S., Ireland, India, South Korea, and Japan. While many customers are businesses, especially smaller startups, Zhao estimates half of Y Combinator companies use Notion, along with rising stars like Perplexity, Pika, and Runway.
To grow further, Zhao is building a sales team to target larger clients, where use is often limited to individual teams, like McKinsey and OpenAI. The potential for Notion’s success is similar to Atlassian, a $3.9 billion software firm that grew by first winning over small teams within larger organizations who loved tools like Jira.
Zhao said in an interview, “The lawyers probably will use Microsoft Word until the end of time, but they might use Notion for other parts of their workflow.”
