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Ben Lang

I'm Ben Lang, Head of Community at Notion. AMA ๐Ÿ‘‡

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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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Atul Ghorpade
Notion is really amazing. Hope so I will create something valuable of it. Let's see.
Atul Ghorpade
Ben Lang
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Thomas Frank
Flylighter
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 ๐Ÿ˜‡), 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 โœŒ
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 ๐Ÿ˜€
Ben Lang
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@margarita_s88 Very happy to hear you ended up as #4, that's wonderful!
Emily Hodgins
Product Hunt
Hey Ben! ๐Ÿ‘‹ 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
Product Hunt
@benln didn't know about CMD+Shift+H! ๐Ÿคฏ Great tips, thanks Ben ๐Ÿ™Œ๐Ÿป
Francesco Bellanca
Sifted
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.
Francesco Bellanca
Sifted
@benln Thanks a million for this and for the amazing work the whole Notion team does :)
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
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@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
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@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
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@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!
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