YouSaid · the spoken record

Camille Ricketts

lines on the record: 77
first: 2022-12-11
most recent: 2022-12-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Thank you for that. You can find me on Twitter. I'm just at Camille Rickett, super straightforward. I'm still sticking with it. And in terms of like where I'm at in my life, I'm just kind of interested in meeting as many fascinating new people and learning about things as possible. I've started going to these founders, you should know events for anybody who's interested, but FYSK and just meeting as many cool people who are building just like incredible concepts that's inspiring every time. And I just want my whole life to look like that. get in touch if you're building something and think i could be helpful”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not aware of any courses that are necessarily offered. Ben Lang has done a number of now AMAs or interviews. So if you want to just Google Ben Lang and the word community or notion, you're going to find just a lot of incredible insight and his experience has been, I think, in terms of like community people operating in tech, Ben is top level. So find whatever he's said.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good philosophy. Yeah, I don't know if that was your experience, but. Oh, the other one I'll shout out, even though this is like a sneaky notion plug is cron. So if anybody isn't using the cron calendar, which is now part of Notion, as some folks might know, it is in fact the best calendar product on the market.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, there's more. I already talked about Figma. I love Figma. I actually use it in my day to day life, which is one of the best parts of it is that folks who are not necessarily designers are highly technical can also get a lot out of it. Superhuman. Couldn't live my life without superhuman whenever I have to go back into Gmail to set an autoresponder or whatever. I'm like, ugh, my eyes. So couldn't live without that. Gosh, I'm on sabbatical, so I don't know how many other SaaS products I'm actually using day to day. So I'm going to keep it at three.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And It was something that I tried within an hour I made it my default browser and I just think it's beautiful and delightful in one of those intangible ways that a lot of these products are.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm in love with Notion. The other thing, like the other great love of my life right now is ARC, the browser company. Oh my god.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the one thing that was really helpful because we used to do this thing at first round review where we would like to explore topics and be like, how do we get to a topic that's going to be unique or new knowledge or whatever it was? And it was, what is one thing that you think that led to your success that nobody else in your peer set has done? Like what was something that you did on a LARC or that you were like, this is a big bet or this isn't probably going to work or it's a mistake that it even turned out this way, but it ended up being great. What is that one thing that was like unusually conceived that you want to share with people?”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, recent. So I went to go see Tar, which I know is going to be like not everybody's cup of tea, but it was just incredible to watch this performance from Kate Blanchett. Like she learned German. She learned how to be a credible conductor of a major symphony orchestra. Like, if you want to see a Brevera performance, that's the one to see. And then recent television show, I'm Watching Fleischmann is in trouble. I love the book. And I just think that the detail and texture of that show is super well done.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I love your podcast. Harry Stubbings never ceases to amaze me. We've gone on at Notion a couple times, and I just really appreciate his approach to mining a lot of incredible information and unexpected stuff.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, all over it. Fantastic. She's incredible. Yes. Oh gosh, I'm going to have a hard time coming up with two other books that have had that sizable of an impact.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously awesome by April Dunford. If you're looking to position your company, I don't know if you've read it, but it is like a step by step guide. It's like 100 pages long.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Closing thoughts. No, this was a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for letting me share. Truly, I also want to make sure I'm giving a lot of credit away from all the people that I mentioned throughout. It was all just a major team effort. And I've gotten very, very lucky to work with the best people.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really do think it's about personality and what feels authentic. And I think that one of the biggest mistakes you can make on social media is giving yourself a quota that you have to hit and say, like, I have to say X number of scintillating things every week on these platforms. We've just seen so much more traction, even from like the main notion accounts when we're a little bit more reserved and we wait until we have something to say that has value.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was. And it remains a big deal if you go on product hunt and you type in Notion, you'll see just how many templates have been able to get noted because of. Product hunt.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Straightforward being that brand that is going to be accessible, I really think that that pays off. And just to give you one example, David Pierce, who I think is one of the best working journalists in tech today, he's at the Verge now. He was covering personal tech for the Wall Street Journal early on at Notion and published a story that said this is the one work-life productivity app that you'll ever need. And that was Notion's Big Break. Like truly, if you look back at the graphs, like that made a demonstrable difference. And I've seen that happen time and time again. And one of my sort of other efforts at first round was helping companies in the portfolio figure out how to DIY comp strategies. And I saw this again and again, that the companies that did get stories that really told, you know, their mission, it made a big difference for just discovery awareness. The number of people who wanted to be involved with them as candidates is an”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question because I think that there's been just a lot of change in this space over the last five years and certainly very strong opinions from all over the ecosystem. I'm a big believer in comms and I don't just say that because I used to be a journalist or I used to work in comms. But I think that there are very few and far between incredible megaphones for what it is that you or your company is doing where you get to reach such a breadth of people with that stamp of credibility and notice like how do you get somebody to say, hey, this is really something you should pay attention to. Obviously, I support like all of the owned media efforts that are really working and bubbling up. And like I said, influencer, I think, is going to be like a massive shift in how we discover things. But maintaining a wonderful relationship with the press being”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but truly it's a very shared experience with you. And I think that a lot of that was making connections between the information that you had available from these interviews. So not just straight like, here's what this person said, but how can you draw connections between those things, connect the dots, pull out bigger themes, all of that is really where I think a lot of the time went.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's after you had done all of the prep work making sure that your interviewee was feeling really anchored and understanding a topic that you were both really excited about and making sure you were mining like all of the tactical gems from that conversation. And then you would start writing and that would be another eight hours. I don't know if that's your experience, but certainly was actually.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, here's where I'm going to shout out my writing partner at first round, Sean Young, who was there with me for most of my time there, and he and I would always, although this, but it would take like... To just write the thing”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that. I love that listing out of those and also the acknowledgement that there are emotional jobs to be done, that they're not just utilitarian jobs to be done. It's not just you didn't know this before and now you do, but it's like you felt this way before and now you don't or you do. And I think that that's underestimated. So I love that you called out entertaining people because we're all working in an industry where it's wonderful to interact with some of that sparkle and levity. So I love that approach.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Audience has, but there's the vitamin versus painkiller sort of dichotomy, and painkillers always win. So can your content be a painkiller? Can it help people out of situations that are causing them a lot of pain? Can it help people stop being so confused or can it make them even feel less alone in their experience? Like that was a big one for first round. Helping operators share failures or suboptimal situations in the spirit of helping many other people feel like that was normalized and that, you know, the experiences they were having weren't as dire as maybe they had thought.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is something that I think we chatted about briefly, but the 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 is 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 at 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 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 and is actually going to have that value? So I think approaching content the way that you would a product in a lot of ways is a very instructive way to sort of start hashing out your strategy, starting with your audience, understanding their big needs. You've heard this, I'm sure, and most of your audience.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and he's one of the people that I've learned the most from, certainly. But more specific to your question around what the content program was able to do there, certainly discovery of first round. I think prior to that, it was a very successful VC fund, but I think we got in front of all kinds of people, particularly in non-traditional geographies or nontraditional founder types or all of that. People who are inside large companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, whenever we would look at our list of subscribers, we had a disproportionate number of email addresses within those companies that were clearly curious about the startup experience. And I think the first gen review was helpful in moving them more toward that mindset. And then them obviously understanding that first round would be like a great first stop for them.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That helps you down the road whenever you're trying to convince anyone else to do it because you say so and so and so and so have already been featured so that that was I think just a big point of like confidence and also like tactically for anyone out there thinking about it if they can leverage whatever connections they have in that vein”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give a few examples. I mean, obviously, first round is a huge example. And so I'd be remiss in not going into some detail there. And truly, like, that was a team effort from the very beginning. So I joined in 2013. And again, I was just so fortunate to work with a leader who believed in it from the very beginning. Josh Koppelman, who's the partner there, who was just a massive supporter of mine, Finn Barnes on the partnership team. But then particularly Brett Berson, who was running the platform team, which is where all of these value-added services sort of live. So it was me and an events person and the talent person. And Brett just like gave us all of the runway and all of sort of the belief and support that we needed. And he was really bullish on content and really helped from the beginning connecting me with incredible interview subjects because this whole thing, the only reason I think it survived and did as well as it did is that we were able to land a few really big names at the very beginning. And then of course.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, Jesse Craig Schickman over there has been doing this now for longer than I did. And she is absolutely incredible. And her team is extraordinary. And I don't miss it every single time it comes out.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's fantastic to hear. And exactly what we wanted to have happen. Just extraordinary operators being given a platform and then using it to do whatever it is that they wanted to do. Like that's part of the dream always.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is in Slack. Yeah. And the thinking there, and it still is that we really just wanted to be in the course of people's everyday lives. We didn't want to be this other destination that you would have to make a point to going to every day.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Yes. It was always a goal of always a value at Notion to make sure that we were reaching as many people as possible.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it just feels like such a. I don't know. There's an emotional quality to it, I think, when that's the case. Yeah. And all of those people end up being so incredibly impactful. The last point I'll make about community at Or the subreddit, which I now know has like 210,000 people in the notion subreddit. And those are all run and moderated by community members who just love running their own communities.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And say, like, hey, I'm from Venezuela, and here's the ways in which notion has changed my life. I'm from Hong Kong, and here's how it's changed my life. And all of that was just like so fulfilling. That would be the number one thing I would say is give your community time to actually grow in what feels like an organic fashion as well. Because I think ironically, and then I'll stop rambling about this, but if you grow to something like, you know, oh, we have 5,000 ambassadors, which feels like really good to say, like on a website, the conversation is actually very muted. I think because people feel like they're speaking to an auditorium whenever they say anything. I think it's because you don't really have a sense of who else is there with you. So helping to defray those concerns, I think, is a good course of action.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, this is going to be a little contrarian, perhaps. And I mean, this is just one data point for me, but not growing it so big so fast. Like one thing that we actually thought about pretty carefully was what a rate of healthy growth would be. So there actually is an application process for joining the ambassadors. It's a very light application process and it really is just so that we know how many people are interested in this. And then they're inducted around, I think it was at the time it was 20 people at a time every month so that it wouldn't feel like all of a sudden this had changed in terms of how the interactions were feeling, but rather like gave everybody time to welcome the new people in and get to know them. And one of Ben and I's favorite things ever about working at Notion, I think, was when we would induct new people into the ambassadors and they would introduce themselves.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that that's very important to sort of protect yourself early on. So making sure that you are learning what individuals really want out of this and making them feel like they're very seen and very heard. That was a big area of focus. And I think it's what kept people really engaged and like coming back and feeling like this was kind of a secondary family for them. And then one of the things that was most interesting to us that once we started sharing what was going on to the community with folks at Notion. So we would do this during all hands meetings or like on Slack, Ben would post these really incredible updates of just like all of the activities of people in the community and what they were up to every month. And it was just so inspiring for everybody inside the company that I think it all rallied us to do even more, I guess, day to day and really understand who it was we were building for.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know if you want to link to this in the show notes as well, but I actually put together some commandments for community builders. Some alliteration. So, the thing for, I think, were very defining for us early on. I already mentioned something about this, but like not trying to hit a number early on. So don't dilute the impact of what it is that you're trying to do in order to show growth.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if anything has been written that run into all of this detail, but it was truly, truly one of the more magical and I think still is one of the more magical parts of this entire endeavor. And I now that team is three people. So Ben, who's still there doing amazing things, Francisco, who joined us in 2021, or sorry, at the end of 2020, and then Emma. And they are just all day, every day talking to people around the whole world. Like the international component of this is also just completely wild to see.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that that was really interesting to people. And then, of course, like the things that you would suspect around subsidizing events, making sure that people felt that they were actually supported by us to throw these events. And then also promoting their work. So if you look back at the social media channel, so much of the focus is on putting the creations of the people we were working with front and center as opposed to talking about just what the company was up to.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely making sure that there's enough incentive built in, right? Because, like we said, it's not meant to be a transactional relationship, but we want them to feel like they are having a special experience and they are connected with the company in a unique way. And it was so interesting to us how giving them the preview of features was so motivating to them and being able to use them and then give us feedback and feel really heard by the product team. So that was like a big area of focus. And I know that that still is. And it's become even more of a robust conversation between the community and the team at Notion itself. And then also we would do these very special experiences where Ivan or Ajay or Simon or MLM, who's the head of engineering there, would be available for these conversations where they would answer questions and it would feel like a very sort of proprietary”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually think it's pretty analogous to when you're thinking about positioning your company because I think the best first step for any positioning exercise is to think who are our best fit customers where it's like these are the people that seem to be really getting it they're paying us more they're talking about it just organically so really figuring out everything about who they are and making sure that those are the people that you're actually inviting in early so the initial base of the ambassadors program which started back in 2019 was just 20 people and they were the 20 people who we happened to see be the most vocal already across Twitter and a couple of other social media platforms because they had that sort of shared quality of wanting to be really vocal and expressive about their experience with the product so that would be my advice for how to get one of these rolling”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'll talk about notions quadrant, which is the one that I would put sort of up and to the right, which is you have product market fit and you're maybe a little bit closer to the consumer side of the spectrum. Obviously Notion runs the full gamut, but I would say especially early on, I think that that's where we saw things take root. And that's where I think ambassadors and influencers really take off individuals who are going to be extremely vocal, extremely excited, and where you're going to see sort of more of this like wildfire spread of at least trying the product using the product, understanding what the product is. So if you can try to fuel that type of motion, if you're in that quadrant, that's helpful.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went into this where they saw people emerging who wanted to help other companies, this layer of people who didn't work in Salesforce, but saw the opportunity to help other companies actually succeed with it, implement it, grow with it. And that's become a massive part of Salesforce's model. So if you're in that quadrant figuring out how to start moving people in your customer base into those categories.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you're strongly enterprise and you have product market fit, let's say, this is something that Notion has really benefited from, but really emphasizing the champions and the consultants communities. So the folks who, like I said, maybe inside of your customers, who really get it, like really get your value, really are excited to help you expand, land and expand, perhaps inside of their companies. making sure that they have a place to gather and a place to feel like they are more connected with your team than the average person gets to be that they are special and that they have access and then on the consultant side like i said just making it really easy removing friction helping promote the folks who want to be out there helping you succeed with more customers like salesforce i know that this is like a golden oldie of an example but if you talk to anybody who was really early at salesforce they really”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Initiative that could be right for you. So just to give you an example of sort of like maybe an extremely different form factor from notion, let's say that you're still on your way to product market fit and you're a strongly enterprise oriented product. I think that you have the opportunity to do customer advisory boards, which is really convening like even smaller circles of ideal fit users and making sure that they are connected to each other as well as you and then incentivize to provide you with feedback, understanding that they're really on the ground floor of this journey with you and that they're going to be able to have influence over whatever you do in the future. Those folks can end up growing into your biggest evangelists. And I've seen that happen a number of times. And I would still consider that community, even though maybe that is not what comes to mind.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like I said, if it's more of a sales led culture that you have, which is definitely true of products that are a little bit pricier or that require longer contracts. So understanding that. But I do think the community takes on different forms. And I think when you hear the word community, you think of a big forum of some type, whether it's a Slack instance or something else where people are chatting away all day long. And I don't think it has to be that. That's not the only representation of it. So if you think about what is going to be right for you at any given time, I actually created this two by two matrix, which maybe I'll share with you after this. And on the axes, you have whether you have hit product market fit or if you're still exploring product market fit, and then whether you're strongly enterprise or strongly consumer. And based on where you land sort of in that two by two matrix, there's a form of community or like a community related.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I'm a big proponent. At the same time, I don't think the community is right for every company. I think that there's definitely an analysis to run on that. But hopefully this is helpful for those who can identify that those are attributes they have.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Startups that were growing sort of through the stages to mid market, they were able to cultivate this huge audience of founders around giving advice and providing them with resources to actually get started and do that zero-to-one journey. So while it was adjacent to maybe what the company's core mission was, it allowed them to actually create community among their customer base because they were like, we're knowledgeable, we can share these things with you that we know are core to your journey. I would encourage anyone who's thinking about community that way to be like, oh, maybe it doesn't have to be around our product so specifically. What other knowledge or resourcing can we offer to the people who we do want using our product that's going to be really instrumental for them? And can we convene them around that idea?”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've mentioned Figma a couple times here, so I don't want to beleaguer the point, but they're certainly a team that I've looked up to through my entire experience at Notion. We were kind of sibling companies in a way. Huge kudos to Claire Butler over there, who I knew led all of those efforts. And we would trade a lot of knowledge back and forth, which was so lovely to have that relationship. But they did an amazing job, I think, in a similar vein to Notion of saying, okay, people are really excited to create these things and then put them out there on the internet. So how can we just fuel that particular emotion out there? The other example I'll give, which is a little bit of a different tack, is Stripe. And when Stripe launched Stripe Atlas, not necessarily court the initial product line that, you know, Stripe was known for and what had been foundational for them, but allowed them to build this community among probably their core demographic at the time, which was founders and”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, or I think if organic growth is something that you see being really beneficial, or if organic growth happens to be something you really have to crack because you don't always have everything you need for paid growth from, you know, either a resourcing standpoint, team standpoint, really figuring out how to get that organic flywheel going can serve you well. It becomes this buttress for any paid growth you explore in the future.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it is that you do every single day gets mobilized in a lot of different directions. And you have a lot more options then.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I've talked to a lot of different people who come at this with different impressions, and everybody, you know, knows more about their company than I do. But I do think that if ubiquity or just the sheer sort of word of mouth engine is something that is going to be valuable for your company over time, I would really urge people to sit down and really think carefully like what is going to be more conducive to our long-term success? Is it going to be that ubiquity or is it going to be revenue now? And I think if we look at a lot of the companies that have been just wildly successful from the start, they're people who have pushed off maybe monetizing every little thing if it's going to really put a damper on that type of enthusiasm and momentum that people have to share it at what it is they're doing because there's always opportunity, I think, later once you have that big tide of people who are not just excited but also legitimizing.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if it doesn't sound too reductive, yes, I would also say that one of the things that I think Ben was best at is not putting a one size fits all experience on any of this. I think that some communities get built where people are like, okay, well, we have this community and it's going to be this and this and this, or these are the types of programs we're going to offer, or these are the types of interactions we're going to have, as opposed to, I think a lot of listening of the people who are actually participating really early on, one of the things that Ben did that I thought was really amazing was he'd spend a ton of time just on Zoom having conversations, one-on-one conversations, like semi-small group conversations, just saying, why are you here? Why do you like participating in this? What is it that would make it better and really helping our entire team follow their lead? So that I would recommend highly, not necessarily coming in with pre-connected.”
2022-12-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source