Ivan Zhao
Ivan Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Notion. Ivan shares the untold story of Notion, from nearly running out of database space during Covid to finding product-market fit after several “lost years,” and the hard-won lessons along the way.
3 skills 3 insights
Strategy & Positioning Skills
Position a highly flexible, horizontal tool within a well-understood category to make it accessible to a broader, less-technical audience.
"If you use Notion, Notion are more understood as the productivity suite, but our intent, and if you use Notion, more you discover intent, which is that it has a no-code developer power into it and you..."
When a product or technical foundation fails to perform, have the discipline to scrap it and rebuild on more stable foundations.
"And then we realize because it's so new, it's just so unstable. It don't know where the bug come from. It's from your source code or from the underlying libraries? Then we have to restart the company,..."
To gain traction for a radical or complex vision, embed it within a familiar, high-utility product that users already value.
"Our realization is actually let's hide our vision, which is everybody can create their software in the form factor that people do care. We called it sugar-coated broccoli. People don't want to eat the..."