INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
app that helps non-developers build collaboration tools, has more than one million users and has scaled its product quickly despite having a
competitors are raising massive sums.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Notion COO Akshay Kothari (Photo: Notion)Where
does your story begin with Notion? Give me a snapshot of where the team is now.Akshay Kothari: [Notion co-founders Ivan Zhao and Simon Last]
We launched about two years ago; 1.0 was just notes that you could take and a wiki so that you could collaborate with people
And then last year we launched databases and that was the 2.0 version, which kind of seemed like an inflection point, where now you could
not only have your notes and your wiki, but also manage your tasks, manage your projects, manage candidates and recruiting, all in a single
tool.Over the last year and a half, the company has grown extremely fast
We have 2 people in marketing and 2 people in sales
That all rounds up to about 27 which is where we are now.Since you joined do you think the idea has shifted at all?In terms of the original
I guess the only realization has been that not everyone wakes up wanting to build software, but everyone wakes to solve problems
for big and small teams?For the first 100 people you can actually do a lot with Notion
With 30 people, we pretty much run the entire company, except for using Slack for internal communication and Intercom for external
communication like talking to customers
Everything else is actually on Notion, like our application tracking system for recruiting inside Notion, our sales CRM is in Notion, our
When you get to hundreds of people what tends to happens is that some person or some team tends to have a preference for a specific tool
In those situations, Notion plays well with other tools
You can embed things easily
So Notion becomes this kind of central nervous system for all of the work that people are doing.Building on that, one of the things we
synchronous communication.So, no interest in building a chat or video chat product?Not in the near term
I think Slack is one of those enterprise tools that people at companies actually like
(Photo: Notion)What are the barriers for satisfying the customers with 100+ employees?
