Notion’s Marketing Strategy From Near Bankruptcy to $400M
$41.7M
Revenue/mo
Business Type
SaaS
Monetization
Subscription
Founded
2013
How it started
Imagine this: it's 2015, and you're sitting in a small apartment in Kyoto, Japan. You've just laid off everyone on your team. You're out of money. Your product crashes constantly. And the only thing keeping your dream alive is a $150,000 loan from your mom.
That was Ivan Zhao's reality.
Ivan Zhao, Notion
Today, Notion is worth $10 billion. Over 100 million people use it. And it generates $400 million per year in revenue. Yes, Crazy numbers.
But the path to get there? It's one of the most brutally honest startup stories you'll ever read. No fake overnight success. No genius marketing scheme. Just a founder who failed, pivoted, and then built something so useful that people couldn't stop talking about it.
Let's break down how Notion actually did it.
A Dream That Didn't Work
Ivan Zhao wasn't trying to build the next "productivity app." He wanted to create the "LEGO of software."
The idea was simple: what if everyday people could build their own tools without knowing how to code? Instead of using 20 different apps, you could build one custom workspace that did exactly what you needed.
In 2013, Zhao and co-founder Simon Last started Notion with this vision in mind. They raised about $2 million from friends and family, hired four employees, and got to work.
For the first two years, they struggled. The problem wasn't their work ethic. It was their product.
Their tech stack was broken. The app crashed constantly. And here's the brutal part: they were building something they personally wanted to use—not something people actually needed.
By 2015, they were hemorrhaging money. They had a choice: give up or start over.
They chose option three.
The Bet That Saved Everything
In 2015, Ivan and Simon made a decision that sounds insane but actually saved their company.
They fired their entire team.
They closed their San Francisco office.
And they moved to Japan.
Why Japan? Because rent in Kyoto was less than half the price of San Francisco. They needed to survive long enough to figure out what they were doing wrong.
"We realized we had to build something that the world wanted, not just what we thought it wanted," Ivan would later say.
During this period, Ivan's mother lent him $150,000—enough to keep the lights on while they rebuilt. It was a literal lifeline.
In that small Kyoto apartment, something changed.
source: Ivan zhao, twitter
Ivan spent up to 18 hours a day designing. Simon coded endlessly. And they stopped trying to build a complex no-code tool. Instead, they started listening to what people actually wanted. As Akshay Kothari, who later became Notion's COO, put it: "People don't wake up wanting to build software. People just wake up wanting to do their job." That insight shifted everything.
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