“We focused too much on what we wanted to bring to the world,” Ivan put it. It turned out, people weren’t interested in that.
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In the first go-round - Notion beta - Ivan and Simon made a programming application that was easy to use even if someone didn’t know how to code. There’s a lot of ways to build a customizable software tool. Fighting for Notion’s life: Teamwork makes the dreamwork
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We sat down with Ivan to get the full back story on the company’s pivot (which they've never talked about publicly before), and the role design played in saving the product. (Check out today’s news in The Verge about Notion taking on Evernote.) These tactics played a crucial role in turning the company around and became the secret sauce of their product when they relaunched. During their year of reckoning, they developed a unique design process to help them do that - from tag-teaming design challenges, to brainstorming endless permutations of a user flow. It was an ambitious goal, and they needed to nail the user experience. We’re a tool that solves people’s daily problems. They wanted people to customize technology to solve their own problems.ĭesign means everything here. He and Simon set out to rebuild Notion from scratch, keeping the same mission: Give non-techies the ability to make their own tools without writing code. As we’d later find out, he was designing frenetically and barely sleeping, pumping out version after version of a new app that would become Notion 1.0. He suddenly popped to the top of our most active user list - spending upwards of 18+ hours a day in our design tool. It was around that time we noticed Ivan in Figma. “Neither of us spoke Japanese and nobody there spoke English, so all we did was code in our underwear all day,” Ivan says. So they sublet their San Francisco office and moved to a cheaper city where they could focus: Kyoto. “If you looked at the burn rate, we all would’ve died together,” Ivan says. Their angel investment money dwindling, they faced a brutal choice: Fire their fledgling team of 4 and start over, or run out of cash. Its founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, had built their app on a suboptimal tech stack, and it crashed constantly. In 2015, productivity tool Notion nearly died.
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