ActivationPublished 2024-09-03 · founder reported
Keep the problem while changing the implementation
How Notion approached activation.
What they did
Ivan Zhao described rebuilding Notion four times, including a rewrite with Simon Last in Japan after an unsuitable technical approach. He linked the later inflection to the 2018 Notion 2.0 launch.
Reported outcome
The 2024 retrospective reported 100 million users and acknowledged years of work before that traction.
An idea to test, from Afterlaunch
Persistence is more useful when paired with willingness to discard an approach that is not working.
Small experiment: Identify one core assumption blocking usability and test an alternative prototype before committing to a full rewrite.
A company’s reported outcome doesn’t prove one tactic caused it. Treat this as a hypothesis.
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