Over the last 7 years, Notion has secured more than 30M users, 4M customers, $350M in funding, and is valued at $10 billion, but how?

2013

In 2013 Notion Labs Inc was started by Ivan Zhao and co-founded by Simon Last.

When people asked them about Notion, they'd refer to their project as the LEGO of productivity tools. Their aim was to give non-techies the ability to create and customize their own tools without writing code.

In the 1st year Notion grew to 4 employees and secured a minor customer base.

2014

After a year of sleepless nights & hard work, they'd come to the realization that Notion was built on the wrong tech stack.

They had to choose between quitting and restructuring in order to keep going. You already know what they chose, but how did they came out on top with a $10 billion valuation, 30 million users and 350 employees?

2015

They reconsidered their entire company structure, fired all 4 employees and Ivan went to his family to ask for help and borrowed $150k from his mother to save the sinking ship.

They moved to Japan so they could be free from any social distractions and be able to solely focus on building Notion.

2016

Notion 1.0 was officially launched in March 2016 for web browsers and got rated as #1 Product of the Day, Week & Month on Product Hunt.

2017

A year later they released Notion for windows and IOS and is when the community we know today began to take shape. Notion spread from word of mouth like wildfire. From the first dedicated users, to the far outskirts our globe, everyone fell for Notion.

2018

In March of 2018, Notion 2.0 was released and was an even more successful launch than the previous one. It was also rated #1 Product of the Day, Week & Month on Product Hunt.

2019

They started scaling in every aspect of the company and in September 2019 they reached 1 000 000 users worldwide.

2020

In the next 8 months they quadrupled that number by 400%. Because of this growth they were valued at $2B and officially declared as a UNICORN, a statistically rare successful business venture.

2021

In October of 2021, a new round of funding helped Notion raise $275 million. The investment valued Notion at $10 billion and the company had a total of 20 million users worldwide.

2022

At the beginning of 2022, Notion launched the Notion Certified Program, an official accreditation that allows users to expand their expertise.

Notion is continuously growing its user base and improving the app with new updates and features, and just at the end of the year when we thought Notion couldn't give us anything more they introduced AI to the platform.

In 2022 Notion grew by 240% making it the fastest-growing app of the year.

2023

In 2023 Notion officially launched the Notion AI, they added a bunch of new features and redesigned the Notion template gallery.

They also created an official Notion community where 100's of Notion creators are able to collaborate and give feedback on how Notion can improve their community and template gallery.

Notion is constantly improving and bringing out exciting new updates and doesn't seem like they're going to stop any time soon, which is good news for both us Notion creators and Notion users.