How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital)

**Camille Ricketts** (0:00)
The way that you think about product market fit, you have to think about content market fit. So even though content feels like it's running adjacent to the actual product that you're putting out there, you still have to think about who is my audience? Who is the audience that I really want to have? Who is the audience that is going to be drawn to this most? Who are they?
What is it that they really need in their lives? Like even abstracting content from it at all.
What is it that they need to get promoted? What is it that they need to avoid failure? What is it that causes them a great deal of anxiety in the day-to-day of their lives or their work? And can you create some type of content product that is going to address this for them?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:38)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Camille Ricketts. Camille was the first marketing hire at Notion and longtime head of marketing at Notion. Prior to that, she was head of content and marketing at First Round Capital, where amongst many other things, she launched the First Round Review, which holds a very special place in my heart because a guest post in the First Round Review essentially helped me launch my now career of newsletter and now podcast. Camille also did content marketing at Kiva and also comms and PR at Early Tesla, where she sat right next to Elon Musk for about a year and she shares some really fun stories about that. In this episode, we focus on two areas that Camille was very early in and has tremendous insights around. One, community-led growth, what it actually is, when it's something you should invest in, how to do it well, all based on her experience building Notion's early community, which was a huge part of Notion's early success.
We also talk about content marketing, when it's worth investing in, how to do it well, and all kinds of tips for building a content marketing machine. It was a total blast chatting with Camille and I'm really excited for you to learn from her. With that, I bring you Camille Ricketts, right after we hear a word from our wonderful sponsors.
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Hey Ashley, Head of Marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

**Ashley** (3:21)
At least 40%.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:22)
And how many of them screw that up and what happens when they do?

**Ashley** (3:26)
Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:45)
I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention.
Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.

**Ashley** (4:00)
Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify and Zura are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile.
This is because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:16)