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When thinking about product-market fit, most founders overlook a parallel necessity: content-market fit. Even though content often runs adjacent to the core product, it requires the same rigorous analysis of audience needs, anxieties, and motivations. This philosophy served as the backbone for Camille Ricketts’ tenure as the first marketing hire at Notion, where she helped scale the company into a $10 billion productivity giant.
Before Notion, Ricketts shaped the editorial landscape of Silicon Valley as the Head of Content at First Round Capital, launching the industry-defining First Round Review. Her career also includes time at Tesla, sitting directly beside Elon Musk during the company's early, high-stakes days. In a conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, Ricketts deconstructs the mechanics of community-led growth, the nuances of building an ambassador program, and the rigorous standards required to build a content engine that actually drives revenue.
Key Takeaways
- Community drives enterprise ubiquity: Community-led growth isn't just for consumer apps; it creates the brand ubiquity and "discovery" necessary to de-risk purchases for large enterprise buyers.
- Identify the "Atomic Unit of Sharing": Successful communities usually form around a product that allows users to express themselves, such as a Notion template or a Figma design.
- The Community Matrix: Your community strategy must shift based on whether you are B2B or B2C, and whether you have achieved product-market fit.
- Don't scale community too fast: Rapidly expanding an ambassador program dilutes the emotional connection. Notion deliberately capped intake to maintain intimacy and trust.
- Content requires a "Painkiller" approach: To break through the noise, content must solve acute anxieties or career obstacles (painkillers) rather than offering mild improvements (vitamins).
Defining Community-Led Growth
Community-led growth has become a buzzword, often conflated with simply having a Slack group or a forum. Ricketts defines it with greater specificity: it is when a community generates such ubiquity and name recognition that it enables the company to move up-market into the enterprise sector. For Notion, the sheer volume of individuals talking about the product, sharing templates, and building personal workflows de-risked the software for corporate buyers.
Measuring Awareness and Discovery
While attribution is notoriously difficult in community marketing, Ricketts focused on "discovery" rather than simple awareness. Discovery implies an intent to learn more. The primary metric for tracking this success was net new visitors to the website—specifically, individuals who had never interacted with the domain before.
The Atomic Unit of Sharing
Not every product is destined for community-led growth. Ricketts argues that the most successful examples—Notion, Figma, Canva—share a specific trait: they provide users with an "atomic unit of sharing."
- Self-Expression: Users want to share what they build because it says something about their identity, organizational skills, or creativity.
- Template Economy: Notion’s growth was fueled by users creating templates. This eventually matured into a revenue-generating ecosystem where creators could earn significant income—in one instance, $35,000 in four months from a single template—selling their workflows.
- Alignment of Goals: The company aligned its success with the financial success of its creators. By helping users build businesses as consultants or course creators, Notion created a legion of evangelists whose livelihoods depended on the product's success.
The Strategic Community Matrix
Founders often ask if they should invest in community immediately. Ricketts suggests that for companies with long sales cycles or high price points, community should not be the primary growth engine. She developed a 2x2 matrix to help founders identify the right community motion based on their stage (Pre-PMF vs. Post-PMF) and customer type (Enterprise vs. Consumer).
Pre-Product Market Fit
- Enterprise Focus: If you are building for enterprise but haven't hit scale, focus on Customer Advisory Boards (CABs). Convene small circles of ideal users. Connect them with each other, not just with your team. These early advisors often mature into your loudest evangelists.
- Consumer Focus: Focus on finding the outliers—the individuals already hacking your product or using it in unexpected ways.
Post-Product Market Fit
- Enterprise Focus (The "Champions"): For established enterprise products, the goal is to identify "Champions" inside customer companies. Notion created specific spaces for power users within client organizations to gather. This channel allowed customer success teams to identify blockers and spot expansion opportunities naturally.
- Consumer Focus (The "Ambassadors"): This is where the viral spread occurs. Once the product works for a broad consumer base, the goal is to fuel the fire of organic sharing through formal ambassador programs and influencer partnerships.
Building and Managing Ambassador Programs
Notion’s ambassador program is frequently cited as the gold standard in tech. Ricketts emphasizes that this program was never transactional; ambassadors were not paid employees, but passionate power users who wanted to build their identity around the tool.
Selection and Incentives
The program began small, with just 20 people identified via social media who were already teaching others how to use Notion. The incentives were designed to offer status and access rather than cash:
- Direct Access: Ambassadors had direct lines to the product team and founders (Ivan Zhao and Simon Last).
- Early Features: They received beta access to features, making them "insiders" who could break news to their own audiences.
- Community Support: Notion subsidized meaningful connections, funding meetups and providing assets for events.
The Importance of Slow Growth
A contrarian insight from Ricketts is the necessity of throttling community growth. Rapidly scaling a community can destroy the intimacy that makes it valuable. Notion implemented a lightweight application process and capped new ambassador inductions (e.g., 20 people per month) to ensure newcomers could be properly welcomed and integrated.
"If you grow to something like 5,000 ambassadors... the conversation is actually very muted I think because people feel like they're speaking to an auditorium... as opposed to understanding who else is there with you."
Achieving Content-Market Fit
Just as a product must solve a market need, content must address a specific audience anxiety. Ricketts coined the term "Content-Market Fit" to describe the alignment between what a company publishes and what their audience desperately needs to succeed in their careers.
Vitamins vs. Painkillers
In the world of product, painkillers (solutions to acute problems) always outsell vitamins (nice-to-have improvements). Ricketts applies this same logic to content strategy.
- Analyze Anxiety: Ask what keeps your target persona up at night. What do they need to get promoted? What failure are they trying to avoid?
- High-Investment Production: Quality is the only differentiator in a saturated market. At First Round Review, a single article often required eight hours of preparation and another eight hours of writing. This depth allowed them to move beyond surface-level reporting to connect dots and extract tactical frameworks.
"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... and can you create some type of content product that is going to address this for them?"
The Continued Relevance of Traditional Comms
Despite the rise of owned media and newsletters, Ricketts argues that traditional PR and communications remain vital. Third-party validation provides a "stamp of credibility" that owned channels cannot replicate. She cites a pivotal moment for Notion: a Wall Street Journal article by David Pierce titled "The Only App You Need for Work-Life Productivity."
Founders on Social Media
Regarding founder communication, authenticity trumps volume. While Elon Musk utilized a direct, high-frequency Twitter strategy, Notion’s Ivan Zhao is more reserved. Ricketts advises against forcing founders to hit arbitrary social media quotas. It is far more effective for a founder to speak only when they have something high-value to say, rather than diluting their voice with performative engagement.
Operations and Resilience
Behind the polished brand, Notion’s early days were defined by scrappiness and resilience. Ricketts recalls working in a converted carriage house where the team worked shoeless, drank tea, and used industrial fans to combat the heat and headlamps when the lighting failed.
This internal culture of solidarity proved critical during crises, such as a massive outage in January 2021. Because Notion had invested so heavily in community goodwill, the response from users wasn't anger—it was support. Users tweeted messages of encouragement to the engineering team, a reaction rarely seen in enterprise software.
Commandments for Community Builders
Ricketts closed the discussion with advice for founders looking to replicate Notion’s success. The primary directive is patience: do not attempt to measure ROI too early.
"One of the worst things you can do is say let's cut this off at the knees if it's not generating ROI... there's always opportunity I think later once you have that big tide of people who are not just excited but also legitimizing what it is that you do."
Conclusion
Camille Ricketts’ playbook demonstrates that "soft" assets like community and content are actually hard strategic levers. By treating content with the same rigor as product development and viewing community as a long-term investment in ubiquity rather than a short-term sales channel, Notion built a defensible moat around its business. For founders, the lesson is clear: build for the "atomic unit of sharing," solve acute pain points through content, and prioritize deep, authentic connections over rapid, metric-driven scaling.
