Notion's lost years, near collapse during COVID, staying small to move fast, building horizontal

Notion CEO Ivan Zhao on the four lost years before PMF, a near-collapse during COVID, and why staying small beats hiring fast.

• Notion ran on a single Postgres instance during COVID; they had 3–6 weeks before running out of space entirely before completing a sharding migration.
• The first 3–4 years were spent on a developer-tool vision nobody wanted; the pivot to productivity software took two more years and a full code rewrite.
• Notion still has most of its raised capital unspent, has been profitable for multiple years, and had no salesperson until past $10M ARR.
• Ivan laid off the entire team (back to 2 people) mid-build when they realized they were on the wrong technical foundation (Web Components vs. React).
• Hardcoding features like Sprints caused internal ‘organ rejection’ from employees and customers; reverting to composable Lego-brick primitives took ~18 months to correct.
• Notion is now building an email product, following the logic that only docs, calendar, and email each have 1B+ daily users.
• Third-party creators make millions selling Notion templates on Etsy without being programmers — Ivan calls this the clearest proof of the original mission.

2025-03-06 · Watch on YouTube