SaaS / Enterprise SoftwareUS
← Sticker Wall
JOURNEY · DETAIL
Notion: From Website Builder to AI Knowledge Base
Founded: Ivan Zhao, Simon Last (with early joint contributors including Chris Prucha, SRI, etc.) · Notion Labs, Inc.
JOURNEY
Key Fields
FIELD STAMPSIndustrySaaS / Enterprise Software
RegionUS
ScaleGiant
ChannelOnline
Origin
Before 2013, Ivan Zhao collaborated with Simon Last in San Francisco, initially intending to build a tool that allowed ordinary people to build websites themselves, inspired by the vision of "democratizing computing power for non-programmers." The early product was not called Notion; instead, it revolved around "web templates and WYSIWYG building." Before long, they discovered that existing CMS or website builders could not simultaneously satisfy "structure + flexibility + aesthetics," so they decided to redefine the product as a block editor where "anything can be placed," which is also one layer of meaning behind the name Notion (ideas/concepts).
Milestones
2013
Early Website Builder Period Failure
Ivan and Simon initially treated this product as a "tool enabling ordinary people to make their own websites." Vague user value caused them to scrap their design three times, beta users remained under a hundred for a long period, and the team almost burned through their savings. This phase lasted from 2013 to 2015.
2016
Official Launch of Notion 1.0 Turning Point
The team completely abandoned the "website builder" positioning, upgrading pages into a borderless block editor where every piece of text, image, and database was a "block." Launched in March 2016 under the renamed Notion, it allowed users to write documents, build lists, and manage projects all in the same tool.
2018
Viral Growth PMF
The product began relying on spontaneous propagation through communities and content creators: Notion formed a viral loop within Y Combinator alumni groups, Reddit, and YouTube "Notion notes" content. Blogs and the template marketplace supported higher user retention, and the paid conversion rate took off, widely recognized as the most growth-savvy SaaS of 2018.
2020
API and Collaboration Platformization Growth
Collaboration demand surged during the pandemic, and Notion launched a public API enabling third-party integrations. During the same period, customer success stories like Turing pushed the company from a note-taking tool into a next-generation workspace. Team size expanded from under 50 to hundreds within three years, and valuation broke 10 billion USD. This phase lasted from 2020 to 2022.
2023
Withdrawal from Mainland China Inflection Point
In November 2023, Notion officially announced the cessation of services in mainland China, stopping service to mainland China IPs and prompting users to migrate to the international version or third-party alternatives. This lost the entire joint zone of Eastern and Western knowledge markets and caused agency clients in China like ManyChat to evaporate overnight.
2024
AI Knowledge Base Transformation Growth
Launched official AI access, database queries, and deep Workspace and Calendar integration. By 2026, Notion occupied the mindshare of enterprise knowledge management entry points, but its boundaries remained clear: it is a middle layer for "information organization + AI retrieval + lightweight workflows" and will not replace ERP or CRM. This phase lasted from 2024 to 2026.
Turning Points
- 2016: Shifted from a "website builder" to a "block editor," abandoning the original positioning to win true PMF.
- 2023: Fully withdrew from mainland China, losing the entire Chinese-speaking market, but extricating itself from zero-trust compliance costs and turning its full attention to AI and collaboration routes.
- Changing the product from a website builder to a block editor amounted to admitting the original positioning was unviable; this self-negation traded for subsequent product-market fit.
Failures & Pitfalls
- The website builder route repeatedly crashed between 2013 and 2015, and unclear product positioning brought the team close to falling apart.
- The mainland China business was forced by external requirements to shut down in 2023, causing years of accumulated localized ecosystem and agency revenue to vanish instantly; many Chinese users were forced to migrate to alternatives like Wolai and FlowUs.
- From 2018 to 2022, it repeatedly faced skepticism regarding the "note-taking software ceiling": competitors and open-source products continuously nibbled at the template market, causing the growth curve to decelerate multiple times.
关键成功要素
- Making the "block" the sole primitive, allowing all content to reference each other, solving the contradiction between information uniqueness and liquidity.
- Templates and community content gave the product an inherent growth flywheel: templates well-crafted by ordinary users turned around to become the first trigger for beginners.
- API and integration strategies turned Notion into a foundational tool rather than an isolated island, with the total value perceived by customers far exceeding the price of a single feature.
- Building the tool first and the platform second: only when structured data accumulates to a certain scale does the AI feature have a retrievable foundation.
Lessons
- Having the courage to self-negate and abandon invested directions when an MVP fails is something only a handful of companies can truly achieve.
- When a company enters an AI explosion cycle, bottom-layer structured data is the true barrier—the freer the format and the more retrievable the data, the higher the barrier actually becomes.
- The mainland China market is a huge incremental opportunity, but if compliance costs and operational friction exceed the team's tolerance, making a decisive cut is the rational choice.
- Features can be replicated rapidly, but structured data and user workflow precipitation cannot—this is the long-term moat of tool-based products.
Core Data
- Peak Valuation：Approx. 12 billion USD (around 2024) (Company-disclosed metric, as of 2026, independent review unverified)
- Peak Team Size：Approx. 700 people (2022-2024 range) (Company-disclosed metric, as of 2026, independent review unverified)
- Main Source of Paid Users：Western education, SMBs, remote teams (Company-disclosed metric, as of 2026, independent review unverified)
- 2026 Core Metric：Average workspace retention duration boosted by AI systems and database structures (Company-disclosed metric, as of 2026, independent review unverified)
- October 2021 User Count：2,000 people (Company-disclosed metric, as of 2026, independent review unverified)
- October 2021 Valuation：10 billion USD (Wikipedia metric (public data metric, unverified by independent review)) (Company-disclosed metric, as of 2026, independent review unverified)
- 2013 Seed Round Financing Amount：Approx. 2 million USD (Wikipedia metric (public data metric, unverified by independent review)) (Company-disclosed metric, as of 2026, independent review unverified)
- 2026 Self-Built Agents Count：Over 1 million (Wikipedia citing company metric (public data metric, unverified by independent review)) (Company-disclosed metric, as of 2026, independent review unverified)
Competitors / Peers
Globally, Coda, Obsidian, and Roam Research all make their voices heard in knowledge management and collaboration, but at the intersection of "AI foundation + template ecosystem + all-in-one workspace," Notion's brand mindshare remains the leading one. The Chinese market is sustained by products like Wolai, FlowUs, Evernote (Yinxiang Biji), Lark Docs (Feishu Docs), and Yuque, each with different focal points.