Latest / Marketing Made Simple with Fexingo: Branding, SEO, and Digital Strategy for Beginners / How Notion Built a Brand Without Traditional Ads
Transcript
- Lucas: There's this idea in marketing that you need a Super Bowl ad or a celebrity endorsement to build a real brand. And then there's Notion — the workspace app — which hit a $10 billion valuation with essentially zero traditional advertising. Luna: Right, they basically skipped the whole playbook that most billion-dollar companies follow. No billboards, no TV spots, no paid social blasts. Lucas: Exactly. And what's interesting is that Notion's approach isn't just 'we're too small for ads.' It's a deliberate strategy that ties directly to how their product works. The core insight is that Notion is a tool for creating and organizing information — which means every user who builds something in Notion is potentially creating marketing material for them. Luna: So the product itself becomes the ad. That's product-led growth in its purest form. Lucas: Let's talk about the specific mechanism. Notion's template gallery is probably their single most important marketing asset. When a user creates a public template — like a project tracker or a habit tracker — it lives on a Notion-owned subdomain with seo optimized copy. Those pages rank for terms like 'free habit tracker template' or 'startup project management template'. Luna: And each of those templates has a 'duplicate' button that takes you straight into the product. So the user goes from searching Google to being inside Notion in one click. Lucas: That's the funnel. No landing page, no sign-up form, no email capture. Just: here's a useful thing, click to use it. And once you're inside, you start customizing, and you're hooked. Notion's head of growth reportedly said that template-driven sign-ups have a conversion to paid rate that's significantly higher than other channels. Luna: And the templates are created by users, not by a content team. So Notion gets an endless supply of free, relevant, high-quality marketing content that scales with the user base. Lucas: Right. The template gallery is essentially a user-generated content engine. And Notion doubled down on this by making templates shareable and embeddable. You can embed a Notion page in a blog post, and it renders as a live, interactive element. So bloggers and YouTubers started using Notion to show their workflows, which naturally included links back to the template. Luna: That's the viral loop. Every public Notion page becomes a potential acquisition channel. And because the content is genuinely useful, it doesn't feel like marketing. Lucas: Let's look at the numbers. Notion's growth from 1 million to 4 million users happened largely through organic word of mouth powered by templates. In 2022, they had something like 10,000 public templates. By 2025, that number was well over 100,000. Each template is a mini landing page with its own search presence. Luna: That's a tenfold increase in three years. And they didn't pay for any of that inventory. Lucas: The other piece is their referral program. Notion offers a $10 credit for every friend you refer who signs up for a paid plan. But the real genius is that they made referrals feel native to the product. When you share a page with someone, there's a natural prompt: 'Invite them to edit? They'll need a Notion account.' It's frictionless. Luna: So the sharing that happens anyway — collaborating on a doc, sharing a project board — becomes a referral trigger. That's smart because it doesn't require the user to go out of their way. Lucas: And Notion also leaned into what you might call 'status marketing.' They created a certification program — Notion Certified — which trains people to become experts and then lists them in a public directory. Those certified consultants then market Notion to their clients because it's in their interest to do so. Luna: That's a classic platform play. Turn your power users into an affiliate network without paying commissions. They get credibility, you get distribution. Lucas: Now, one thing that's often overlooked is how Notion handled the 'empty product' problem. When you first sign up, you're staring at a blank page. That's terrifying for most people. So Notion invested heavily in onboarding templates — not just in the gallery, but in the first-run experience. New users are prompted to choose a template immediately, which gives them a starting point. Luna: That reduces the activation barrier. Instead of 'learn how to use this tool,' it's 'fill in your to-do list.' Huge difference. Lucas: And those onboarding templates are designed to showcase Notion's capabilities. For example, the 'Engineering Wiki' template shows off databases, linked pages, and rollups — features that a new user might not discover for weeks. So the template serves as both a crutch and a showcase. Luna: It's like a test drive that also teaches you how to drive. And the more you learn, the more likely you are to create your own templates, which then feeds back into the marketing engine. Lucas: Exactly. That's the flywheel. Notion's head of marketing once said in an interview that they think of every template as a 'product' that needs to be discoverable and usable. They optimized the template gallery for search, added tags, and even A/B tested template descriptions. It's treated with the same rigor as a paid ad campaign. Luna: I think a lot of marketers hear 'user-generated content' and think 'set it and forget it.' But Notion shows that you need to curate, optimize, and promote that content for it to work. Lucas: Right. They have a team that reviews templates for quality, selects featured templates, and even commissions templates from power users for specific use cases. For example, during the pandemic, they worked with remote work experts to create templates for distributed teams. That's not passive — that's editorial curation. Luna: And it paid off. Notion's organic search traffic is dominated by template-related queries. According to Similarweb, 'Notion template' is one of their top branded search terms, and many template pages rank on page one for non-branded terms like 'project management template.' Lucas: So the SEO play is massive. But there's another angle: Notion also used templates as a PR and social media tool. When they launched a template for 'Startup Equity Calculator' or 'Personal Budget,' it often got picked up by bloggers and journalists. Each launch was a mini news event. Luna: That's earned media driven by product utility. Compare that to a press release about a new feature — nobody cares. But a free template that solves a specific problem? That's shareable. Lucas: Now, let's talk about what this means for other brands. Notion's approach works because their product is inherently shareable. A project management tool? Very shareable. A CRM? Less so — because the data is sensitive. So the template strategy is most effective for tools that are collaborative and whose output is non-sensitive. Luna: But the broader principle applies more widely: find the thing your users naturally create and make it easy to share. For a design tool, that might be templates or assets. For a fitness app, it's workout plans. For a cooking app, it's recipes. Lucas: Exactly. And then optimize that sharing loop. Notion made templates embeddable, searchable, and one-click-duplicable. Every friction point removed increased the viral coefficient. If your product has a user-created output, ask: how can that output become a marketing asset? Luna: So it's not just about building a product that people love. It's about building a product that, when used, naturally produces marketing collateral. Lucas: That's the takeaway. And it's worth noting that Notion's approach didn't explode overnight. They had a relatively small user base for years before the template flywheel kicked in. It took patience to build the gallery, seed it with quality templates, and wait for the SEO to compound. Luna: But once it did, the growth was self-sustaining. And that's the dream for any marketer: a channel that gets more effective the more you use it. Lucas: If these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used in your own work — a template strategy, a viral loop, anything — that's exactly why we do this show. And the way we keep it ad-free is through listener support, not sponsors. If today was useful to you, you can help keep these episodes coming at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a small gesture that makes a big difference for us. We appreciate everyone who's chipped in. Lucas: Alright, back to the strategy. One thing I didn't mention is how Notion used the 'freemium' model in conjunction with templates. Their free plan is generous — unlimited blocks, collaborative for up to 10 guests. That means a user can create and share templates without ever paying. So the template engine runs on free users, and only converts when teams need features like permission controls or guest limits. Luna: That lowers the barrier even further. No credit card required to start creating marketing for them. Lucas: And Notion also invested in developer relations to encourage third-party integrations, which in turn made templates more powerful. For example, a template that integrates with Google Calendar or Slack becomes more valuable, which increases sharing. It's a virtuous cycle. Luna: So the marketing strategy is deeply intertwined with product development. That's hard to copy if your product team isn't on board. Lucas: It's a reminder that the best marketing often doesn't look like marketing. It looks like a useful template, a helpful certification, or a smooth referral flow. Notion's brand isn't built on messages — it's built on actions that users take. Luna: And that's a much more durable moat than any ad campaign. Because every template that exists today is still out there, still ranking, still driving sign-ups. It's an asset that appreciates over time. Lucas: Worth thinking about the next time you're planning a campaign: could you build something that your users would want to share instead of something you have to push? That's the Notion way.