How we unlocked influencer marketing in the early days of Notion to drive millions of signups

Welcome back! I wanted to share a deep dive into one of the areas I spent a bunch of time on when I was at Notion. Plus, don’t miss an incredible list of many of the most promising early stage startups to join.

Here it goes.

Unlocking influencer marketing in the early days of Notion was a game-changer. Partnering with creators on YouTube and TikTok helped us expand into new markets, drive evergreen signups at mass scale, and fuel our community programs. Below, I share how we kicked this off, early learnings, and ways for you to apply this strategy.

A few months into working at Notion, I came across a couple of YouTubers talking about how they were using Notion in their videos. They spoke about how great Notion was to manage their video production process. I was curious if they would be interested in publishing full reviews on how they used Notion. I got the green light internally to run an experiment with a small budget. They all got back to me saying they would be thrilled to partner with Notion. We asked them to produce videos on how they use Notion and gave them UTM links to track signups. The results were incredible, even in just a short amount of time after they had been published. I made the case to double our budget, and we saw the same thing happen again.

As I scaled this channel, it became clear I’d need help to manage all of the day-to-day work. We had more than enough on our plate on the community front, with the early days of our Ambassador program, template gallery, user conference, and more. I hired a contractor to help manage the process end to end. They would source influencers, reach out, and coordinate the sponsorship. This gave us the ability to invest more spend and launch more partnerships every month.

Following some of these early experiments, we set up some guidelines for ourselves:

• We learned that full videos on Notion performed the best, instead of 60-second ad reads. Even though full videos were more expensive, they had significantly better results on a cost per acquisition basis the majority of the time.

• These partnerships performed better when the creator used Notion themselves. The videos felt much more authentic; it hardly came off as a sponsored post.

• We set a minimum of 50K+ followers to partner together. Given our limited time, it allowed us to focus on more influential creators. Eventually, we would reduce this to work with micro-influencers as well, particularly on TikTok.

In the early days we mostly focused on creators in the productivity, education, and tech space. As time went on, we expanded to other types of audiences. We started to experiment on Instagram and TikTok as well. TikTok became its own beast, which you can learn about more in the article linked in my comments.

With some time behind us, I put together some notes for the team to see why influencer marketing was such a special channel for us. There were four particular reasons:

• Evergreen signups — notably with YouTube, we saw creators were driving new signups months after their videos had gone live. The cost per acquisition would continue to go down over time, making our investment in this channel continuously more attractive. This would compound as time went on.

• Break into new markets — we started partnering with international creators early on. Depending on which region they lived in, we would sometimes see our overall signups dramatically increase in their area/language, especially when multiple influencers would go live around the same time. In some geographies, we would see a 2–5x baseline signup increase.

• Snowball effect with creators — most creators started off using Notion to manage their video production. In their first video about Notion, they would usually share this use case and other creators took note. As Notion became more known in the creator world, it was easier to scale our partnerships every month.

• Fuel community growth — as more partnerships went live, new users would come across our community page and look for ways to get involved. Particularly in new regions, we’d see more people signing up for our community programs.

This became an incredibly powerful flywheel, driving awareness, new users, community growth, and more influencers.

As the program scaled, we brought on more contractors. It became clear this required a full time role at Notion so we decided to hire someone and turn this into it’s own function. We were lucky enough to bring on Lexie Barnhorn to run influencer marketing, grow the team, and continue to scale this program to where it is today.

For startups exploring influencer marketing, a few tips as you get started:

1. Find a niche — go deep on a specific vertical. When we started we were quite focused on the productivity space and tried to concentrate our outreach efforts there. YouTube, TikTok have an endless list of niches. A quick google search will help you come up with many options to get started.

2. Be authentic — aim to get creators to actually use your product, not just produce ad reads. It will go a long way. You may have to get creative early on when your product is still unknown. Find ways to stand out and get creators excited about what you’re building. Don’t think of this as a transaction, try to build a real relationship with this person.

3. Run experiments — try out different formats, forms of outreach, and see what performs best. We experimented a lot early on until we figured out what worked best. This isn’t something you can unlock in a few days, it takes time.

growth for startups

Helping out a friend who has done outbound growth at companies like Rippling and Samsara. He’s amazing at things like Linkedin/email and messaging, and he’s starting to help a few companies. Happy to connect if you know any b2b companies looking for help on this front.

exceptional startups

Joining a breakout company at the right time is not easy. Here's a list with many of the fastest growing early stage startups in the world. Still early enough to get in at the right time, with clear product-market fit, and substantial revenue/funding.

exceptionalstartups.com

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