High Signal Podcasts Evidence ledger
Method
Browse
← Back to evidence

Evidence receipt / belief

Published · transcript-backed

Ivan Zhao: belief

6 Mar 2025 Lenny's Podcast Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder)

“I think the good advantage is if a customer use Notion, they can address those three, four use cases in one place.”

— Ivan Zhao

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Ivan Zhao
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
6 Mar 2025
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…So speaking of that, so I don't know if you know this. I ran a survey recently where I asked my readers what tools they use most, what tools they love most. And it went out to my entire subscriber base. We've got 6,500 people filling out the survey. And Notion more than any other company placed very highly in many categories. For example, I have the notes here, it was the second most popular project management tool after Jira. It was the fourth most popular docs. Which is interesting because you think Notion would... Notion is known for docs and it's interesting, that was the lowest one actually. And then it was third in CRM, just behind Salesforce and HubSpot. Yeah, we did not intend to build CRM, but what is a CRM is relational database. That's why we give people that brick. That's a relational database and they can build CRM themselves. I think the good advantage is if a customer use Notion, they can address those three, four use cases in one place. Especially for our startup mid-market companies, their need for each of the vertical use case is not as complex so they can have all the information in one place, good for their teams, good for AI actually. That's a huge market change that's like we did not expect until recently. And save their costs, which is more and more people care about the bundling purchase nowadays. And our approach for that is, yes, we're number two in project management, number what? Number four in CRM, but we're interested in more bricks to make us number... Move up the categories in ranking. So it just takes time, but that's our approach. Yeah. Well, it's working whatever you're doing there. So say someone is trying to build a horizontal tool like yours. There's a lot of founders that are trying to build something that can do a lot of things really well. Do you have any advice for that first use case? Just figuring out something that initially works like you're talking about segmentation, is there something there of like, "Do this if you want to find any success with a horizontal tool"?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.

Search evidence