How Notion Went From Near-Death to $10 Billion

In 2015, Notion was dying. The product was buggy. The technology stack was fundamentally broken. The team had shrunk to just the two co-founders. They were running out of money and running out of ideas.

Ivan Zhao and Simon Last made a decision that most advisors would have called insane: they moved to Kyoto, Japan, and rebuilt the entire product from scratch. Not a refactor. A complete rewrite. New architecture. New editor. New everything.

The Kyoto Rebuild

For over a year, Zhao and Last lived cheaply in Kyoto and coded. No employees. No office. No distractions. They rebuilt Notion on top of a block-based architecture that would allow users to create any type of document, database, or workspace from the same set of building blocks.

This architecture was the breakthrough. Every other productivity tool did one thing: Evernote did notes, Trello did boards, Google Docs did documents, Airtable did databases. Notion could do all of them, and they could be combined freely on the same page.

The Relaunch

Notion 2.0 launched in 2018. The initial growth was slow. The product was powerful but had a steep learning curve. There was no viral loop. No network effect. Just a very good tool that took time to learn.

What changed was the community. Power users started creating templates and sharing them. YouTube tutorials appeared. Twitter threads went viral showing creative Notion setups. The community built the onboarding experience that the product itself lacked.

By 2020, the pandemic accelerated everything. Remote teams needed a central workspace. Notion was perfectly positioned. Growth went from strong to explosive. Revenue grew 4x in a single year.

Why the Near-Death Experience Mattered

The conventional wisdom is that near-death experiences are something to avoid. For Notion, it was essential. If the original version had been moderately successful, they never would have done the full rebuild. They would have iterated on a broken foundation forever.

Being forced to start over gave them the freedom to make architectural decisions that would have been impossible with an existing user base and codebase. The block-based architecture only works if you build it from the ground up.

The Takeaway

Sometimes the best thing that can happen to a startup is hitting rock bottom early enough to start over. The founders who survive that experience and come back with something genuinely better are the ones who build decade-defining companies.

Notion is worth $10 billion today not despite the near-death experience, but because of it.