case study template notion

Notion Case Study Gallery Template

Hand picked templates by top notion creators..

Case Study Gallery

Made by: Notion

Category: Portfolio

This template is meticulously crafted for the easy organization and display of detailed case studies. It is ideal for showcasing your case studies and insights in an engaging and easily accessible format. Researchers can use this template to present their case studies in a structured and appealing way, facilitating better understanding and discussion. Businesses can leverage this template to highlight their success stories, customer testimonials, or product efficacy studies, thus enhancing their credibility and appeal to potential customers. Educators can use it to present real-life examples and case studies to students, promoting practical learning.

UI/UX Designer Case Study: Notion Template for UI/UX/Product Designers

Professional Case Study Template for UX/UI Designers, Product Designers.

This Case Study will allow you to save hours of work trying to set up your own case study framework, download it and start making progress in your design story. You'll have your very own case study story in no time.

What's inside?

20+ questions to frame a killer design story

Who is this case study template for?

UI Designers, UX Designers, Product Designers

• What is Notion? Notion is a free productivity tool, designed to help companies or individuals coordinate deadlines, objectives, and assignments for the sake of efficiency. Get it for free, here
• How to download the template? Open the template link, then click " Duplicate " on the top right corner to duplicate it to your workspace.
• How can I contact you for custom solutions? Send me an email with your needs to  [email protected]

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The Quickest Way to Create Your UI/UX Portfolio Using Notion

Finding it hard to finish your UI/UX or product design portfolio? Not sure if you should make a website, a pdf, a slideshow or send via courier pigeon? Well, I'm here to break down the pros and cons of the different types of portfolio formats and show you why Notion App is one of the best solutions for doing them ALL! Well, except the pigeon, Notion doesn't do pigeons...yet.

Which way to go?

Option 1: Traditionally, you can self-host your portfolio on a CMS like WordPress, Squarespace or Ghost:

The upside: You will have your very own, professional website with custom URL to link to when submitting your design portfolio and perhaps for use on printed materials like business cards.

The downside: There is a lot of technical setup (and potential monetary cost) involved in building, hosting and deploying your site and without prior experience, the learning curve may be high and delay you in actually completing your website.

Option 2: Another option is to use a community platform like Behance or Dribbble:

The upside: It’s easy to set up and you don’t need any technical know-how to do it.

The downside: It can be distracting when you are putting your work up directly adjacent to that of others in your field as it increases the potential for clients or recruiters to click elsewhere. Also the design of your portfolio isn't unique since it's laid out the same for everyone on the platform.

Option 3: You can also settle for a simple PDF or Word doc:

The upside: All you need is knowledge of a word-processing program, it’s fairly easy to format and there’s no technical overhead.

The downside : The result is a static document, so it’s not interactive, it doesn’t live online and it can be hard to share over email.

Option Awesome:

The final option is something you may not have thought of before. Notion app isn’t only good for collecting your user research and organizing and managing your design projects. You can actually create your portfolio and case study pages and publish them directly to the web like you would any other webpage! It's even crawlable by search engines.

Why Choose Notion?

Quick solution - It's great for beginners or anyone that doesn’t want to get invest the time, money or effort into the technical stuff and just wants to focus on the content and getting their work out there.

It’s online - You can publish pages to the web the same way you would publish any website and pages can be indexed by search engines.

Interim solution - This can be something you can use to plan your website or to use while you're building your main site elsewhere. You can even export the Notion pages as HTML and turn them into a website when you’re ready!

Targeted approach - I always tell our DesignerUp students to be very focused on the content they add to their site or PDF presentation. Having specific portfolio or case studies instances that align with the roles you are applying for is far more effective than having a one, single very generalized one. Having pages that you can easily duplicate makes this super simple to do!

Interactive - You can actually embed interactive prototypes, videos and links without fussing with code.

PDF export  - If you still want that nice static PDF you can export that too with just one click.

I’m going to go through exactly how you can set up your Notion portfolio below. If you'd prefer to consume this content in video format, check out my walkthrough video below.

You can download all of these pre-made Notion templates here and follow along!

Landing Page

To setup your 'landing page', add a page [ + ] from the left sidebar. The name of your page becomes the title of the landing page. To change the hero image, hover over the top of the page to bring up the context menu that allows you to choose an image. You can either upload your own, paste a link from the web or my personal favorite select something from Unplash; a royalty free image repository. You can customize the page icon/avatar by clicking on it to bring up the selection menu.

Next, you can add in your introductory content. As is customary, I've started out with an image, that I designed myself in Sketch, and an introductory blurb about me.

You'll notice that my photo and blurb are set in a 2 column layout. Doing this inside of Notion is pretty easy. Just add in your content as you normally would in a vertical fashion (I've turned mine into an H1 Heading by highlighting it to bring up the text options). Then, when you're ready, just use the dotted icon to the left of the block to drag and drop your text block next to your image (look for the blue vertical or horizontal line to indicate the drop zone). Once dropped, you can hover in between the two columns and slide left or right to adjust the spacing.

The same can be done for the text blocks to create 2 column paragraphs, just write your text as you normally would and then drag and drop it into place. This works with more than 2 columns as well.

Case Study Gallery

To create my grid of case studies, I've used the ' Gallery Inline' b lock. You can access and insert any Notion block by using the [ + ] icon that appears to the left of your cursor when you hover on the left side of your page. To customize the information that gets displayed on your gallery cards, use the content menu icon (...) to create properties and toggle them on and off. For my example, I wanted Company, Designer, Tags and Timeline properties to be displayed. If you want the cover image of your page to be displayed on your card, you can select it from the Card Preview drop down. Finally you can choose from 3 grid sizes for your gallery (small, medium large) I've used large here.

Case Study Page

The case study page is your biggest opportunity to show what you can really do, what you’ve done, your process and your thinking. I spend a lot of time helping our DesignerUp students craft their narrative and the exact copy that they need to write. It’s different for everyone, some of us are coming from a non-design background and don’t have a lot of real projects or experience under our belts and so we need to take an approach of leveraging and framing the skills and traits that we do have as it relates to UI/UX. Some of us have more experience but need to be more targeted with our presentation and framing our story in the language of our viewers. If you’re interested in designing a full case study like the ones shown here and getting 1:1 mentorship custom crafting your UI/UX portfolio, have a look at our Product Design Master Course . But for now, let’s get back to focusing on the case study layout and setup.

You can create your individual case study pages by clicking on a card and then clicking on the 'Open as a Page' link at the top left to expand the page.

I've created a custom cover image for my first case study and then laid out my portfolio with the following sections:

Title and Project Details:

Using a combination of an ' H1' block, which I then highlighted and turned blue using the default text color options , and a plain old ' Text' block.

Deliverables:

This is a 'To-Do List' block that I've dragged over to sit in the column next to the Title and Project Details

Dividers are a nice way to denote separate sections of your page. Insert the 'Divider' block to insert this separating line.

Discover Phase:

Inserting my title and description in the same as above, I've followed this up with a full-width image as a page separator. To do this, add an ' Image' block and then hover over the bottom right corner of the image until you see the opposing arrow icon, then drag your image out to the right as if you're trying to enlarge it to be as big as possible. It feels a little funny at first, but as soon as it's big enough it will just magically snap into the full-width layout (you may have to scroll back up a bit to see it).

You can then use the sizing bar at the bottom of the image to increase or decrease the height.

Solutions and Goals:

I like to lay out the project Solutions and Goals in a two-column layout by using the 'Call out' block . You can click on the icon on the left to bring up the emoticon menu in order to change it or upload your own. Use the 6 vertical dot icon to drag them over into columns if you choose.

UX Research

Mostly the same blocks as before but adding in a 'Toggle List' block here to organize and display my Qualitative and Quantitative research findings. The great thing about the Toggle List is that you can also add other blocks to it.

Inspiration and Mood Board

The little mood board I've created here is just another 'Gallery Inline' block but this time I've turned off all the properties so all you see on the cards is the cover image.

Jumping over to another case study, one of my favorite features in Notion is the ability to embed your live, interactive UI prototypes from Invision. To do that, all you need is the link to the prototype that you've created in Invision which you'll insert using 'Invision' block. The viewer will be able to click through your entire prototype directly from your Notion page!

Testing and Feedback

Using the same drag and drop column technique as before, I've created some metric highlights and a few user testimonials to finish it off.

And that's it! If you want to export this to another format you can find that option in the context menu at the top right of your Notion workspace.

As you can see there is a limit to how much you can customize and 'design' the elements within Notion but those constraints are also what makes it so easy and quick to combine just a few different blocks into a very organized and powerful representation of your work and process.

Grab your very own copy of these templates here!

Remember, even more important than the layout or the format you choose to use for your portfolio is the content. So if you're interested in really mastering your UX/UI craft and building your case studies with an original product idea check out our Product Design Course.

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UX Portfolio & Case Study + Tips (Notion template)

Ease Your UX job hunt with a simplified portfolio creation!

I used to struggle with creating a realistic case study for my portfolio. The examples online and from bootcamps seemed out of touch with my real work experience in software houses and as an in-house designer. They talked about many steps in the design process that I never really went through. For example, I've only created one persona in all my years of working on real products. Usually, we designers work on parts of a project, not the whole thing from start to end.

So, I made this template to focus on real problems and solutions from my UX designer journey. It helps show your value in the projects you've worked on. This way, recruiters can easily see what you did to make things better. My approach is simple: introduce the client and project, share your research, talk about the features you worked on with the problem and solution, and wrap up your case study. This template is all about showing your real contribution without getting lost in fancy process terms.

What’s Included?

• Front Portfolio Page: Sleek design to make a strong first impression.
• Case Study Template: Highlighting problem statements and solutions with a simple, effective example.
• Resume Template: Neatly formatted to capture all essential details.
• Focused Content: Zero in on what truly matters, saving time for you and your recruiters.
• Minimalistic Design: Clean and clear presentation to let your work shine.
• Ease of Use: Effortless to personalize and share with potential employers.

Set-Up in Minutes:

• A straightforward set-up to get your portfolio up and running quickly.
• Includes tips and a practical example to guide you.
• A free Notion account is all you need to begin.

Simplified portfolio for all your UI/UX job hunting :)

Resume page

Minimalistic style, case study template with tips.

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The 9 Best Notion Templates for Designers

Are you looking for an easy all-in-one workspace to manage your brand’s design processes, or even a way to manage and scale your design business? Using Notion, you’ll be able to organize your design documents, manage clients, create branding guidelines, and so much more — all from a single workspace!

To help you get started, we’ve curated a list of the best Notion templates for designers. Check it out, and let us know which ones are your favorite in the comments below!

Looking for freelancer templates? We’ve wrote a blog post recommending the best Notion templates for freelancers !

Looking for more productivity tips and tools? Subscribe to The Flow — our quick, snappy, value-packed focus and recharge newsletter. Also, don’t miss our several other  Notion template round-ups and guides !

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Studio Pro System

Made for web designers, Webflow developers, and creative entrepreneurs alike, the Studio Pro System will help you run your business and manage your products/services. The system acts as a second brain template , and will give you everything you need to control your finances, organize your CRM, manage projects, and lots more!

Template Available Here

Notion Design System Template Pack

Based on some of the most influential design systems in the world like Google Material, Apple, and more – this Notion design template pack by DesignerUp gives you a templated system to set up your company’s branding. Map out your brand’s mission statement, visual design, content, components, and more!

Notion Templates for Product Designers

Organize your UI/UX research and design projects all within Notion! Use this advanced template for product designers to save your ideas and thoughts, manage user surveys and interviews, save fonts and color palettes, plan your product marketing, and more!

Related Post: Notion Product Management Templates

Notion Client Proposal Template for Designers

Use Notion to create beautiful, pre-designed project and client proposal templates . With this template, you can simply customize the proposal to your liking by adding brand visuals and company information. You can also map out the scope of your projects with cost, scope, work processes, and more – to get your client on the same page before your project begins!

Notion Product Design Portfolio Template

Looking to showcase your favorite design projects without the hassle of creating a full-fledged portfolio site? Using a Notion website template , you can easily create an online portfolio that offers 4 different homepage designs, 2 Notion resume templates , and 4 case study templates to show off your work and knowledge!

Notion UX Design OS

Streamline and manage your design process all in one kit with the Notion UX Design OS. This system includes 50+ templates that are linked and organized into 8 categories – including clients, team, projects, portfolio, documents, tools, tasks, and self development!

The Designer’s Workspace

A simple Notion designer workspace that gives you everything you need to run a successful design business, The Designer’s Workspace template is easily customizable and scalable to suit the needs of your design business with – 50+ templates and over 10 databases ready for you to use!

Simple Notion Brand Guidelines Template

Keep your branding consistent across your company communications with a Notion brand guidelines template. House your brand’s typography, colors, tone of voice, and more by establishing and outlining it all in this Notion template!

Notion for Designers OS

The ultimate operating system for designers looking to run, manage, and scale their design business in Notion – this template bundle is made for freelancers, web and brand designers, and any other creatives looking to grow their business!

Featuring several pre-designed dashboards, goal tracking, project mapping, client management tools, and 30+ other templates, Designers OS has everything you need to run your design business.

Which Notion design template do you like the most? Any other Notion template for designers you think should be included in the round-up? Let us know in the comments below!

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Notion Test & Use Cases Template: Scenario Planning In Notion (2023)

The best product, service and business decisions tend to come (in my experience) when I'm thinking from the user's perspective; inhabiting their shoes. Use scenarios are one of the most powerful ways of doing this--they force you to be specific about the precise situation your customer, client or user will find themselves in, and consider how your product or service will (or perhaps won't) be able to help.

In this component, I share the same Use Cases database and Notion template document I use for all my product, content and business scenario planning. Let's take a look at what's inside.

What is a Use Case scenario document?

Use case scenarios help us place key personas in specific contexts where they might actually be considering our product; needing our product (but not knowing it); using a product feature; or simply stuck with a problem we might be able to help with.

There are two types of use cases I use: product use cases and business use cases. Product use cases are all about how someone might interact with our product, touchpoints and features; business use cases document how we might be able to help a specific business process or improve an existing workflow.

Creating use case scenarios forces you to think through various user groups and different types of customer interactions; it also allows you to track and review usage overtime to see if there are any common patterns emerging (either in terms of areas where people are struggling, or opportunities for upselling or cross-selling).

Why Use Notion for Use Case Scenarios?

Notion gives an infinite canvas for mapping and linking use case scenarios--in a way that remains structured and easy to navigate. The Use Cases database in this template is a richly-related table of properties, however, in Notion it's simple enough to navigate between the connected lists, add details where needed, then return to get an overview of all Use Cases.

Leveraging Notion databases also means we can filter, sort and rank Use Cases by important properties like:

• By Personas;
• By Products;
• By Projects & Initiatives; and
• Even by keyword volume.

Using The Use Case Scenarios Notion Template

Included in the template, you'll find 7 main workspaces:

• Use Cases 'Home'
• Initiatives

Let's talk a little more about each.

Use Cases Overview

The Use Cases home overview gives you a table, with all of the template's databases linked and related in a single view. This is the motherboard for the component, and it's where you can list new use cases to fill out with further details.

Personally, while using this setup, I tend to jump around from workspace to workspace. While brainstorming new use case scenarios, I'll have an idea for a feature that would be useful to include; a template to create; a piece of content to write; a keyword that's worth researching further.

Best to take this home view as your 'launch' point--it isn't necessary to fill out each use case line by line.

The Personas database is a collection of your target market archetypes--the people who you think might use your product, or those you have good data to suggest are already your best customers.

Every Use Case should have at least one persona tied to it... for obvious reasons. But some scenarios will apply to multiple, and having these linked databases means you can add as many personas to each Use Case as you like.

So, if one of your Use Cases is 'New Year's Resolution', then you might have 3 or 4 personas that fit that scenario--and you might also have 2 or 3 products or offerings that connect specifically to that scenario.

The Offerings database documents all the products or services you offer; these could be physical goods, digital products, SaaS platforms or service packages.

If you are using this database for an Ecommerce store, or any catalog with a large number of specific product items (say, 50+), then it's best to use the 'Offerings' database as a category property (say, 'Jeans', 'Sweatshirts', 'T-Shirts'), then you can repurpose the 'Features' database to be more granular ('Levi Jeans, Black, 32').

If you only have a few offerings, on the other hand, you should be able to simply list those in this database, then link them to the appropriate Use Cases.

This will also give you one of the more useful ways of filtering and sorting your Use Case scenarios database; namely, by Offerings. Suppose you are selling a SaaS product with 3 Tiers, and you also offer an Enterprise or 1-1 services option. That would be a total of 4 offerings, and you could link not only different personas, but different use cases to each of these offerings, then sort your table by those particular tiers/offerings.

As mentioned above, the Features database lets you get more granular about the specifics of what your offerings entail. So, if your you're selling a To-Do list SaaS, and one of your Use Cases is 'New Year's Resolutions', you might have an idea for a new Feature that's specifically related to this use case; say, a to-do list template which is preset with a 'resolution', a 'target' and a 'compare with last year' view.

You can also use this database to simply link to existing features that are most relevant for common use case scenarios--this lets you very quickly pinpoint which features are getting the most mileage from your users, and which (perhaps) aren't really pulling that much weight after all.

As a big believer in SEO, this is one of my favorite aspects of this Use Case scenarios template. As I'm brainstorming specific use case scenarios, I'm in an ideal mindset to consider what my target persona would be likely to search in that situation. So, once again, if the use case scenario is 'listing out New Year's Resolutions', there would be a series of unique keywords that relate to both my 'To-Do List App' and 'New Year's Resolutions' which would help me meet that persona in a much more specific and meaningful way.

Rather than simply competing on big keywords like 'best to do list apps of 2023', by considering the specific scenario, I can focus more on long-tail keywords, which are in turn more likely to be low competition.

Similar to keywords, the Content workspace is where you can track all the blog posts, articles, social media posts and other pieces of content that relate to a particular use case. Once again, thinking through the specific scenario that a user is facing can be an excellent way to brainstorm content ideas that will stand out:

• Ebooks and downloadable guides that relate to a specific scenario;
• Social media posts that are timely and related to that use case;
• Articles and keyword content to meet specific searches; and
• Videos that are likely to be especially helpful in solving a problem in that scenario.

These are all examples of how you can improve your content game by linking your content database directly to use case scenarios.

Projects & Initiatives

The Initiatives workspace is where you'll track all the projects and initiatives related to your use case scenarios. These can be related to content creation, product development, customer support or even higher level business strategy like pricing strategy and positioning.

Use case scenarios help you think more concretely about your product and services through the lens of your customers. When you can do this consistently, and implement on the insights gathered from brainstorming these scenarios, you can see focused improvement on anything from feature prioritization to marketing and user retention.

Duplicate the Use Cases Notion Template to your account, make use of the databases included or link it up to your own existing docs, and start linking together key scenarios that are facing your target personas.

Level up your Notion workspace, today⚡

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An onboarding masterclass

Note: this case study was released before I started writing accompanying articles, which is why it's just the slideshow.

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That’s all for the slideshow, but there’s more content and key takeaways below.

That was an easy way to consume 50 hours of UX research, right?

What will you dive into next?

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All of the UX analysis on Built for Mars is original, and was researched and written by me, Peter Ramsey.

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How Notion Built A $2B SaaS Startup Through Community & Templates

Article's Content

How did Notion become a $2 billion SaaS company with 1MM+ users, and what can they do to reach the next million users?

Those are the questions I was asking as I dove deeper and deeper into the growth strategies in play right now from Notion —the collaboration, productivity, spreadsheet, note-taking, pretty-much-everything SaaS tool.

And they’re the questions I’m going to try to answer today.

In this article, I’m going to break down some of the strategies Notion has used to build a $2 billion company , grow to 1 million users after a single seed round, pull in over 20 million site visits monthly & hit over 40,000 unique referring domains in just four years.

I’m also going to share two SaaS-specific content marketing strategies to help Notion break away from the competition and tap into a brand-new user base that’s actively on the hunt for the exact tools Notion is offering—to ultimately propel Notion toward the next $2 billion.

If you’re owning growth at a SaaS company of your own, I’m confident these two strategies can be applied to your industry as well to boost traffic and acquisition starting this year.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Calling out competition
• Breaking down barriers to entry
• Building a 46k member Subreddit
• Establishing their Notion Pros program
• Amplifying positive feedback
• Tailoring their onboarding
• Building a growth loop with templates
• Pitting themselves against *more* competitors
• Optimizing template pages for search

Before we dive head-first into strategies and tactics, let’s clarify one thing…

Notion is reinventing the spreadsheet & competing with thousands of software companies at the same time

You’ve heard it before and I’m going to say it again:

For most SaaS companies, Excel and Google Sheets are your biggest competitors.

We’ve talked before about the unbundling of Excel and how most SaaS companies are built around single spreadsheet use cases like HR and payroll services , budgets, project management, etc.

And sure, you’re going to have direct competitors that also specialize in what you specialize in. For example, in the project management space, you’ve got Asana, Trello, Todoist, Basecamp, etc. In the task management software space, there is Monday.com, Wrike, Jira, etc. All competing with each other to win the almighty user.

But at the end of the day, the good old-fashioned spreadsheet is still coming to eat your lunch.

• Using Asana to collaborate with clients? There’s a spreadsheet for that.
• Using Trello to track project statuses and owners? Spreadsheet for that too.
• Using Todoist for personal task management? Yep, Google Sheets can do that too.

Don’t get me wrong—these project management tools all have their unique value props that help them continue to grow even with Excel slowly coming for them.

Our economy runs on Spreadsheets. 📊 Many SaaS companies think their biggest competitor is another SaaS company. In reality, their biggest competitor is often Excel: https://t.co/0Or3YptkSg Exciting to see startups like @spreadsheetcom in the market. #SpreadsheetDay pic.twitter.com/PpF4Irw4wl — Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) October 17, 2019

Then there are the companies coming for Excel.

These are companies that are reinventing the spreadsheet entirely.

Notion, Airtable, Coda, Spreadsheet.com, Smartsheet and others are positioning themselves as spreadsheet alternatives to directly challenge Excel and Google Sheets across the board.

Here’s what it means:

Not only do most SaaS companies still need to compete with Excel, they’re also now competing with these new-school spreadsheet tools. And these companies reinventing the spreadsheet aren’t just competing with each other; they’re competing with everyone .

For example, Notion isn’t just trying to pull users away from Airtable or Excel. They’re trying to attract users from thousands of SaaS companies across dozens (even hundreds) of industries.

• Accounting SaaS tools
• HR SaaS tools
• Project management SaaS tools
• Content scheduling SaaS tools
• Event planning SaaS tools
• Real estate SaaS tools
• Reporting SaaS tools

Every template and use case in Notion, Airtable, Spreadsheet.com, etc., can take the place of a SaaS company that was built to address that use case.

Throughout the rest of this article, I’m going to examine Notion’s marketing tactics to figure out what they’re getting right and where there are even more opportunities for growth.

Let’s jump in.

How Notion Is Winning With Their Community & Flexibility

In this section, I’m going to be breaking down some of the strategies & tactics the Notion team has used to grow so quickly & build a highly engaged community of “Notioners” in <4 years.

First of all, what actually is Notion?

Notion calls itself an “all-in-one workspace.” Basically, it’s a no-code software that allows teams to build wikis, share documents, take notes, manage workflows and more.

Notion has taken off over the past few years because of how flexible and user-friendly it is—it’s essentially a powerful sandbox where teams can build any systems they need without having to code or connect dozens of tools.

After Notion ’s latest raise in April 2020, the company is sitting at a $2 billion valuation .

In this section, I’m going to show you what they’re currently doing well from a marketing and growth perspective.

Calling out the competitors you’re replacing

Right on the Notion homepage, they’re calling out the exact tools that their software can replace in each of their three most common verticals.

For team wiki s , it’s Confluence and GitHub Wiki:

For project and task management tools —Trello, Asana and Jira:

And for standard note-taking and documents—Google Docs and Evernote:

Since Notion (like most other spreadsheets and no-code database software) is essentially a blank canvas with thousands of different use cases, they’re mentioning these well-known competitors to give you some context for how you can use their software.

Here’s what they’re saying with these elements:

Storing all of your important docs and information in Confluence?

Use Notion instead.

Managing your work in a separate project management tool ?

Relying on Google Docs and Evernote for note-taking?

This helps users who aren’t 100% familiar with Notion better understand the capabilities—with examples to boot. And by talking about how you can move multiple different use cases into Notion, they’re also pushing one of their primary value propositions from the jump.

Breaking down barriers to entry with integrations

Of course, just because you can replace some tools or use cases with Notion doesn’t mean you want to replace every single tool in your stack.

To tackle that barrier head-on, Notion lists a few of the many tools they play nice with, showing how they can fit into the workflows you’re already comfortable with:

Use Slack often? Notion works well with Slack.

Don’t want to ditch the Google Suite entirely? You don’t have to. Notion and Notion integrations work with Sheets, Docs and Drive.

“But wait—don’t they call out Google Docs on this same homepage?”

Yes they do, but not every Notion user is planning to completely abandon Google Docs—and they’re making it clear that you don’t have to.

Building a 46,000+ member Subreddit around their product

Notion’s Reddit community is huge.

It’s become a place for current and future users to connect to share templates, ideas, accomplishments, product ideas, etc.

Over the past 1.5 months alone, the community has grown from 38,500 to just shy of 47,000:

That’s a daily trend of 170 new subscribers on average every single day:

Let’s not skip past the actual impact this growth can have as well.

A community dedicated entirely to Notion is adding 170 members every single day (weekends included). That’s 170 new people who could either (1) become first-time Notion users, or (2) level-up the ways they use Notion already, turning regular users into power users over time.

And this isn’t just a community where users hit the “join” button only to never come back again. There are 25 new posts and 119 new comments shared every single day:

This community is also mostly hands-off for the Notion team themselves. It’s a community-led group where users connect and share insights with other users.

Not only does that keep the Notion team from having to hire dozens of full-time community managers just to keep the wheels turning—it also keeps the conversations happening inside 100% genuine and authentic.

Where this community becomes even more interesting is when we start to unravel what Notion actually is doing to work side-by-side with its members through their ambassador program.

Establishing a Notion Ambassador program for power users & creators

One strategy in particular Notion has leaned on (and seen great success from) has been finding and working with the most vocal members of these communities.

To test this strategy, they launched an ambassador program called Notion Pros as an experiment to see which members (if any) would be interested in working closely with the Notion team to improve the product, stay connected with the community, finding even more potential Notion users, etc.

Notion’s Head of Marketing, Camille Ricketts, talked about the early stages of this program during her conversation with Forget The Funnel .

For the experiment, they built a simple landing page using the Notion platform and hit 400 applications right off the bat.

To keep it manageable, they limited the Notion Pros program to 20 total seats at the start. As of August 2020 they’re now up to 60 Notion Pros representing, supporting & promoting the tool across the many Notion communities out there.

One great example of a Notion Pro helping drive growth for Notion while building her own brand is Marie Poulin .

She’s grown her YouTube channel to 15k subscribers focused entirely on how to best use Notion across a wide number of use cases:

Her videos are consistently hitting 5-figure view numbers & cover everything from setting up a weekly agenda, using Notion for popular task management methodologies, building advanced databases, setting up recurring tasks, etc.

And Marie is just one example of a Notion Pro creating great content around Notion. Keep in mind—the program is up to 60 members at the moment. That means there are 59 more people creating content, talking about Notion, and helping new users discover Notion.

The big takeaway for SaaS growth teams:

Find your power users. Connect with them. Explore what opportunities exist for collaboration.

Let them take the wheel and guide the ways they’d like to collaborate with your team, then build a program to support them. Give them content to run with, give them access to your product roadmap, set up a Slack channel for them—let them help you grow.

Amplifying positive community feedback

Notion embeds real tweets from real people directly on their homepage:

This is a great tactic to take the “social proof” piece of your landing pages even further. Sourcing testimonials and quotes from current users is still a good idea, but pulling positive mentions like these directly from Twitter adds that extra layer of authenticity.

Sure, Notion could be running a backchannel conversation with everyone in that screenshot asking them to say something nice, but I’d put the chances of that at just about zero. People love the product, they’re telling their communities exactly that, and Notion is just boosting the message.

Tailoring their onboarding to specific user entry-points & objectives

This is one of my personal favorites…

Back to Camille Ricketts’ (Notion Head of Marketing) conversation with Forget The Funnel —she talked about how Notion has used their onboarding process to customize every new user’s first experiences with the product.

After a new user signs up, they go through a quick onboarding quiz to help Notion better understand what they’re trying to accomplish with the product.

For example, let’s say I’m looking to set up a new Notion workspace for the Foundation team from my laptop.

After I sign up with my Foundation email, I’m asked how I plan to use Notion:

After I choose “with my team” they get me to create our workspace, set how large the team is, and share which department I’m in.

I’m choosing 5-20 employees & the marketing team:

Then I’m taken to an invite screen to get my team members connected (our first referral growth opportunity) before I jump in:

And finally, the activation begins.

Once I hit the product for the first time, I’m given a handful of templates to get started with. Because I said I planned to use Notion with my team and I’m part of the marketing department, they’re getting me up & running with:

• Brand Assets (wiki)
• Meeting Notes
• Content Calendar

All tailored to match up with what I’m most likely to be interested in—which not-so-coincidentally happen to also be the templates that are most likely to keep me engaged.

If I would’ve chosen to use Notion for just myself and from my phone, here’s the page I’d land on & the templates they’d serve up once I hit the product:

By going through this pre-onboarding process, Notion can quite literally tailor the screens you first see inside the product to maximize the likelihood of you poking around and getting your feet wet.

Here’s how the process maps out:

This is something I’d highly recommend just about every SaaS company steal for their own onboarding process . Setup a quick quiz to try to better understand every new user’s intentions (and potential pain points) as they’re signing up, then show them what they’ll want to see.

Building a scalable growth loop with 250+ templates

This is where things start to get even more interesting with Notion.

Because of the basically infinite number of use cases Notion has, it’s no surprise that Notion users have built an impressive gallery of templates. In the company’s public templates directory alone, there are user-created templates for…

3-minute journals:

Design feedback documents:

University / college course planning checklists:

And quite literally hundreds more when you factor in the templates Notion users share in the r/Notion subreddit—all available for free. The community has even created tags specifically for posting Setup Showcases and Templates :

And through the community, members are sharing their own personal templates like this task list built specifically for students:

Templates are so popular that some Notion members are even creating their own newsletters just for sharing templates every week:

Notion’s built up an engaged community of users who love to create systems that work for them and then share what they’ve created with their peers.

The best part for Notion’s growth?

As more templates are shared in Reddit circles, Slack channels, Facebook groups, etc., more potential users are being introduced to Notion, and existing users are finding more use cases to tie their workflows and systems into Notion even further.

That’s a winning growth lever across acquisition , activation , retention and referral .

Here’s how this growth loop works, using my friend Nick as an example:

• Nick discovers Notion through a template shared on Twitter
• He signs up for a Notion account to start using this particular new template
• During the onboarding process, Notion finds out more about Nick’s intentions and surfaces 5 more templates they’re likely to be interested in
• After Nick builds a page from one of these 5 templates, Notion shows him a few more templates he can now connect to his new page
• As Nick starts to use the product more and more, he starts searching for even more templates from the community to level up his workspace and processes
• By now, Nick is using Notion every day and he’s become an active user
• Now that he’s more comfortable with how Notion works, he starts to build templates of his own to fit even more use cases
• Because he’s already pulling so much value out of the r/Notion community, he wants to give back & starts to share his newly built templates with others
• Nick also decides to share his new template on his own Twitter account
• Then 3 of his friends—Lisa, Alex & Chris—see his Notion template and sign up…

… and the loop continues.

Acquisition. Activation. Retention. Referral.

All through the use of templates—templates you can build yourself, and empower your own power users and community to start building and sharing.

The growth takeaway for other SaaS companies?

Create opportunities for your existing customers to share the systems, processes and workflows they’re using successfully with others in the community.

Untapped Content & SEO Growth Opportunities

In this section, I’m going to break down two new content marketing & SEO-specific strategies the Notion team can starting building to continue growing their active user numbers.

First thing’s first, let me say this:

The Notion team is doing a great job across plenty of channels and growth strategies.

They deserve full credit for everything we just covered, and they’ve been able to grow to $2 billion by building a great product, promoting it well, and building one of the most engaged product communities I’ve ever seen.

The suggestions I’m about to share are two opportunties that came up while researching their current approach for this teardown. Both are extensions of some of the great work the team is already doing.

Pitting themselves against competitors in search

Yes, Notion is calling out the competition on the homepage. That’s one step toward convincing potential users who rely on those tools today that Notion is a viable replacement.

But what if potential customers want to do more research? What if just knowing Notion can replace Asana or Evernote isn’t enough for them to pull the trigger?

They need more information.

And when they’re after information, they turn to Google.

• Top keywords: Notion vs evernote, is notion better than evernote, evernote vs notion
• Volume: 2,000 searches/month

Right now, 2,000 Google searches are happening every single month comparing Notion to Evernote. That’s 2,000 people per month who are on the fence looking for answers.

And guess what? Notion has a Switch from Evernote page:

… but it’s pretty much nowhere to be found in Google:

That’s a grand total of SIX keywords where Notion is in the top 20—and they’re on page 2 in Google for every single one of them.

Cliche alert—the best place to hide a dead body? Page 2 of Google.

Search is a zero sum game. If you're #1, you're eating. If you're #2, you're snacking. If you're #3-10, you're getting scraps and crumbs. and if you're on page 2… you're starving. — JH Scherck (@JHTScherck) August 18, 2020

If Notion is sitting on page 2 for searches that directly compare their product to one of their top competitors, it means someone else is getting to control that narrative.

Maybe the pages ranking on page 1 are pro-Notion, recommending that Evernote users make the switch. But maybe they’re not.

And Notion’s “Switch from Evernote” page isn’t even on the radar for the overall “evernote alternative” topic, which is getting 6,100 searches per month with 14 different search terms:

Even beyond Evernote, there’s plenty of opportunity for Notion to target “alternative to” searches for every competitor they’re already calling out on their homepage, like Trello, Confluence, Jira, etc.

In fact, we looked at how often people are searching for alternatives to some of Notion’s top competitors:

All in all, that’s ~24,000 people actively searching for a solution like Notion every single month .

To capture this search traffic, I’d recommend Notion build a comparison page directory that houses standalone comparison pages for each and every competitor they want to call out:

Here’s what a comparison page directory would help Notion achieve:

• Rank for “ notion alternatives ” to retain customers at risk of churn and convince them that Notion is still the best choice
• Rank for branded “notion vs [competitor]” to control the narrative and highlight why Notion is better than the other options
• Rank for “[competitor] alternatives” to capture users who are actively searching for a replacement to Notion’s competitors

Each page inside the directory can use the same overall template and page structure. All that needs to be updated are the comparison details (pricing, features, etc.) and the supporting content throughout.

The best part about a comparison directory like this?

Especially for an Excel / spreadsheet alternative like Notion.

Remember at the beginning of this post when I talked about how the new Excel alternatives (e.g., Notion) are also competing with thousands of SaaS companies that are more specialized?

This means Notion could technically create hundreds of comparison pages over time to position themselves as an alternative to every tool on the market.

• Trello alternatives
• Squarespace alternatives
• Basecamp alternatives
• Dropbox alternatives

…and so on.

All it would take is building a new comparison page from the same template—something that could easily be outsourced to freelance content creators or a content marketing agency .

The key takeaways for SaaS companies:

Put the competition in your crosshairs and control the narrative when a prospect is doing their research. To scale, build a comparison content directory with a templated page structure.

Optimizing their templates directory for search

As powerful as Notion’s templates directory (and overall ecosystem) is becoming, there’s still massive untapped potential for these templates.

The most glaring is organic search.

Based on Ahrefs data, there are over 350,000 different search queries containing “template” or “templates” happening every single month.

Notion doesn’t have a pre-built solution for all of those searches, but I have no doubt there are thousands of unique searches that Notion does already have solutions for.

For example, every month, 600+ people are turning to Google to find habit tracker templates .

These people are asking for a ready-to-use tool, and they’ll probably be highly motivated to sign up for whatever SaaS tool can deliver.

But wait, Notion’s already got that covered, right?

They have exactly what these people are searching for in their templates directory—plus dozens more user-generated habit tracker templates not currently highlighted in the directory that all satisfy these users’ search intent:

Well… as of today, for the primary target keyword “habit tracker template,” you’ll have to click all the way to page 7 in Google before any Notion pages show up:

And it’s not just niche use cases like habit tracking where there’s massive opportunity for Notion to use templates that already exist to attract quite literally thousands of new users a month.

Let’s look at a few more:

Weekly planner templates

• 45,000 searches/month
• 225 keywords

Notion has weekly planner templates ready to go:

If they can rank on page 1 for a high-intent query getting over 45,000 searches per month, there are users to be earned.

Content calendar templates

• 8,100 searches/month
• 46 keywords

Notion’s got you covered there as well:

The best part is, those 8,000+ people searching for content calendar templates are going to be creators, content marketers, marketing team leads—ideal Notion users.

Trip planner templates

• 3,200 searches/month
• 49 keywords

Notion can deliver on that search, too:

And the list goes on.

Another good one—of the Notion team were to build a hub page with their best resumé templates and offered some guidance on how to use them, they could capitalize on tons of search traffic.

You see how far this could go…

How Notion (and other SaaS co’s) can build template directories at scale

In 6 steps, here’s how I’d recommend that Notion capitalize on their templates to boost organic traffic and user acquisition:

1. Identify priority template groups .

Which templates best align with Notion’s ideal users? Which templates are getting the most searches per month? Blend these two answers together to find the highest priority types of templates to promote.

2. Build hub pages for each template group.

Instead of relying on the individual templates to rank, build hub pages that round up the best templates available for that group. Use easy-to-understand URL structures and house everything underneath the main “templates” directory:

3. Round up Notion-created and user-created templates that match.

Instead of housing every individual template in one massive directory (which puts the onus on the user to hunt for a template they can use), use these hub pages to round up some of the most popular and well-constructed templates.

PS: Highlighting user-created templates will especially help *big time* later on. More on that in a bit.

4. Add supporting content to the page—walkthroughs, tips, etc.

Complete each page with content that helps visitors use these templates successfully. To scale this approach, each page can be built from one standard structure.

Canva’s already doing a fantastic job with this . Their template hubs all follow a similar overall structure:

5. Distribute, distribute, distribute.

When the Notion community finds something helpful, they tend to go crazy for it. So when these template hubs go live, distribution is key.

Here’s when it pays off to include user-created templates.

Reach out to every single creator whose templates have been featured to let them know—this’ll help nurture the relationship with these creators while also giving them a reason to promote the template hubs.

6. Build backlinks—often.

It’s no secret that backlinks are a major ranking signal for Google. The more links you’re earning from high authority websites, the better your pages are going to look in the eyes of Google.

After each hub launches, invest in backlink outreach . Hit up pages already talking about the topic. Find the most influential communities for each topic and reach out. As traffic increases, the template pages will start to pick up links naturally as well.

If the template hubs are organized effectively (e.g., notion.so/templates/[TOPIC] ) with proper internal linking throughout, then every link acquired across the templates section is going to help the entire directory climb in Google.

Concluding thoughts

Notion’s been able to build a $2B SaaS company on the back of a great product, a great community, and a great team.

They’ve established a scalable growth loop through their templates that acquires, activates, retains & refers users on its own, and they’ve built a customized onboarding process that increases the likelihood of keeping new users engaged after they’re acquired.

If their goal is to creep on the traditional spreadsheet’s SaaS market share and compete with nearly every niche software tool available, they’re definitely on the right track. And there’s still even more opportunities for growth with great content and great SEO in particular.

Two of the biggest opportunities to do exactly that:

• Explain how they match up against the competition
• Dominate top-of-funnel “templates” searches

Don’t get me wrong—Notion didn’t cross 1 million users by sitting on their hands, missing growth opportunities left and right.

The Notion team has built an amazing product (can’t lie, I use it daily) that looks great and works even better, a seriously powerful community (46,000 subreddit members and counting) and a brand that pulls in new users like a magnet.

But hey—there’s always room for growth, right?

Did you enjoy this post?

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