Community for B2B Startups: Ben Lang
Notion's former Head of Community
Hey friends! I’m Akash, an early stage software & fintech investor at Earlybird Venture Capital, partnering with founders across Europe at the earliest stages.
I write about startup strategy to help founders navigate their company-building journeys, from inception to PMF and beyond.
You can always reach me at akash@earlybird.com if we can work together.
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Today we’re speaking to Ben Lang, former Head of Community at Notion!
Ben has previously shared his insights on how he scaled Notion’s community efforts here with
. also covered Notion here.
Ben joined Notion in 2019 to lead community efforts and saw the team grow from 15 to 600+. Over 5 years he helped scale the team, build out their Ambassador program, influencer function, Consultants certification, user conference, education program, and more. He actively makes angel investments and advises a few startups. He is building nextplay.so to help people discover what’s next with curated opportunities, gatherings, and content. He also is a former founder (Mapme), and previously led growth as the first marketing hire at atSpoke (acquired by Okta).
Ben, it’s well known that Camille Ricketts, then Notion’s Head of Marketing, found you through your own proactive efforts as an Ambassador before the programme ever started.
In your view, should the Community function report into Marketing or to the Chief Customer Officer?
I think that really depends on the goals of your community program. If you’re thinking mostly about distribution, it probably makes more sense to go to the marketing side. If you’re thinking more about customer support and customer adoption, it would probably make more sense to go to chief customer officer.
It really comes down to what you’re trying to achieve with the community at your company, this varies from company to company, i don’t think there's a one size fits all that makes sense for everyone.
One thing we know is that ambassadors would receive early access to products before they were GA’d - just like many leading software companies have many private previews in flight at any given time. Do you think a customer advisory board would have been additive when you already have a systematic way of getting feedback from your community?
I think they served different functions for us.
Our Ambassador program brought together our biggest advocates who would spread and teach Notion in incredible ways around the world. Some hosted gatherings, some wrote books about notion, some had youtube channels about notion, etc. ultimately they represented a subset of our most dedicated power users who had their own needs which at times would differ from our team customers.
On the community team, we did end up building what we called our Champions program which brought together our biggest “internal” advocates which differed quite a bit from the external facing Ambassadors mentioned above. These internal advocates were the ones advocating for Notion on their teams. Depending on the company size, you might have one or a handful at a company. We wanted to make sure we could funnel in their feedback which oftentimes would include a lot of the feedback they were hearing internally from their teammates as the informal representatives of notion on their teams.
Frictionless products that users can easily self-serve through to activation are naturally going to develop communities more seamlessly than complex products that need a high-touch approach to onboarding.
To this end, we see more product leaders at PLS companies own a quota for self-serve revenue - how do you advise founders of complex products to approach community building when self-serve is not an option?
I think community building can work with both types of products. There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Having a complex, non self serve product may incentivise people to look for help and guidance as they continue to learn the product. Naturally, that could be a valuable place for a community to come in.
On the other hand, it may be harder to scale a community with that friction in place. Whereas with a self serve product, depending on the complexity of the product there may be different levels of appetite to connect with people in a community. With Notion, given it was self serve but had a high level of complexity, often times people would look towards all of the community offerings to connect with others and improve their usage.
At Notion you tested and leaned into influencer marketing - what are the best incentives or rewards that you think generalise well for B2B software companies that are similarly looking to empower influencers to market their products?
With Notion there were a few reasons it worked so well:
Visual product. Easy to make videos about, fun for viewers to watch.
Lot of use cases, can apply to all kinds of influencers. We had a broad audience of influencers to partner with.
The use case of managing your Youtube channel with Notion was something creators loved, so we pushed that as much as possible to get more creators to actually use Notion. Creators actually loved the product and would be authentic/genuine about their reviews.
A lot of B2B products likely may not have any of these advantages, which can make it harder. I think its important to be open minded when it comes to this channel, try and come up with your own unfair advantage. That might mean developing something in the product to help, or going after a niche aggressively, tapping into new/under-leveraged networks, seeding creators and helping them grow with you. Most B2B companies don’t invest in influencers, so there’s so much opportunity to think out of the box here.
I wrote a whole article about this.
What emphasis would you place on asynchronous (Discord, Slack etc.) vs synchronous community building (events, meet-ups)? Notion’s ambassadors were known to host regular meetups, but of course you had groups too.
Yeah our community programs incorporated both online and offline elements.
We didn’t really prioritise one over the other, we encouraged both as much as possible. I remember early on, for the first time seeing someone hosting a notion community event on their own without any involvement from us. We thought it was incredible someone would take the time to oragnize and that people would show up. We decided to provide funding and resources to anyone who wanted to organize these to encourage even more. When it come to the online groups, we were also amazed to see people self organizing around notion and moderating growing groups of notion fans by interest or region. We did our best to support these groups and drive more people.
We always saw ourselves as “service providers” in a sense trying to add more value to our community in a bottoms up way.
Although ROI measurement for community needs to be conducted on cycles of multiple years, were there any metrics that tangibly improved in cities where Notion had particularly vibrant/dense communities? I would assume that leads became product qualified accounts faster, or team expansion was faster, owing to lower training needs?
For starters, we had a lot of challenges with data given our decentralised approach with community building. Since all of the groups people created were community-led, we didn’t have the data access to connect to our own systems. We had to create our own custom tool for tracking the growth, engagement and impact of these groups, but there were still a lot of missing pieces.
When it came to influencer marketing, it was much easier to measure and track the impact on a regional level. In my article linked above about influencer marketing, I spoke about the flywheel between influencer marketing and participation in community programs. As we would go after certain markets, this flywheel would feed itself and have a visible impact. For example, in some countries we would kick off with a few influencer partnerships, we would see someone create a local Notion group and join our Ambassador program, more local users would join the group and participate in any local events, and more influencers would hear about Notion. This was incredible to see.
For companies that are pre-PMF, when should they start investing in community, especially if they’re building a product that needs to be built slowly before it’s GA’d (and therefore you’re only building a community around a vision rather than a product users play with)? How should they start investing in community and in which ways does this overlap with content marketing?
I see building community as a creative endeavour - I don’t think there’s a one size fits all. My approach working with other companies and on my own projects has always been a mix of creativity and taking inspiration from others.
Starting off, I think you need to understand what you’re trying to achieve. That might be to attract early design partners, or to generate broad awareness for a new category you’re building, or plenty of other things. Based on that, you want to start to think about what opportunities there are to create value, bring people together and do something meaningful that will get people on board. I would talk to a lot of people in the space, prospective customers, or whoever might have an understanding of the gaps. From there, you can start to formulate your hypothesis about what makes sense to build.
I wrote a story about how we built a community for IT leaders when I worked at Spoke before having a product. We were able to get thousands of signups through this, in a crowded space.
If you could change one thing about how you scaled Notion’s community efforts, what would it be?
Stayed more focused. At times it felt like we were trying to take on too much. Like I mentioned above, we took a very bottoms up approach, or what some call “community-led” and would build our community programs around what people were already doing. We would identify themes and areas with growing interest in the community and see how we could put fuel on the fire. Sometimes that meant trying to take on too much at the same time.
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