In 2015, productivity tool Notion nearly died. Its founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, had built their app on a suboptimal tech stack, and it crashed

Design on a deadline: How Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure

submited by
Style Pass
2021-06-17 15:30:06

In 2015, productivity tool Notion nearly died. Its founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, had built their app on a suboptimal tech stack, and it crashed constantly. Their angel investment money dwindling, they faced a brutal choice: Fire their fledgling team of 4 and start over, or run out of cash. “If you looked at the burn rate, we all would’ve died together,” Ivan says. “It wasn’t much of a choice.”

So they sublet their San Francisco office and moved to a cheaper city where they could focus: Kyoto. “Neither of us spoke Japanese and nobody there spoke English, so all we did was code in our underwear all day,” Ivan says.

It was around that time we noticed Ivan in Figma. He suddenly popped to the top of our most active user list — spending upwards of 18+ hours a day in our design tool. As we’d later find out, he was designing frenetically and barely sleeping, pumping out version after version of a new app that would become Notion 1.0.

He and Simon set out to rebuild Notion from scratch, keeping the same mission: Give non-techies the ability to make their own tools without writing code. They wanted people to customize technology to solve their own problems.

Leave a Comment