Font -- Funnel
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.”
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.
It was an ambitious goal, and they needed to nail the user experience. During their year of reckoning, they developed a unique design process to help them do that—from tag-teaming design challenges, to brainstorming endless permutations of a user flow. These tactics played a crucial role in turning the company around and became the secret sauce of their product when they relaunched. (Check out today’s news in The Verge about Notion taking on Evernote.)
We sat down with Ivan to get the full back story on the company’s pivot (which they've never talked about publicly before), and the role design played in saving the product.
There’s a lot of ways to build a customizable software tool. In the first go-round—Notion beta—Ivan and Simon made a programming application that was easy to use even if someone didn’t know how to code. It turned out, people weren’t interested in that.
Font -- Jersey 20
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.”
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.
It was an ambitious goal, and they needed to nail the user experience. During their year of reckoning, they developed a unique design process to help them do that—from tag-teaming design challenges, to brainstorming endless permutations of a user flow. These tactics played a crucial role in turning the company around and became the secret sauce of their product when they relaunched. (Check out today’s news in The Verge about Notion taking on Evernote.)
We sat down with Ivan to get the full back story on the company’s pivot (which they've never talked about publicly before), and the role design played in saving the product.
There’s a lot of ways to build a customizable software tool. In the first go-round—Notion beta—Ivan and Simon made a programming application that was easy to use even if someone didn’t know how to code. It turned out, people weren’t interested in that.
Font -- Nova
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.”
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.
It was an ambitious goal, and they needed to nail the user experience. During their year of reckoning, they developed a unique design process to help them do that—from tag-teaming design challenges, to brainstorming endless permutations of a user flow. These tactics played a crucial role in turning the company around and became the secret sauce of their product when they relaunched. (Check out today’s news in The Verge about Notion taking on Evernote.)
We sat down with Ivan to get the full back story on the company’s pivot (which they've never talked about publicly before), and the role design played in saving the product.
There’s a lot of ways to build a customizable software tool. In the first go-round—Notion beta—Ivan and Simon made a programming application that was easy to use even if someone didn’t know how to code. It turned out, people weren’t interested in that.
Font -- Geo
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.”
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.
It was an ambitious goal, and they needed to nail the user experience. During their year of reckoning, they developed a unique design process to help them do that—from tag-teaming design challenges, to brainstorming endless permutations of a user flow. These tactics played a crucial role in turning the company around and became the secret sauce of their product when they relaunched. (Check out today’s news in The Verge about Notion taking on Evernote.)
We sat down with Ivan to get the full back story on the company’s pivot (which they've never talked about publicly before), and the role design played in saving the product.
There’s a lot of ways to build a customizable software tool. In the first go-round—Notion beta—Ivan and Simon made a programming application that was easy to use even if someone didn’t know how to code. It turned out, people weren’t interested in that.
Font -- Metro / Centered
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.”
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.
It was an ambitious goal, and they needed to nail the user experience. During their year of reckoning, they developed a unique design process to help them do that—from tag-teaming design challenges, to brainstorming endless permutations of a user flow. These tactics played a crucial role in turning the company around and became the secret sauce of their product when they relaunched. (Check out today’s news in The Verge about Notion taking on Evernote.)
We sat down with Ivan to get the full back story on the company’s pivot (which they've never talked about publicly before), and the role design played in saving the product.
There’s a lot of ways to build a customizable software tool. In the first go-round—Notion beta—Ivan and Simon made a programming application that was easy to use even if someone didn’t know how to code. It turned out, people weren’t interested in that.
Font -- Teko / Larger then Headings
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.”
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.
It was an ambitious goal, and they needed to nail the user experience. During their year of reckoning, they developed a unique design process to help them do that—from tag-teaming design challenges, to brainstorming endless permutations of a user flow. These tactics played a crucial role in turning the company around and became the secret sauce of their product when they relaunched. (Check out today’s news in The Verge about Notion taking on Evernote.)
We sat down with Ivan to get the full back story on the company’s pivot (which they've never talked about publicly before), and the role design played in saving the product.
There’s a lot of ways to build a customizable software tool. In the first go-round—Notion beta—Ivan and Simon made a programming application that was easy to use even if someone didn’t know how to code. It turned out, people weren’t interested in that.
Font -- Funnel / Gradient Color
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.”
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.
It was an ambitious goal, and they needed to nail the user experience. During their year of reckoning, they developed a unique design process to help them do that—from tag-teaming design challenges, to brainstorming endless permutations of a user flow. These tactics played a crucial role in turning the company around and became the secret sauce of their product when they relaunched. (Check out today’s news in The Verge about Notion taking on Evernote.)
We sat down with Ivan to get the full back story on the company’s pivot (which they've never talked about publicly before), and the role design played in saving the product.
There’s a lot of ways to build a customizable software tool. In the first go-round—Notion beta—Ivan and Simon made a programming application that was easy to use even if someone didn’t know how to code. It turned out, people weren’t interested in that.
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.”
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.
It was an ambitious goal, and they needed to nail the user experience. During their year of reckoning, they developed a unique design process to help them do that—from tag-teaming design challenges, to brainstorming endless permutations of a user flow. These tactics played a crucial role in turning the company around and became the secret sauce of their product when they relaunched. (Check out today’s news in The Verge about Notion taking on Evernote.)
We sat down with Ivan to get the full back story on the company’s pivot (which they've never talked about publicly before), and the role design played in saving the product.
There’s a lot of ways to build a customizable software tool. In the first go-round—Notion beta—Ivan and Simon made a programming application that was easy to use even if someone didn’t know how to code. It turned out, people weren’t interested in that.
