Much has been said about Figma’s astounding growth from $0 to $400M+ ARR in <5 years. In addition to being tough to build, developing a successful GTM motion took time and patience. Leadership was adamant that the product and pricing tiers be feature-complete before charging the customer. Product obsession and patience were ingrained in the cult

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Notion is a philosophical descendent of HyperCard (turns out you can even buy a third-party HyperCard-themed Notion template) that offers extremely adaptable information structures built from an alphabet of ‘content blocks’. It’s also worth $10 billion and has 30 million users. I used it to create the first bidirectionally linked note-taking system... See more

In San Francisco, while Zhao still believed he was right about his grand vision, he realized he was wrong about his market. It was a crucible moment. The first version of Notion was a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. Disappointingly for the co-founders, it turned out, even if they were Last’s and Zhao’s actual friends, non-cod... See more

Needless to say, competing in the “newsletter” category made life easier. It wasn't perfect: most of the writers we acquired this way did not start paid subscription newsletters, and we generated no revenue off them. But still, it was absolutely worth it. The “newsletter” positioning served as a wedge, and generated a viral distribution loop where ... See more