Summary
Notes
Transcript
Good morning, and welcome to Make With Notion. This is our very first in-person conference as a company. There's a lot to share, a lot to demo, and a lot to celebrate today. Let's get started. Speaking of celebration, I just found Mary last month.
And the wedding planning process finally gave me the opportunity to convince my wife to try Notion databases. Like this wedding registry ODO, which we published through Notion Sites. But more importantly, the wedding itself was a magical experience. It brought together so many dear people to the same place at the same time. And today, and this week, it feels the same to me, but for our Notion community.
You know, we counted last night. There are people from 45 different countries in attendance today. Woo! Woo!
That's a quarter of the United Nations right here. So thank you for traveling to San Francisco and to watch this keynote online. To be with us here today. We're very grateful. Notion started 10 years ago in the spirit city of San Francisco. Here's a photo of us back then in our very first office. My hair is longer now. My team told me I had a pretty good glow up.
This is our first prototype. You can see that there's some hints of the Notion Editor today. There's drag and drop, and there are the blocks on the left. In the past 10 years, we worked really hard on this idea. And you know. And we finally shipped charts this year, so good thing takes time. Thank you for your patience.
And in the past year, we have grown a lot. Right before COVID, we crossed over 1 million users globally. And last quarter, we passed 100 million users.
It's a huge milestone. But it's never just about the numbers. Never about the numbers. What I'm most proud of is always the people. And you all know this. Today, Lushan has some of the most passionate communities around the world. From Brazil, thank you, to Japan, to Nigeria, and this from Dublin last month.
Okay, and this is from Dublin last month. In so many ways, notion no longer belongs to us, but it belongs to you. You shape it. You make Notion your own. That's why on our billboard, we have this tagline, think it, make it. And that's why we make this very conference make with Notion.
Because we want you to make Notion your own. I'll share a couple of my favorite examples from our community and how people are making Notion their own. Earlier this month, these two gentlemen visited our office and they told us they're from Thailand and they're part of the monastery and they run everything on Notion.
From their meditation schedule, to manage their chores, to publish their writings online with Notion sites. Notion is everything. The everything tool for them. So, if you had told me years ago that one day Notion will help run a monastery in Thailand using AI, I would think, oh, you're crazy. Here's another example.
We all know Toyota is the number one car manufacturer in the world, right, by volume and sales. And they're known for their durable quality, thanks to a production method they invented back then called Kanban. And today, Toyota is an Ocean customer. And it stored the knowledge based on Notion, and their research team used Notion Kanban board to manage the project. So we're pretty proud to provide Kanban boards to the inventor of Kanban. So not too shabby.
Of course, Notion is not just for monks, not just for enterprise customers like Toyota. Today, we power many of the fastest-growing companies in tech and AI, like Figma and OpenAI. We also love that so many founders trust Notion and start their companies on Notion, like nearly half the Y Combinator companies.
And this is my favorite. In the past year, some creators in our community are now making over a million dollars a year, each selling Notion templates or doing Notion consultancy. It's truly a testament of our product and of our community here. But in our heart, no shit really hasn't changed. This is our first investor, Pitch Deck. And undercover,
I borrowed a quote from Marshall McLuhan. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. It's still our point of view today. We draw our inspiration from pioneers of our field. Back in the 1970s, these computer pioneers imagined a world where software can augment human intellect, where people can modify the tool, modify the software they use, just like a bicycle for our minds. I still remember during college reading papers published by these computer pioneers and feeling their sense of optimism and empowerment.
I still believe then. I still believe now. This is the most important thing I can work on as a software programmer. To give other people the creative freedom to shape their own tools. But somehow, somewhere along the way, as computers became more commonplace in the 80s and 90s, the world forgot the vision from those computer pioneers. Software became more rigid.
And something that only programmers can modify. And as software moved on to the cloud in the past 15 years, things got worse. There are even more tools, more silos, more rigid EM sprawling. So today, if you're an average company, you have to use more than 88 tools to run your business. It's hard to find anything you can waste so much time context switching. And the costs from those tools add up quickly.
And with more AI tools coming onto the market, it's getting even more confusing, and more expensive. In notion, this is exactly the problem we want to solve. And we take it very personally. Because we believe software should be creative. Software should be beautiful. Software should be soft, malleable, and adaptable to how you think, not the other way around. So how do we, you know, solve this problem of the software sprawling problem for you all today?
Well, our insight lies in our favorite toy growing up, Legos. Now, raise your hand if you played Legos growing up. Wow, okay. So y'all know what they are? Our insight is, most software is made from the same common building block. They all have text, text editing. They all have database. They all have views. They all have chart automation.
So, why don't we just deconstruct software back to those common building blocks, make them as friendly as Legos, so our end-users can build whatever tools they want without needing to code. Because our end-users tend to be the domain experts. They usually can create better tools than we can. And LEGO did exactly this in the toy industry. On one end, LEGO can build toy cars. And on the other end, LEGOs can build Barbie dolls.
All share the same bricks. And because they all share the same bricks, they're all connected by default. No silos. And it can grow with you and offer great value for your money.
But most importantly, LEGOs are creative. LEGOs are beautiful. Because they are yours. You made them your own. They can be as unique as your personality, as complex as your personality. That's your business name. And when your tools are tailor-made and all connected in one place, it will help you move faster, think better, and unlock your potential for whatever you do.
So, I hope this gives you a sense of our mission and notion, and why we exist as a company. Because we want to help you to build beautiful tools for your life's work. We want the world to know that notion is first and foremost for people who build, for people who care, for the entrepreneurs and leaders who want to make changes in their organizations, and for creators like you in the audience today.
So with this frame of mind, let me introduce my co-founder Ache to talk about the new building blocks we're launching today. Here's Ache.
Thank you, Ivan. And so wonderful to be here with all of you today. Thank you. I'm Akshay Kothari, and I am the owner of supporting our product teams here at Notion. We have some really exciting new things to share with you today. And a lot of what I'm going to be talking about and what we're going to be releasing today is very much inspired by your feedback and your requests. So thank you for all of that. We're going to be covering these three areas in product.
We're going to be releasing brand new building blocks that you get to play with. We'll introduce new workflows that you get to build with these blocks. And then finally, we'll introduce new ways to share your creations with the rest of the world. And to make things exciting.
We're going to walk through all of these through live demos. But let me set the stage with a problem that we are facing as a company today. Notion today is 800 people across seven different offices around the world. And every month we have some new employees who join us. And as is normal, these new folks have simple questions. Someone is having a Wi-Fi issue? Someone needs an urgent legal review of a contract? Or someone just has a simple question of benefits?
So like every other company, what we did is we spun up a bunch of Slack channels. We asked people to ask questions. And they do, as you can see from the screenshot. But if I'm being honest, it feels a bit chaotic. It feels very unorganized. So what we're going to do today is on stage here with all of you, we're going to use our building blocks, and we're going to create a Nutino help desk. That is not a typo.
Notino is what we use as a word for Notion employees. And we're going to use Notion to build a help desk so that Notinos can ask questions. And the teams that get these questions can see it in an organized way. Sounds fun? All right. So to build this help desk, we are currently, today's notion is missing a fundamental building block. Any guesses what that might be?
It's been in the making for so long, and I'm so excited to share that we're launching forms today.
And to tell you more, here's Sachi.
Hi, everybody. I'm Sachi, and I'm on the forums team. We've been hard at work these last few months, and I'm so excited to share more about what we're launching today. Notion is already a great place to organize your information and share it with others, but there's a pretty important piece of this workflow that's been missing.
And that's collecting information, which is pretty manual and tedious in Notion today. Many other apps and workarounds have sprung up to fill this need, everything from third-party form integrations and CSV export to some people resorting to just manually copying and pasting their data in order to get it into Notion.
So we set out to build a better experience with forms, one that makes it super easy to create and share a form to collect the information that you need. And then, when you have that information in Notion, you can filter, sort, analyze, and take action on it all from one place.
Here are a few examples of what you might use forms in Notion for. At work, forms are a great way to standardize requests for your internal teams, like this social request form made by our social media team. Or for your next project, you can send out a form to collect user feedback, and then take action on it right from a Notion database.
Say you're having a Halloween party. You could already plan your event in Notion. Now you can even send out a form to collect RSVPs. Don't ghost your friends. Let's take a deeper dive and check out forms together.
Like Akshay introduced, today we're going to be building Notion's brand-new help desk where employees can receive support. Something a bit more organized than just shouting into the slack void and hoping that you got a response. Our help desk is going to use a form to submit tickets which can then be triaged by our internal team.
I've already taken a first pass at creating our form, but let's add some final touches together. Here's where we can modify our questions. We support question types like text, multiple choice, images. But if you're adding a form to an existing database, it'll automatically suggest questions based on your database's properties.
Let's add a question for what office an employee is working from. And we can see that all of the options get pre-populated right from that property, and these are actually all of Notion's offices worldwide. You can also click on a question in order to customize it.
For this first, what do you need help with question, I'll make this required so that people have to answer this before they're able to submit the form. The rest of the questions look pretty good. We ask about how urgent their request is. We give them space to upload any attachments. But then for our final notes question, I can add a helpful description and provide support for longer answers here.
Currently, our Help Desk form is only shared internally with members of this workspace, which works perfectly for this use case. If I wanted to, though, I could actually publish this to the web so that anyone in the world was able to submit. I can also preview what my form is going to look like for those submitting.
And that looks pretty good. You can see that we're automatically collecting who is submitting our forms here, which also works great for our help desk. If I needed to, though, I could also make the form anonymous. This looks pretty good, so I think we can share it out.
Once we share out our form and we start receiving submissions, you can see all of the tickets that are getting created right here in this database itself. So employees have already been submitting a bunch of tickets. Some of them, you know, facilities is going to look at, IT, HR. It looks like we have this pretty unfortunate ticket that just got created by Larry. It seems like their dog used their laptop as a chew toy.
Hopefully we can get this resolved for Larry today. This seems kind of urgent. Here we have the full power of Notion databases. I can filter down my data. I can set up an automation to receive a notification when someone creates a new ticket. And I can visualize my data with a chart. So I just created this super basic chart to see the spread of tickets across all of our internal teams. But the possibilities here are pretty endless. So that's our help desk. And it's all made possible by Forms.
I'm super excited to see what you all do with forms next. They're fully integrated with the rest of Notion, which means your workflows require one fewer tool. They're super easy to build and easy to share. I do think our help desk could be a little bit more beautiful and maybe more customized for our use case.
And I think Tyler can help us with that. Here he is to tell you more.
Hey everyone, I'm Tyler from the design team, and I'm super excited to share with you something we've been working on this year. Layouts. With layouts, you can take customization to a new level in Notion. We think that it's going to be able to give you so many more opportunities to use Notion for whatever different use case you have.
Now, here's an example from one of our internal task databases. This is a task page that started off just by tracking a few properties. But, and I'm sure this has happened to a lot of you, things got a little overwhelming. Here's another example from my personal notion.
This is a recipe from a cookbook database I used to organize all of my recipes. Recently I've been using AI properties to estimate prep time, baking time, and even generate a grocery list for me, automatically. It's been working pretty well, but there are some things I wish I could change, like being able to see these photos in a bit greater detail.