It was an ambitious goal, and they needed to nail the user experience. We’re a tool that solves people’s daily problems. They wanted people to customize technology to solve their own problems. 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. 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 suddenly popped to the top of our most active user list-spending upwards of 18+ hours a day in our design tool. It was around that time we noticed Ivan in Figma. “Neither of us spoke Japanese and nobody there spoke English, so all we did was code in our underwear all day,” Ivan says. So they sublet their San Francisco office and moved to a cheaper city where they could focus: Kyoto. “If you looked at the burn rate, we all would’ve died together,” Ivan says. Their angel investment money dwindling, they faced a brutal choice: Fire their fledgling team of 4 and start over, or run out of cash. Its founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, had built their app on a suboptimal tech stack, and it crashed constantly. In 2015, productivity tool Notion nearly died.
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