Notion worked with hundreds of accelerators and incubators two years ago to give their portfolio firms free credits for its work collaboration platform. The company is now actively promoting the program to all startups.
Notion is introducing a new startup initiative on Tuesday that will give any startup in the world a $500 credit to sample their product for free, regardless of its size or funding position. The credit might give startups free access to Notion’s premium offerings for up to a year — if not longer — depending on the size of their staff.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Akshay Kothari, the startup’s chief operating officer, claimed that when the program was first created, the goal was to “ensure that entrepreneurs all over the world used Notion.”
In the last two years, the work collaboration platform has seen a significant transformation. The firm, which was recently valued at $2 billion, has emerged as the productivity suite of choice for numerous startups (including Figma, Substack, Modern Health, Mixpanel, Buffer, and Headspace), as well as engineers, creatives, and designers.
According to the company, the number of companies using Notion has increased by fourfold in the last year as firms around the world adopt remote working. Notion workspaces are used by more than half of the firms in Y Combinator’s most recent batch, 90 of Forbes’ Cloud 100 companies, and roughly 28% of Crunchbase-listed startups that have received more than $1 million. Even company founders in India — a sector Notion has admittedly not paid much attention to — are increasingly sharing their Notion-created and stored pitch decks with potential investors.
Many people use Notion to make announcements, as well as to take and share notes with their teams on Notion pages. Notion is also building new templates to minimize friction from such use cases, according to Kothari, as part of the new push. It’s also releasing a “startup starter bundle,” which will include guidelines, lessons, livestream possibilities, customer tales, and commonly asked questions.
He stated, “Our goal is to get to a stage where a Notion is a tool that every startup in the world uses without even thinking about it.”
To achieve that kind of scalability, Notion has partnered with two infrastructure behemoths that are well-liked by startups: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Stripe. According to Kothari, the two companies will now offer Notion’s premium offerings to hundreds of thousands of businesses in their programs, up to a set credit limit.
“We believe Notion can become the information infrastructure with them,” he said, referring to how important AWS and Stripe have become to companies. “Now that we’ve launched this, we’ll keep looking for new ways to collaborate.”
