The Ambassador Program Blueprint
Recruit the already-vocal, pay them in access not cash, and grow the cohort deliberately slowly
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 93%
Notion's ambassador program started with 20 people and became one of the company's most powerful growth engines. The blueprint: treat member selection exactly like a positioning exercise (find your best-fit users), keep the relationship non-transactional by paying in early access and proprietary attention, promote members' work rather than your own, and cap intake so the group never feels like an auditorium.
Origin
Designed at Notion in 2019 by Camille Ricketts with Ben Lang, Notion's head of community, whom she credits as the mastermind. The selection step borrows explicitly from April Dunford's positioning method (Obviously Awesome), which Ricketts names as her top book recommendation.
Core principles
- 01Ambassadors are not paid promoters — they are people who already love building and sharing, whom you make more effective.
- 02The best incentive is not money; it is feeling seen, heard, and given proprietary access.
- 03The community's value eventually comes from member-to-member bonds, not from your one-to-one relationship with each member.
- 04Growth rate is a design decision, not an outcome.
How to run it
- 1
Select like you're doing positioning
The first step of any positioning exercise is asking who your best-fit customers are — the ones who really get it, pay you more, and already talk about you organically. Apply the same filter to community: scan social platforms and invite the people who are already the most vocal and expressive about their experience with the product.
Pro tip Notion's initial base was just 20 people, chosen because they were already the loudest on Twitter and a couple of other platforms.
Watch out Do not recruit for reach. Recruit for the shared quality of wanting to be vocal and expressive.
- 2
Build the incentive stack out of access, not money
Give previews of unreleased features and route their feedback to the product team so they feel genuinely heard. Run AMAs and closed conversations with founders and senior engineers so the space feels proprietary. Subsidise the events they want to throw.
Pro tip Founder participation is disproportionately motivating — Ivan, Simon, Akshay, and the head of engineering all showed up for these sessions at Notion.
Watch out The moment it feels transactional, the non-transactional magic that makes ambassadors evangelise is gone.
- 3
Point your megaphone at them, not at you
Use the company's own social channels to put the creations of community members front and center rather than talking about what the company is up to.
- 4
Meter the intake
Add a light application process — its purpose is to gauge interest, not to gatekeep — and induct a fixed cohort at a fixed cadence. Notion inducted about 20 people at a time, once a month, so existing members had time to welcome each new group.
Pro tip Make every new cohort introduce themselves and say how the product changed their life; the ritual is what turns a roster into a family.
Watch out A community of 5,000 ambassadors looks impressive on a website but goes silent — people feel like they're speaking to an auditorium and lose any sense of who else is in the room.
- 5
Design around what members actually say they want
Do not arrive with preconceived notions of what programs and interactions the community needs. Spend the hours on one-on-one and small-group Zoom calls asking why they're here, why they like participating, and what would make it better — then follow their lead. Split the group into interest channels (events, templates) rather than forcing one uniform experience.
Pro tip Report the community's activity back into all-hands and internal Slack every month; it rallies the whole company and clarifies who you're building for.
Watch out A one-size-fits-all community experience is the default failure mode of company-run communities.
- 6
Host where they already are
Put the community inside the tool your members already live in all day (Notion used Slack) rather than a bespoke destination they would have to make a point of visiting.
Pro tip The unread badge on an app they already have open is a growth feature; a new site has to be 10x better to earn a habit change.
In the wild
Notion picked its 20 loudest existing fans in 2019, gave them feature previews, founder AMAs, event subsidies, and social promotion, then inducted new cohorts of ~20 a month while splitting the Slack into interest-based channels.
→ The program became a three-person team running ambassadors worldwide, roughly 30 member-hosted in-person events a month, and relationships with hubs like Station F in Paris.
Lenny gates his Slack community behind a paid newsletter subscription — not for the revenue but because willingness to pay filters for people serious about self-improvement, which slows growth.
→ About 10,000 members with a healthy conversational quality, confirming Ricketts' claim that slowing growth is a feature, not a cost.
Common mistakes
Optimising for headcount
Growing to thousands of ambassadors fast produces a muted community. Conversation dies when members can't sense who is in the room with them.
Making it transactional
Paying ambassadors to promote you converts intrinsic evangelism into contract work and destroys the authenticity that made them worth recruiting.
Prescribing the community's shape up front
Deciding in advance what programs and interactions the community will have, instead of interviewing members, produces a community nobody wants to show up to.
Is it for you?
Best for
A first community or marketing hire at a post-PMF prosumer product with visible organic fans already posting about the product
Not ideal for
Companies with no existing organic advocacy — there is no one vocal to recruit, so fix product love first
From the transcript
“Cuz I think the best first step for any positioning exercise is to think who are our best fit customers.”
“program which started back in 2019 was just 20 people and they were the 20 people who we happened to see be the most vocal…”
“there actually is an application process for joining the ambassadors. It's a very light application process and it really is just so that we know…”
“if you grow to something like, you know, oh, we have 5,000 ambassadors which feels like really good to say like on a website, the…”
“he spent a ton of time just on Zoom, having conversations, one-on-one conversations, like semi-small group conversations”
“not necessarily coming in with preconceived notions about what a community needs to look like.”
From the episode
How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business
Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital)