The Atomic Unit of Sharing Test
Decide whether community-led growth will work for you before spending a dollar on it
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
A qualification test for whether community is a real growth lever for your product or a vanity project. The core question is whether your product produces an artifact that users want to show off because it says something flattering about them — Ricketts calls this the 'atomic unit of sharing'. If it exists, community compounds; if your motion is long-cycle, high-price, sales-led, community is not your first bet.
Origin
Coined and articulated by Camille Ricketts, first marketing hire at Notion (employee #11), from building Notion's community motion alongside head of community Ben Lang. She names Figma and Canva as products with the same property.
Core principles
- 01Community-led growth is really a discovery engine — ubiquity and name recognition that de-risks you as a purchase, especially when moving up-market into enterprise.
- 02The shareable artifact must be self-expressive: showing it proves the sharer is organised, creative, or expert.
- 03Freemium/product-led motions convert community into revenue; sales-led, high-touch motions do not.
- 04Discovery beats awareness — the goal is people with intent to find out more, not people who have merely heard the name.
How to run it
- 1
Name your atomic unit of sharing
Identify the specific artifact your product lets a user create and want to publish: a Notion template, a Figma file, a Canva design. If you cannot name one concrete object users make and voluntarily show to strangers, you fail the test.
Pro tip Test the self-expression angle: does sharing it make the sharer look competent, organised, or creative? That vanity payload is the fuel.
Watch out An artifact users create but never want anyone else to see (an internal report, a payroll run) is not an atomic unit of sharing.
- 2
Check your sales motion against the disqualifiers
If you have a long sales cycle or a high price point requiring many touch points before a buy decision, community should not be your number one investment. Freemium and prosumer motions pass; enterprise-only sales-led cultures do not.
Watch out Even a disqualified company can run a community — just not this form of it. See the two-by-two matrix framework.
- 3
Pick discovery, not awareness, as the objective
Define success as people taking the deliberate step of learning more, not passive exposure. At Notion the operating metric was month-over-month net new visitors to the website — people who had never been there before, motivated enough to come and learn about the product.
Pro tip Own that metric on the brand team so community, content, and influencer work all roll up to one number.
- 4
Deliberately delay hard measurement
In the early phase do not make metrics the be-all end-all. Watch qualitative signals instead — organic geographic expansion, how people report discovering you in surveys, unprompted social chatter — and only formalise measurement once the motion is obviously working.
Pro tip Instrument the parts that are trivially attributable (influencer/sponsored content links, event attendance reports from community hosts) so you have some hard numbers without distorting the whole program.
Watch out Demanding ROI proof in month one is how you cut a compounding channel off at the knees.
In the wild
Notion users built templates and workspaces and were eager to show them off — the act of sharing signalled that the sharer was organised and fluent with the tool. Notion leaned into that instead of the product surface itself, and the templates ecosystem became the visible face of the product across Twitter, Reddit, and Product Hunt.
→ Ubiquity that de-risked Notion as an enterprise purchase and helped carry the company to a ~$10B valuation with roughly 400 employees.
Stripe's core payments product had no obvious shareable artifact, so with Stripe Atlas they convened their core demographic — founders doing the zero-to-one journey — around knowledge and resources rather than around the product itself.
→ A large founder audience cultivated adjacent to the core mission, showing that companies failing the artifact test can still build community around a knowledge asset.
Common mistakes
Copying community-led growth because it's buzzy
Community is aspirational for every PLG company on Twitter, but it is not right for every company. Running it without the atomic unit of sharing or a freemium motion burns budget with no compounding effect.
Killing the program because it doesn't yet show ROI
Ricketts calls this one of the worst things you can do. Community output is discovery, which lags and attributes poorly early on; forcing early ROI proof kills the organic fervor that makes it work.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and first marketing hires at freemium or prosumer software companies whose users create visible artifacts and who need organic growth because paid acquisition is out of reach
Not ideal for
Sales-led enterprise products with long cycles and high price points, where community should not be the first growth investment
From the transcript
“Certainly for freemium products, I think for a lot of them, especially if they have what I'm going to call the atomic unit of sharing,…”
“I think that community lends itself particularly well if you have something that your product creates that people want to share because it exhibits something…”
“Definitely I think if you have a long sales cycle or a high price point where there has to be many, many, many touch points…”
“And the one that I found to be the most instructive was net new visitors to the Notion website.”
“one of my number one recommendations for anybody who suspects the community could be a big growth driver is to not make metrics the be-all…”
From the episode
How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business
Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital)