Community as an Economy
Help your fans make a living from your product and their income becomes your distribution
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 88%
The deepest form of community lock-in is economic: instead of merely rewarding advocates, actively help them build revenue-generating businesses on top of your product — template shops, courses, consultancies, influencer channels. Their livelihood then depends on your ubiquity, and the consultants they become quietly staff your enterprise motion.
Origin
Camille Ricketts' account of how Notion's ambassador community evolved into a template and consulting economy, with the pattern generalised from Salesforce's implementation-partner layer.
Core principles
- 01Align your goals with theirs — find out what reward each member actually wants and help them get it.
- 02Economic dependence is the strongest possible evangelism incentive, and it is voluntary rather than bought.
- 03The consumer-side creator economy and the enterprise sales motion are the same pipeline: today's template seller is tomorrow's implementation consultant.
- 04Start early, because these routes take years to nurture and members won't see them for themselves at first.
How to run it
- 1
Ask each member what reward they're chasing
Members want different things — some want revenue, some want an audience, some just want to host events. Map the routes available and align your support with the outcome each individual wants for themselves.
Watch out Do not assume everyone wants to monetise; forcing commerce onto people who wanted a hobby kills the vibe.
- 2
Build the enablement layer
Produce guides and how-to material, counsel people one-on-one, and remove friction from the paths to making money — selling templates, running courses, consulting.
- 3
Connect the operators to each other
Introduce people running similar businesses so they can help each other. The peer network compounds faster than any support you can personally give.
Pro tip This is the same force multiplier that makes ambassadors discover template-building from each other rather than from your marketing.
- 4
Promote them into the market
Actively promote the consultants and creators who want to be out there helping customers succeed, and let their surfaces (Product Hunt launches, subreddits, Facebook groups, external communities) do the discovery work.
Pro tip Notion opened a channel specifically for members who wanted to run communities external to Notion's own — the Vietnam Facebook group hit ~250,000 people and the subreddit ~210,000.
- 5
Defer monetising the ecosystem
Weigh ubiquity against revenue-now. Companies that were wildly successful from the start pushed off monetising every little thing when doing so would damp the enthusiasm to share. Once you have that tide of people legitimising you, monetisation options multiply.
Watch out Taxing your creator economy before it is a tide is how you get neither the tide nor the revenue.
In the wild
Around mid-2021 Notion heard of a creator who had made about $35,000 in four months selling a single template. Rather than treating that as a curiosity, Notion built guides, connections, and promotion around the template business.
→ That became a common story from that point on; some ambassadors approached ~$1M in business, and today's Notion consultants employ dozens of people each.
The consultants who first came up through Notion's community started implementing Notion inside companies of all sizes — a layer of expertise Notion never had to hire.
→ Many companies now rely on those community-grown consultants, directly supporting Notion's move up-market into the enterprise.
Common mistakes
Waiting until the community is large to enable monetisation
The routes to making money take time to nurture, and early members won't imagine them on their own. If you start late, you never get the compounding cohort of operators whose income depends on you.
Monetising the enthusiasm too early
Charging for or taxing every part of the ecosystem puts a damper on the very enthusiasm and momentum that produce sharing — and there is always opportunity to monetise later once you have ubiquity.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product-led companies whose users build reusable artifacts, where a creator or consultant layer could plausibly make a living on top of the product
Not ideal for
Products with no extensibility or configuration surface — there is nothing for an outside expert to sell
From the transcript
“I remember really early on, probably like mid-2021, we heard of one creator who had made like $35,000 in 4 months selling one template.”
“Like so many companies now of many sizes are relying on the consultants that first came up through our community. And some of those consultants…”
“So all of our efforts there are like around building guides or counseling people one-on-one or making it easier for them to to actually achieve…”
“they're people who have pushed off maybe monetizing every little thing if it's going to really put a damper on that type of enthusiasm and…”
From the episode
How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business
Camille Ricketts (Notion, First Round Capital)