More than a decade ago, in 2011, a young artist Ivan Zhao graduated from one of the top Canadian universities: the University of British Columbia. As a self-taught programmer from a young age, Ivan opted not to get a formal education in programming, choosing to study cognitive science (with a minor in photography) instead. But soon after graduating, Ivan found himself on a 1-page portfolio websites creation spree. Being the only geek in a circle of fashion designers, artists, and creators, he was expected to put his technical talent in the group's service. Sick of creating 1-page websites, Ivan set his sights on building powerful software that would replace this agonizing task of churning out 1-page websites for his friends. Ivan quit his job at the digital publishing company, Inkling, and teamed up with Toby Schachman to pursue this mission. Toby, at the time, had just finished his Master's at NYU, where he published his entire thesis on visual programming. In 2013, they raised some Seed money and were onto the races. Along the journey, they added one more person to the team: Simon Last. The trio set out to build the first experiment to validate the hypothesis of creating a plug-and-play tool to create software.

One of the first prototypes they built was Concept. Concept made it easy for people to collaborate live on building web pages. The team was Chris Prucha and Jessica Lam the creators behind SugarBox. The problem with Sugarbox, or Concept or the vision of democratizing programming for creative people, was that it was not rooted in any immediate frequent problem that the very same people they targetted (non-programmers) faced. The work on Notion started in late 2013/early 2014. But, by early 2015 the project was still held at a standstill. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy with nothing to show for all the teams hard work. Simon & Ivan made the hard decision to part ways with Chris & Jessica. The duo then moved to Kyoto, Japan, to rebuild the entire application from the ground up. The move to Japan + slimming down the team gave them some runway to give Notion a fighting chance to make it out into the real world.

In March 2016, almost a year after they hit the reset button on building Notion, Ivan & Simon launched the product on Product Hunt. The launch ended up being to be one most successful ones in 2016! Thousands of people flocked to the Notion website to sign up and try this new product.

Ali Abouelatta • ✨Notion