Marginally Better S01E16: The Community Currency

A productivity app on the brink of collapse rebuilt itself in a small apartment in Kyoto—and a decade later became an $11 billion company with 100 million users. What changed? Not the product alone, but the people around it.

In this episode of Marginally Better, Joe Taylor, Jr. explores the rise of community as currency—why companies like Notion, Figma, and Discord are growing without massive marketing budgets, while others spend billions trying (and failing) to manufacture connection. It’s a deep dive into what real community looks like, why it can’t be forced, and how businesses can create the conditions for customers to become something more: collaborators, advocates, and builders.

Episode Links:

Transcript:

A productivity app nearly went bankrupt in 2015. Two guys. No customers. Weeks away from shutting down. They moved to Kyoto, Japan, and rebuilt the thing from scratch in a rented apartment.

Ten years later, that app has a hundred million users and an eleven billion dollar valuation. And they got there with almost no advertising budget.

The company is Notion. And the thing that saved them wasn’t a feature. It wasn’t a pivot. It was a thousand strangers on the internet who loved the product so much they started selling it for free.
Today on Marginally Better, we’re talking about community as currency — why the companies spending the least on marketing are growing the fastest. Why Meta just burned through seventy-three billion dollars trying to build community from the top down and failed. And what a knitting website with eleven million users can teach you about customer loyalty that no Super Bowl ad ever will.

That’s all coming up, after the break, on Marginally Better.

Announcer: From the global headquarters of Johns and Taylor in beautiful New Jersey, it’s

Marginally Better. Here’s your host, Joe Taylor, Jr.

Joe Taylor, Jr: Welcome to Marginally Better, a show about business, innovation, and the American economy. I’m Joe Taylor Jr.

Something shifted in how businesses grow. And if you’re still measuring your success by follower counts and ad impressions, you’re measuring the wrong thing.

Story 1: The Seventy-Three Billion Dollar Misunderstanding
Let’s start with the most expensive mistake in corporate history. Meta — the company formerly known as Facebook — has now lost more than seventy-three billion dollars on its Reality Labs division. That’s according to reporting from TechCrunch and CNBC, which tracked the losses through Q4 of 2025. Nineteen billion in 2025 alone. And Mark Zuckerberg told investors to expect more of the same in 2026.

The bet was that people wanted to strap screens to their faces and attend meetings as cartoon avatars. They didn’t. What Meta built was a platform. What people wanted was a place. Those aren’t the same thing.

And here’s the kicker: Meta is now cutting up to thirty percent of Reality Labs’ budget and pivoting to AI-powered smart glasses. Bloomberg reported on the restructuring in December. A thousand people lost their jobs. The metaverse didn’t die — it just turned out nobody was living there.

Story 2: The Figma Flip
Now here’s the opposite story. Figma — the design tool — built something their community wanted so badly that the community started building it for them.
First Round Review published a detailed breakdown of Figma’s community-led growth strategy. The short version: Figma opened a plugin marketplace and a template gallery where anyone could publish their own tools. Thousands of new resources show up every day. And here’s the part that should make product managers lose sleep — Community Inc’s analysis found that community-driven feature requests and plugin development are now outpacing Figma’s own internal R&D cycles. The users are building the product faster than the company.
People who download a template have higher activation rates, lower acquisition costs, and stronger retention. Each template is also a web page indexed by Google. So the community isn’t just building features. They’re doing Figma’s marketing and SEO for free.

Story 3: The Discord Migration
Discord — originally a voice chat app for gamers — now has two hundred and fifty-nine million monthly active users, according to DemandSage’s 2026 statistics report. But the real number is this one: more than fifty-five percent of those users identify as non-gamers.
Startups are running customer support through Discord channels. Small businesses are using it as a real-time focus group. AI communities have made it their home base. The platform that was built for people coordinating raids in video games is now where a generation of entrepreneurs goes to build companies.
And the average Discord user spends ninety-four minutes a day on the platform. Ninety-four minutes. For context, the average email open rate is twenty-one percent. WhatsApp messages get opened ninety to ninety-eight percent of the time. But Discord isn’t just getting opened. People are living there.

Story 4: The LEGO Surge
And then there’s LEGO Ideas — the platform where fans submit their own set designs and vote on which ones LEGO should produce. If your design hits ten thousand supporter votes, LEGO reviews it for production. You get one percent of net sales.

In the second half of 2025, a hundred and forty-six fan designs hit that ten-thousand-vote threshold. That’s more than double the previous record. LEGO Ideas themselves called it the biggest review period in their history. TikTok is driving a lot of this — fan designs going viral, rallying thousands of votes in days.

LEGO isn’t just crowdsourcing ideas. They’re crowdsourcing demand. Every voter is a pre-committed customer. Every creator is an unpaid product developer with a built-in audience.

The Pattern
Four stories. Same pattern. The companies trying to engineer community from the top down — spending billions on platforms nobody asked for — are losing. The companies that created space for community to form on its own are winning. And in some cases, the community is literally building the product.

Up next — the most dramatic version of this story I’ve ever come across. A productivity app that was weeks from shutting down. Two founders who fled to Japan. And the community that turned their failure into an eleven-billion-dollar company. That’s after the break, on Marginally Better.

It’s Marginally Better. I’m Joe Taylor Jr.

The Kyoto Reboot
The Failure
In the spring of 2015, Ivan Zhao was running out of time. Zhao was twenty-seven years old, a cognitive science graduate from the University of British Columbia, and he’d spent the previous two years building a productivity tool that combined documents, spreadsheets, databases, and project management into a single workspace. The idea was elegant. The execution was a disaster.

The first version of Notion was too complex, too buggy, and — as Zhao would later admit in an interview with Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter — nobody wanted it. Not nobody as in “not enough people.” Nobody as in: the product had essentially zero traction. The company was weeks away from shutting down.

So Zhao made a decision that would have sounded insane to any venture capitalist in San Francisco. He laid off his small team, packed his bags, and moved to Kyoto, Japan — along with his co-founder Simon Last. They rented a modest apartment in a quiet neighborhood and started over. Not a pivot. A complete rebuild.

As the Software Report documented, the Kyoto period was brutal. Zhao and Last coded for eighteen hours a day, living cheaply, disconnected from the Silicon Valley pressure to ship fast and raise money. They stripped everything back to first principles. What do people actually need? Not what’s clever. Not what’s technically impressive. What solves a real problem?
The breakthrough, as Zhao described it on Founderboat, was embarrassingly simple: “Most people don’t want to build their own apps. They just want something that solves their problems quickly.” He’d been building a tool for engineers. He needed to build a tool for everyone.
The Community

By March 2016, Notion 1.0 launched. And it became the number one product on Product Hunt — not just for the day. For the entire month.

But here’s what’s important: Notion didn’t have a marketing department. They didn’t run ads. They didn’t have a sales team. What they had was a product that people genuinely loved. And those people did something companies spend millions trying to manufacture. They told their friends.

The Growth Elements published a deep analysis of what happened next. Users started creating their own Notion templates — organizational systems, project trackers, personal dashboards — and sharing them online. Some posted them for free. Others started selling them. An entire cottage industry of Notion template creators emerged, completely independent of the company.

Then came the ambassadors. Camille Ricketts, Notion’s first marketing hire, noticed something unusual: people were tweeting about the product with the kind of passion usually reserved for sports teams and pop stars. First Round Review’s marketing deep dive documented how Ricketts put out an open call for ambassadors. A thousand people applied within the first few weeks.
These weren’t paid influencers. They weren’t getting equity or commissions. They were users who wanted to host Notion meetups, start YouTube channels reviewing Notion workflows, and build templates for other users to discover. The company didn’t hire a marketing team. The marketing team hired itself.

Ben Huh — who’d stumbled across Notion on Product Hunt and become one of its most vocal evangelists — was eventually recruited to lead community. As he told Bettermode in their case study, “The first thing we did was create a forum calling for folks to get involved.” The community didn’t need to be managed. It needed to be acknowledged.

The Flywheel
And then the flywheel started spinning.
New users discovered Notion through templates shared on social media. They customized those templates for their own needs. Some of them created new templates and shared those. Other users found those templates, joined Notion, and the cycle repeated.

The PM Repo calls this the “Templates, Creators, and Power Users” flywheel — each group feeds the next. Templates lower the barrier to entry. Creators produce content that drives discovery. Power users become advocates who bring Notion into their companies. And every template is a web page indexed by Google, which means the community is doing Notion’s SEO work too.
The numbers tell the story. By 2019 — three years after the Kyoto relaunch — Notion had one million users. By 2024, according to SQ Magazine’s statistics report: a hundred million users and four hundred million dollars in annual revenue. And they did it while staying profitable — something most venture-backed software companies treat as a distant theoretical goal.
SaaStr’s analysis of Notion’s recent eleven-billion-dollar valuation notes something remarkable: the company grew revenue nineteen times over four years while the valuation moved just ten percent above its 2021 price. Jason Lemkin called it “a masterclass in patience” — growing into your valuation instead of inflating past it.

But the real insight isn’t about Notion’s finances. It’s about what their community represents. Digital Native’s research found that Notion has over a million community members — one percent of its user base — who actively create content, host events, or build tools for other users. They’re not customers. They’re co-creators. And the distinction matters because you can’t buy co-creation. You can’t manufacture it with a thirty-six-billion-dollar investment in virtual reality headsets. You can only earn it by building something people care enough about to share.

Ivan Zhao put it plainly in his Sequoia Capital spotlight: “Our biggest bet is that good community drives good business.”

Seven years after nearly shutting down in a Kyoto apartment, that bet is worth eleven billion dollars.

The Place, Not the Platform
So here’s the question. If community is worth this much — if it can take a bankrupt two-person startup to a hundred million users — why do most businesses get it so wrong?
The answer is they confuse platforms with places.

The Ravelry Principle
Ravelry is a website for knitters and crocheters. It launched in 2007, looks like it was designed in 2007, and has eleven million registered members. There’s no algorithm. No feed. No viral mechanics. It has a pattern database, a forum, and a yarn shop directory. That’s basically it.
And here’s what’s interesting: Ravelry doesn’t try to grow. It doesn’t optimize for engagement. It doesn’t send push notifications begging you to come back. It just exists as a place where people who care about fiber arts can find each other.

Local yarn shops list themselves in the directory for free. Knitters organize meetups through the forums. Pattern designers sell their work through the marketplace. It’s a complete economy — not because someone engineered a business model, but because someone built a room and the right people showed up.

The Scale Trap
Most companies hear the Notion story and think: “We need a community strategy.” So they hire a community manager, launch a Slack channel, and start posting engagement prompts like “What’s your favorite productivity hack? Drop it in the comments!”

Nobody drops anything in the comments. The Slack channel dies within six weeks.
The mistake is treating community as a growth tactic instead of a design philosophy. Notion didn’t build a community. They built a product that was worth forming a community around. The community was an emergent property of the product, not a feature bolted on afterward.

This is what Meta got backwards with the metaverse. You can’t spend your way to belonging. You can’t engineer a seventy-three-billion-dollar sense of connection. Connection happens when people gather around something they care about — and you give them just enough structure to find each other.

Your Hundred People
Here’s what this means if you’re running a business. You don’t need a million followers. You don’t need a viral moment. You need a hundred people who care.
Sephora’s Beauty Insider program has forty-five million members and drives eighty percent of their North American sales, according to recent reporting from BeautyMatter and eMarketer. But the program didn’t start as a loyalty juggernaut. It started as a forum attached to a points system. The forum turned out to be more valuable than the points.

Your version of that might be a WhatsApp group with your best customers. A monthly email that people actually reply to. A Discord server where twenty people talk about the thing you sell — not because you asked them to, but because they wanted to.

The future of customer experience isn’t in building bigger platforms. It’s in creating smaller spaces where the right people can find each other and talk about the things they care about.
In an economy where everything is automated, algorithmic, and artificial, genuine human connection is the scarcest resource. And the businesses that figure out how to create it — or better yet, how to get out of its way — will be the ones that last.

Because unlike the metaverse, belonging is something people actually want.

[Music: Closing theme begins softly]

That’s the thing about community. You can’t buy it. You can’t fake it. And you definitely can’t spend seventy-three billion dollars and manufacture it in a lab. But if you build something worth gathering around — and then give people the space to gather — it turns into the most powerful growth engine in business. Not because it’s optimized. Because it’s real.

Building a community your customers actually want to be in starts with understanding what they need — not what you want to sell them. We think about that intersection a lot at Johns & Taylor — how experience design creates the conditions for connection. If this episode got you thinking about your own business, we’ve been writing about it on the Johns & Taylor blog. The show notes have the link.

Thanks for listening to Marginally Better. If this episode resonated, leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps other people find the show — and that’s our version of community-led growth.

If you want behind-the-scenes notes from me and the rest of the team, head to marginallybettershow.com or follow the link in our show notes.

Marginally Better is a Calufrax radio production. Our producer is Nicole Hubbard with research by Connie Evans. I’m Joe Taylor, Jr.

Marginally Better S01E16: The Community Currency

Episode Links:

Transcript:

Joe Taylor Jr.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Marginally Better S01E15: The Transparency Tax

Marginally Better S01E14: The Senior Surge Opportunity

Marginally Better S01E13: The Waiting Game Winners

Episode Links:

Transcript:

Joe Taylor Jr.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You may also like

Marginally Better S01E15: The Transparency Tax

Marginally Better S01E14: The Senior Surge Opportunity

Marginally Better S01E13: The Waiting Game Winners