The “Kyoto” Reset: How Notion Saved Itself

Metric	The Notion Stats
Company Name	Notion
Founders	Ivan Zhao & Simon Last
The “Zero” Moment	2015: Tech stack broken. Cash running out.
The “Crazy” Bet	Firing the whole team, moving to Kyoto to recode from scratch.
The “Unscalable” Move	Manually supporting the first 1,000 “power users” on Twitter.
Current Valuation	~$10 Billion+
Key Secret	Community-Led Growth (The Template Economy).

It is 2015. Ivan Zhao and Simon Last are standing in their San Francisco office. They have a problem. They have burned through most of their seed money. Their app—a no-code website builder—is crashing constantly. The tech stack is unstable. Nobody is using it. They are “Default Dead.”

Most founders in this position try to raise a “Bridge Round” (begging investors for more cash). Ivan and Simon did something radical. They fired their entire team. They sublet their office. And they bought two one-way tickets to Kyoto, Japan.

They didn’t go there for vacation. They went there because it was cheap, quiet, and far away from the noise of Silicon Valley. For nearly a year, they lived in a tiny apartment, eating convenience store ramen, and coding for 18 hours a day. They didn’t just fix the bugs; they deleted the entire codebase and started over.

They left San Francisco with a dying company. They returned with Notion 1.0. This is the story of how a “Hard Reset” saved the most valuable productivity tool of our generation.

The Outside Story: The “App Builder” Nobody Wanted

To the world in 2014, Notion was a confused product. The original pitch was: “Create your own apps without code.” It sounds great on paper (and similar to what AI promises today), but in reality, it was a nightmare. Normal people don’t want to build apps. They want to use apps to solve problems. The interface was too complex. The learning curve was vertical. Investors passed. Users churned.

The Inside Reality: The “Lego” Insight

In the isolation of Kyoto, Ivan Zhao had an epiphany that changed everything. He looked at the history of computing (specifically pioneers like Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay). He realized that software had become too rigid.

Microsoft Word is for documents.
Asana is for tasks.
Trello is for kanban boards. These were “Single Purpose Tools.”

Ivan didn’t want to build another tool. He wanted to build Legos. Legos don’t have a “purpose.” You can build a castle, a car, or a spaceship. The insight was: “Don’t tell users how to work. Give them the blocks to build their own workflow.”

So they stripped away the complex “App Building” code and replaced it with “Blocks” (text, image, checklist, database). They bet that if they made the blocks simple enough, the users would become the architects.

The Mechanism of Scale: The Template Economy

When they launched the new Notion in 2016/2018 (2.0), they didn’t have a marketing budget. So they relied on a strategy that is now the gold standard for B2B growth: Product-Led Growth (PLG) via Templates.

Because Notion is a blank canvas, it can be intimidating. So, Notion encouraged their “Power Users” to share their setups.

A student at Harvard shared her “Study OS.”
A startup founder shared his “Fundraising CRM.”
A designer shared her “Freelance Dashboard.”

Notion didn’t just allow this; they weaponized it. They built a Template Gallery. Suddenly, Notion wasn’t selling “software.” They were selling “The Operating System of a Harvard Student.” This created a Viral Loop:

User creates a cool template.
User shares it on YouTube/Twitter to build their own audience.
New users sign up for Notion just to duplicate the template.
Notion gets free users + free marketing.

Today, there are “Notion Consultants” making $200k/year selling templates. This ecosystem is Notion’s unpaid marketing army.

The “Moat” Today: The “Sunk Cost” of Structure

Why is it so hard to quit Notion? It’s not because the text editor is better (it’s just okay). It’s because you built the house. When you use Asana, you are renting Asana’s workflow. When you use Notion, you have architected your own brain into the software. Migrating away from Notion feels like a lobotomy. This is the IKEA Effect: We love things more when we build them ourselves.

Founder-Level Lessons (Uncomfortable but True)

The Kyoto Reset teaches us that Environment Design is a productivity hack.

1. Subtraction is Greater Than Addition

When the product wasn’t working, they didn’t add features. They fired the team and deleted the code.

Lesson: If your foundation is rotten, you cannot build a penthouse on top of it. You must demolish it.

2. Escape the Echo Chamber

They couldn’t have fixed Notion in San Francisco. The social pressure (“What’s your growth rate?”) would have killed them.

Lesson: Sometimes you need to go to “Kyoto” (or a cabin, or a basement) to hear your own thoughts. Innovation requires silence.

3. Don’t Solve the Problem; Sell the Toolbox

If you try to solve every edge case (CRM for dentists, CRM for florists), you will build a bloated monster.

Lesson: Build the primitives (Blocks). Let the community build the verticals (Templates).

The “Replica” Blueprint: How to Apply the “Notion Strategy”

How do you use this today?

The “Template” Lead Magnet: Don’t sell a “Consulting Call.” Sell a “System.”

Application: If you are a fitness coach, give away your “Notion Meal Planner Template.” It is tangible value that brings them into your ecosystem.

The “Hard Reset” Audit: Look at your project. Is it built on a shaky foundation?

Application: Are you patching a sinking ship? It is cheaper to stop, rebuild for 3 months, and launch right, than to patch for 3 years.

The “IKEA” Onboarding: Get your user to customize one small thing in the first 5 minutes.

Application: Once they customize the color or move a block, they psychologically “own” the dashboard.

Final Reflection: What This Success Teaches Every Entrepreneur

Notion teaches us that Taste scales. Ivan Zhao is not a typical CEO. He cares more about the aesthetic of a button than the conversion rate of a landing page. In a world of ugly enterprise software, Notion proved that Software should be soft. It should feel like paper.

The Kyoto Reset wasn’t just about code. It was about finding the soul of the product. If you are lost, stop running. Go to Kyoto.