To build a great business, you must change people’s behavior. But…how?
Many entrepreneurs can’t do it. They craft a solution with love and care, enter a marketplace with optimism and expectations, and believe that their idea is so valuable that people will immediately see its genius. But too often, consumers look at the new product or service and think, I don’t need that. And then it dies.
Ivan Zhao has thought a lot about this. Because at first, his product died too.
Back in 2013, Zhao believed that lots of people wanted to build apps and websites — but they were too hard to build. That’s why he created a company called Notion, which helped people build digital products easily. But nobody wanted it. Flop.
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What happened next has become lore in tech circles: Zhao and his cofounder Simon Last moved from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, where they disconnected from the world of hypergrowth tech founders to refocus their startup (and eventually were joined by a third cofounder, Akshay Kothari). They developed a new vision for Notion, rebuilding it as a flexible collaboration and productivity tool. Zhao calls it “Lego for software” — which will make sense to anyone who’s used Notion, and is a little hard to imagine for anyone who hasn’t. In short, imagine a blank page with infinite building capabilities. You can create tables, which means you can make to-do lists or sales trackers. You can create calendars, which means you can make content planners or coordinate with colleagues. And so on. You can design presentations in Notion, schedule social media posts in Notion. And you can add other users to any project, so many people can collaborate in one space. Instead of flipping around between tools (Google Docs, Excel, PowerPoint, Reminders, a calendar), it all lives in one place, easily organized in a navigation bar, and easily searched or summarized with AI.
This caught on. Then it caught fire. Notion was growing so fast, and earning so much, that its founders were turning away investors. In 2021, Notion reached a $10 billion valuation. In 2024, it reached 100 million users. It is fast becoming the default tool not only for college students and Gen Z, but also collaborative office workers worldwide.
At the start of all this, Zhao says, he didn’t have the words for how to change people’s behaviors and build a great business, or why any of this worked. He just had intuition.
“I can say it a little more clearly now,” he says.
And for Zhao, the clearest explanation has something to do with…the beetle.
Image Credit: Jared Ryder
The Philosopher Founder
Ivan Zhao doesn’t talk like most successful founders.
He has no talking points. He doesn’t try to hype or sell or convince you of anything. Instead, he quotes books and speaks abstractly. He treats business like a philosopher would, talking about it as a thought experiment come to life. For example, consider our first topic of conversation: customer service. It does not go where you’d expect.
Notion is famously user-centric. Its early users started building useful tools on Notion, which they shared on social media. Notion then created a way for users to download templates and sell them on third-party marketplaces. (This fall it launched its own native marketplace too.) Zhao says “many” of those creators now make north of a million dollars a year on it. As a result, Notion users have a lot to say. They have questions. They want new features. They are flooding the company with inquiries. So I wanted to know: How does Notion manage all that?
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First, Zhao shows me his phone and starts scrolling through his notifications. “My mom called me,” he says. “Then there’s a bunch of support tickets.” Honestly, there are more than a bunch. It goes on endlessly. He gets a notification about every ticket. Just to put that in perspective: The cofounder and CEO of a $10 billion company with 100 million users is getting a notification on his personal phone — the same phone his mom calls! — every single time a customer asks the company for something. Every. Time.
Why? There are two answers to this.
The first is practical: He watches for trends and makes sure his support team is scaling properly. To him, customer service isn’t just about responding to people whack-a-mole style. It’s about using all their insights as data — which means you need to make sense of it at scale. That’s why Notion created an elaborate system where every customer interaction is tagged and sorted. Product developers can easily see groupings of exactly the feedback that’ll help them, and Notion can maintain ongoing communication with customers.
“We have a process for people who make a request,” Zhao says. “We tag it. So once we release the new product they request, we follow up with you to say, ‘Hey, remember you asked for this a year ago? Now we released it.’ No software company does this.”
I asked: How did he build a system like this? What guided him?
This is when he starts to get philosophical. He recommends a book called Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. It teaches that everything is a system — a series of causes and effects — and that a founder’s job is to cultivate that system, understand why it works, and help it thrive. Zhao loves that insight. In his mind, he paired it with another love he has — of biology.
He points to a patch of grass next to us.
“There’s no better system than nature,” he says. “If we dug this grass up, there might be a beetle. It needs to intake information, output something, survive, and replicate. So if you designed your company like a beetle, how would you design it?”
This might not be a question most founders consider.
But consider it! What does the beetle need? “You need oxygen. You need food,” he says. The food must nourish, be processed in the beetle’s body, and be outputted as waste — and because beetle poop is rich in nutrients, it’s a great fertilizer that helps plants grow. The beetles eat the plants, and the cycle continues in a tidy and renewable way.
Zhao wants his company to be structured like this. “Your customer gives you the oxygen, which is money,” he says. “And you need to create value for them in return. You need to intake with your eyes; you need to have some basic processing of your memory.” He goes on. The point is: Customer service shouldn’t just be a thing. It’s not just some department that fulfills a task. It must be part of a system, integrated into the whole like a beetle’s mouth is connected to its guts, so that every part of the system can learn from customers, build based on their feedback, and make the customer happy so they return.
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The business is a beetle. The beetle is a business. That’s how Zhao thinks.
And now you can appreciate the two concepts that helped him grow: invariables and the wave. Each practical, each philosophical — as well-balanced as nature itself.
Image Credit: Jared Ryder
The Invariables
If you want to build a good business, you must understand the invariables.
What are they? They’re the limitations you cannot change. They’re the boundaries you must live with. This may sound obvious, but entrepreneurs often overlook them. They become too captivated by their own ideas. They confuse their wants with other people’s needs.
“Business really comes down to understanding human behavior,” Zhao says. “They are the fundamental invariable.”
In 2013, when Zhao first created a website and app builder that nobody wanted, he did not consider one of the fundamental invariables of human behavior. It is this: Most people are not builders. They don’t actually want to create apps, websites, or anything else. They are simply users: They want an existing thing to solve their problems. Zhao had built a great product that solved a problem that few people had.
So he stepped back and reconsidered: What was his goal? Yes, fine, he’d made a website and app builder. But at a more fundamental level, he tried to build software that improves the lives of knowledge workers. So what were their real problems? What invariables define their needs and lives?
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He went back in time. “If you trace back the arc of software, you have to trace back to the arc of the office worker,” he says. The office worker is a product of the Industrial Revolution; this is when work became specialized and geographically concentrated. People clustered in cities, then factories, then in offices to organize and sell what they made in the factories. They needed tools for output (typewriters!) and input (filing cabinets!). “That hasn’t changed,” Zhao says. “The need to communicate, store, and retrieve is always there.” In other words, it’s an invariable.
But over time, these workers’ tasks have become more complicated. Today, we have endless SaaS products to help us communicate, store, and retrieve information. We have a reminder app, a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, a collaboration tool, and so on. Does it have to be this way, endlessly fragmented? No. Zhao thinks of the opening line of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a historical novel about the rise and fall of Chinese empires. The book starts with this line: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”
Zhao thinks: Everything unites, fragments, and unites again. In software, it’s called bundling and unbundling. The digital age has been full of unbundling. Notion is really just a re-bundler. It is a singular app to replace many apps. “So that’s the invariable I’m thinking about,” he says. It is the invariable of simplicity — a core human desire to get things done easily.
But here’s the twist that Zhao didn’t see coming: When you build a company, you create new invariables — and you cannot violate them either. Zhao also learned this the hard way.
Here’s what happened: A few years ago, Zhao saw his competitors roll out project management tools, and he got nervous. He pushed his team to create a competitive tool themselves, and then release it as a finished product. Unlike other Notion creations, this product’s features weren’t very flexible. Users and creators alike were upset, because they had come to expect customization. (The company eventually backtracked and changed the product.)
Zhao has thought a lot about this failure, and now he sees his error: He pushed Notion to act in a non-Notion way. “I knew all the ways that it wasn’t the right decision,” he admits, “but I wasn’t refined enough to listen to myself.” But even worse, he’d violated an invariable. When you start a company, you’re basically telling customers, This is what we do, and this is what you can expect. Those become invariables. “Their needs are fixed, more or less tied with the product,” Zhao says. “You cannot all of a sudden change.”
But a question remains: If you can’t change an invariable, then how does anything ever change? After all, companies do change consumer behavior.
Zhao’s answer: “People can create waves, but it’s really difficult and almost impossible. But what you can do is ride the wave.”
Image Credit: Jared Ryder
The Wave
Every few years, people’s behavior changes in some way. Then the invariables shift — sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Zhao imagines this as a wave. A founder’s job is to go where people are already going, but faster.
Airbnb, for example, is credited with changing users’ behavior — introducing the idea of renting people’s homes instead of hotel rooms. But Airbnb didn’t create this change. The idea was already in the air: People were starting to rent out their possessions in the so-called “sharing economy,” and the 2008 recession left people needing to make money wherever they could. Airbnb rode the wave.
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Notion is doing this too, Zhao says. It didn’t create people’s frustrations with a fragmented SaaS market. That was decades in the making. The way Zhao sees it, everyone used Microsoft in the 1990s — and then, once cloud computing became strong enough, competitors flooded the market and chipped away at Microsoft’s dominance. That was good for a while, but now it’s noisy and confusing and people are craving simplicity. The wave was coming. Notion rides it.
I make an admission to Zhao: I use Notion, but I struggle to adopt it fully. I’m 44, grew up in that Microsoft-dominated era, and learned to write on Microsoft Word. My laptop contains decades’ worth of nested Microsoft files, and I don’t exactly know how (or why) to fully migrate my habits and systems into Notion.
“We’re okay with this,” Zhao says, unfazed. “The largest waves are the generational waves.”
The way he sees it, he’s better positioned than Microsoft or Google. These companies serve older generations with calcified habits. They can’t make radical changes to chase Notion without pissing off old folks like me. Instead, he’ll focus on college students, who will develop habits in Notion that they’ll take into their future jobs.
That’s not to say he’s disinterested in older generations — but he knows that Notion itself won’t compel them to make a change. So what will? Here comes another Zhao philosophy:
“Vitamins don’t change user behavior,” he says. “Painkillers can.”
To me, Notion is a vitamin: It’s a good and potentially nourishing product that I can also live without. “But if you’re working in a company of 100 or 1,000 people,” Zhao says, “and you need to use way more tools, then the pain is there, and it increases every year, and now you have your 10th browser tab open — we can solve that pain for you. It requires you to change your behavior somewhat, but it’s worth it because it eases your pain.” Because in this scenario, Notion stops people’s pain. And painkillers change behavior.
To Zhao, these are the fundamentals of business. They are why Notion works, and why any company can work — so long as it understands and accelerates the world that it operates in. You respect the invariables. You build a system. You ride a wave. You serve a painkiller. But whatever words you use, you must know that none of this happens purely by philosophizing. It happens by taking what you think and what you believe, and then trying something — and watching it fail, and then trying it again, until you truly understand what people want and what they don’t.
At the beginning of this article, I wrote that to build a great business, you must change people’s behavior.
But, no. Not really. To build a great business, you must understand people’s behavior. It’s as simple as a little beetle, and as complex as one too.
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