3 builders who never spoke to each other

Hand the community to the people running it

Go to the users already building unexpected things on your product, offer them a closer relationship, then get out of the way and resource them with somewhere to show their work, a direct line to your team and introductions to each other. Give contributors a name to belong to, credit them individually including the typo fixers, curate the beginner tasks by hand, and run a public exchange so the thing keeps growing without you building it.

The method

1. 01

   Go to the users who are already building unexpected things on your product and offer them a closer working relationship.

2. 02

   Then get out of their way and resource them: somewhere to show their work, a direct line to your team, and introductions to each other.

3. 03

   Coin a name for the people who contribute to your project: it gives them something to belong to rather than a queue to wait in.

4. 04

   Credit contributors by name in tiers with their individual commit counts, and include the people who only fixed a typo.

5. 05

   Curate the beginner tickets by hand and run a chat community alongside them, because a task that looks trivial can quietly cost a newcomer days and lose you the contributor.

What it returned

• 100,000

  Notion approached its biggest power users about two years before this interview, which became the ambassador program: one ambassador runs a subreddit of nearly 100,000, another a Korean group above 20,000, another an Arabic community above 30,000.

• 20

  He calls Clawdbot contributors clawdibutors and handles 20 to 30 pull requests a day plus more issues, against his earlier project which had traction but few people contributing back

• 291

  He lists a core team of Mario Zechner with 291 commits and Armin Ronacher with 132, then major contributors on 72, 55 and 36, then twenty named community contributors

• Community leaders running their own large groups extended Notion's reach well past what the company could do itself.

Sources

• Building the world's most customizable workspace with Ivan Zhao, co-founder of NotionIvan Zhao · nesslabs.com · Building the world's most customizable workspace with Ivan Zhao, co-founder of Notion · 2021-03-12
• VibeTunnel's first AI-anniversary | Peter SteinbergerPeter Steinberger · steipete.me · Thank You! · 2025-07-16
• ClawdbotPeter Steinberger · steipete.me · Prompt Requests · 2026-01-02
• The QuarantineCory Zue · coryzue.com · Ship a substantial Pegasus release: A · 2021-09-06