Camille Ricketts
Camille Ricketts began her career in journalism, at the Wall Street Journal, in 2006. In 2010 she joined Tesla, where she worked in communications alongside Elon Musk. She transitioned into marketing and became the Head of Content and Marketing at First Round Capital and then went on to become the very first marketing hire at Notion. We get super-specific on how Notion championed their most loyal users and built a passionate community, and the incredible outcome it had for the company’s growth.
Marketing Skills
Positioning should be based on the 'hard cold reality' of who your best-fit customers actually are, not who you wish they were.
"I think the best first step for any positioning exercise is to think who are our best fit customers? And it's not necessarily who we wish they would be, but it's actually the hard cold reality of who..."
Effective brand storytelling involves painting an emotional picture of the vision to enlist 'hearts and minds.'
"painting an emotional picture of the vision that he was really going after and being able to convey the emotional quality of the mission to the people he talked to. So definitely at the time about the..."
Traditional PR and comms provide a 'stamp of credibility' and a broad reach that owned media often cannot replicate.
"I'm a big believer in comms. ... I think that there are very few and far between incredible megaphones for what it is that you or your company is doing where you get to reach such a breadth of people..."
Content marketing requires 'content market fit,' which means creating content that solves specific emotional or professional anxieties for the target audience.
"The way that you think about product market fit, you have to think about content market fit. So even though content feels like it's running adjacent to the actual product that you're putting out there..."
High-value content acts as a 'painkiller' by solving confusion or normalizing difficult professional experiences.
"painkillers always win. So can your content be a painkiller? Can it help people out of situations that are causing them a lot of pain? Can it help people stop being so confused or can it make them eve..."
High-quality content requires significant time investment—often 8+ hours of writing after extensive research and interviewing.
"It would take eight hours to just write the thing. And that's after you had done all of the prep work of making sure that your interviewee was feeling really anchored and understanding a topic that yo..."
Community-led growth creates ubiquity and name recognition that de-risks the product for enterprise buyers.
"it's when your community helps you achieve such ubiquity and such name recognition that it actually allows you to start moving upmarket into the enterprise. And I know that might be very specific to e..."
Community thrives when a product has an 'atomic unit of sharing' that allows for self-expression or aspirational display.
"I think that community lends itself particularly well if you have something that your product creates that people want to share because it exhibits something about themselves. So at Notion it was temp..."
Prioritize long-term ubiquity and word-of-mouth momentum over immediate monetization of every feature.
"I would really urge people to sit down and really think carefully what is going to be more conducive to our long-term success? Is it going to be that ubiquity or is it going to be revenue now? And I t..."
Avoid rigid, preconceived structures for community; instead, listen to active participants to shape the experience.
"I would recommend highly not necessarily coming in with preconceived notions about what a community needs to look like. ... I think that some communities get built where people are like, okay, well we..."
Start an ambassador program small with the most vocal organic supporters rather than a large, unvetted group.
"The initial base of the ambassadors program which started back in 2019 was just 20 people and they were the 20 people who we happened to see be the most vocal already across Twitter and a couple of ot..."
Protect the quality of the community by avoiding growth targets that might dilute the experience early on.
"not trying to hit a number early on. So don't dilute the impact of what it is that you're trying to do in order to show growth. I think that that's very important to protect yourself early on. So maki..."
A healthy growth rate and an application process prevent the 'auditorium effect' where members feel too intimidated to speak.
"not growing it so big so fast. One thing that we actually thought about pretty carefully was what a rate of healthy growth would be. So there actually is an application process for joining the ambassa..."