Marie Poulin and Benjamin Borowski

Our marketing work felt very vague, nebulous and reactive. We had an ongoing marketing and content initiative that had no end to it. We would create reactive to-do items that fit that container — like writing blog posts or newsletter emails — and we’d rush to get them out, but we didn’t really have a clear “why” behind what we were doing or an understanding of why certain things might be happening in our ecosystem. We’d get stuck in the weeds of the work and we were kind of in survival mode, with Marie feeling a lot of the burden.

We wanted an outside perspective from someone that we really trust — an expert who could do a bit of detective work to see the things that we couldn’t see, looking at all the moving parts of our products and offers from a holistic perspective and tell us what we’re missing. With how expensive the roadmap was, we did have some uncertainty around whether this was the best place to put our resources. Was it strategy that we needed or was it implementation support with the writing, given that we knew Marie was stretched too thin?

It was well worth the money. We got so much value.

The roadmap gave us a clear set of about a dozen sub-projects to work on that were actionable and measurable. Kai showed us the immediate things that we could do now to get the highest value improvement of our funnels. He broke down the work into bite-sized chunks and said, “Do this now, do this next, do this later.” It lifted the burden of that level of decision making for us. Because of the depth of Kai’s expertise, we felt a sense of trust that we could just tackle those projects in the order that they were presented and as we worked on them, it became apparent really quickly the impact that they could have. It’s also given us the clarity for how to think about marketing more holistically, a structure that sets us up long term, and an awareness that lends itself toward more team level collaboration.

We’re now seeing momentum that we weren’t before. We’ve basically finished the “now” and “later” stuff. Doing the work he recommended on our website was so much easier because it was clear that it was super valuable work to be doing right now. If we hadn’t had Kai’s prioritization and the weight he gave to each of the projects, we wouldn’t have moved forwards with as much purpose and focus and we wouldn’t have finished those key projects.

One of the challenges Kai helped us address was reducing customer confusion. Since previously segmenting our offers into personal training and team training, we were getting emails from people confused about what the products were. One of the top points Kai made in the roadmap was that our homepage was actually a sales page for the Notion Mastery course (which is targeted for individuals, entrepreneurs, and small business owners). He recommended we create a new homepage to introduce people holistically to the business and help them make the decision about where to go next. There’s less confusion about how to move through our web properties now. We’ve reduced the time to get customers to make a decision about product purchases.

We’ve also done optimization passes based on Kai’s recommendations. A lot of our SOPs were processes that we thought were right, but when Kai looked at the outcomes, they weren’t actually doing what we thought they were doing. Kai pointing out something that was missing allowed us to go back and refine the way that we work to produce better outcomes. For example, because of Kai’s recommendation to do an SEO pass, we’ve added much more metadata on articles on our blog so that when they show up elsewhere, it’s in a more parsable, readable way. We feel a lot more confident that the articles are going to have more of an impact when we ship them.

Even beyond the roadmap itself, it was amazing just how valuable just some of the things Kai would say in our calls with him. We could ask him questions and he’d answer in the moment, “You’ll want to do X, Y, Z.” Whatever he said was always just jam-packed full of insights that we were able to immediately take away and sometimes even go and make a change right after the call.

This wasn’t a roadmap that Kai could have just provided to another business. It was incredibly tailored. You could tell that he’d really thought through everything based on our conversations. I feel like he heard us and he understood and was able to distill the challenges we were facing. It feels like Kai really cares when he works with you. He’s not just treating you like a business client, or trying to check a box or whatever. He’s really paying attention and listening deeply. You feel like you’re in good hands for sure when you’re working with Kai.

— Marie Poulin and Benjamin Borowski, Co-Founders, Notion Mastery