Ben Lang’s story makes me smile.
I run influencer partnerships at Notion and spent much of last year sitting next to Ben in our New York office. He was our longtime Head of Community, and along with helping me learn how to use Notion itself, he taught me about the people who really are the backbone of the global Notion community: our super-users and ambassadors, influencers and creators.
And, of course, their templates.
If Notion is a set of building blocks, templates are turnkey houses—ready-made pages that anyone can duplicate in their own workspace. Ben and I talked a lot about how content creators could use templates to grow their audience and connect with their followers. I had no idea how quickly he’d become one of them.
Ben left Notion in 2023 and made headlines a few weeks ago with a “relationship template” called Couple’s Home Base that he’d created for himself and his wife. After a few weeks of trolling on X and resulting media buzz, thousands of paying customers downloaded it. The other day I sat down with Ben to catch up on his post-Notion life and how this whole template kerfuffle started.
Let’s start at the beginning—how did you get to Layer in the first place?
Before I joined Notion I was a super-fan. I was living in New York, working part-time for a few startups. I built a website where people could share their Notion setups. I started a Facebook group for Notion users. Then I emailed [co-founder and CEO] Ivan Zhao to ask about the API. He wrote back inviting me to hang out when he was in New York, and it turned into a job interview.
What were those early years like?
For a few years it was just Camille Ricketts and I being scrappy on all kinds of stuff: the Ambassador program, influencer marketing, user conferences, education programs. And of course the original template gallery.
When did you start feeling like templates were going to be a thing?
I always thought templates would be huge. I used to tweet screenshots of my Notion page and people were like, “Cool! How do I use this?” And I’d have to say, “Well, you gotta do it on your own.” But once we had a Duplicate button, you could just copy it into your workspace. Notion is a blank canvas; either you build or you copy someone else. And most people don’t want to be builders.
