Backstage at TinySeed: How We Use Notion as a Central Knowledge Base for our Startup Accelerator
Here at TinySeed, we made the decision when we started our accelerator to work with mainstream tools and products vs. building our own.
The advantages are numerous:
The founders that we work with will generally be familiar with the tools we use
We save on development time and costs
And the tools are (usually) improving and adding more features over time.
One of the main tools we use is Notion, a versatile and user-friendly tool that combines note-taking, project management, and database capabilities. We needed a way to create internal dashboards of information for the founders in the accelerator, with a few big requirements:
The dashboards needed to be easily editable — by both our team as well as our founders.
Have database functionality — for storing master information and displaying it in different places in different ways.
And it had to be easy to use!
Notion has some killer features that allow us to collaborate with founders, track events and mentors, and surface up information in several areas automatically, allowing us to create a central knowledge base where founders can easily access these resources and other accelerator information.
This article isn’t meant as an advertisement of Notion, moreso as a way for us to share how we use it to help others use Notion more effectively, as well as a way to showcase our inner workings to founders who may be interested in applying to our accelerator.
Here’s how we use it 👇
Accelerator + Cohort Dashboards With Up-To-Date Information (Without Needing Manual Updates By The Team)
We’ve organized Notion into two dashboards, one for accelerator-wide information and one for cohort specific updates.
Our Accelerator dashboard contains all the information that founders need to about the program, including our Code of Conduct, office hour booking links, mentor overviews (more on that in a second), links to our perks and benefits (which are discounts for tools and products for being a TinySeed founder), and more.
In addition, each accelerator cohort gets their own dedicated dashboard. These cohort pages list all upcoming calls, previously scheduled calls (with recordings attached), a list of all companies in that cohort, and links to our in-person events (which include our kick-off event we hold for each cohort at the start of the accelerator year, as well as all other events we run throughout the year, like meetups attached to a MicroConf.)
Calls, in particular, are updated almost daily, so it wasn’t something we wanted to change manually on each cohort dashboard every time we scheduled a new call.
There are a few complicating factors we need to account for. In case you’re unfamiliar with TinySeed, we run four cohorts a year. There are two accelerator programs based on region (Americas accelerator as well as EMEA — Europe, Middle East, and Africa), and each accelerator has a year-long batch starting in the Spring and Fall (phew!)
So, in terms of currently managed batches, we have a Spring Americas, Spring EMEA, Fall Americas, and Fall EMEA batch running concurrently at any one time.
In addition to having four cohorts running at one time, another complicating factor is that we have two different kinds of events:
Playbook calls (which we run for the first few months of the accelerator, run by the TinySeed team on important topics like Sales and Pricing) are attended by only members of a single cohort.
Mentor presentations and Q&A events, which can be attended by all TinySeed founders (present and past.)
To sum it up: We needed a way to create events that were listed automatically on every cohort page, as well events that would only show up on only one specific cohort page. Every cohort page needs up to date information so our founders would know what online events they can join, and listing events manually would be a huge pain for our program directors.
Here is where the power of Notion comes in!
By setting appropriate Tags on our event database, and utilizing Linked Databases and Filters on our cohort pages, we automatically show the right events on each cohort page with almost no manual effort. For example, an event listing for a Spring 2023 Playbook call will only show up on the Spring 2023 cohort page, while a mentor call with Samuel Hulick (our excellent onboarding mentor) will automatically show up on the event listings area for every cohort in TinySeed.
Here’s how it looks in Notion (click each to expand):
So we've covered creating event listings with tags to help filter info onto different pages. But check this out: Those same event pages also come with some awesome collaboration features.
Let’s take a closer look at those listings. 👇
Event Listings With Built-in Collaboration
Let’s dive a bit more into the specific event listings. To the left, you can see how we’ve set the previously mentioned tags so we’re able to list each event in the right places on our dashboards.
An event description and mentor description are obvious things to have on an event listing, but take a look at that question area at the bottom of the page.
We know founders are super busy (they’re building a startup, after all!) so we don’t require live attendance on our calls from our founders. We needed a way for folks to be able to see the event listing and leave questions for our call facilitators (myself and fellow Program Director Alex) to ask on the call to the mentor on their behalf, and then they can review the call recording afterwards when it’s convenient for them.
An easy way for everyone to edit a page and leave questions was a must for any tool we use.
Since pages are editable by all users, Notion fits the bill here as well. Extra bonus: The collaborative editing is live to all viewers of the page, so founders can type questions live during the event, giving Alex and myself an easy way to collect questions and save a record to go along with our recording.
But wait, there is one more feature on this page!
See how the event listing links to the specific mentor? 👇
A Central Mentor Database Allows for Easy Search
An example of one of our mentor pages in our master mentor database.
TinySeed is blessed to have the best mentor roster out of any SaaS accelerator — a mixture of seasoned entrepreneurs (Hiten Shah, Rand Fishkin, Laura Roeder) as well as many subject-matter experts to assist TinySeed founders whenever they need help (Asia Orangio and Dev Basu for growth topics, April Dunford for positioning, Lianna Patch for copywriting, and many others.)
We have taken great care to assemble a well-rounded group of experts, ensuring a diverse range of voices and different expertises, while also striking a balance of choices. After all, having too many choices can make it difficult to identify the right person to seek guidance from!
As Program Directors, Alex and I are always available to assist our founders when they’re looking for help, but we also strive to develop tools and systems that enable them to streamline the process of selecting mentors so they can be self-sufficient.
As you might have guessed, Notion’s database and tagging system also comes into play here. We have a master mentor database with properties for tagging expertise, location, Twitter, and other details, along with a longer description that dives into the mentor’s background and current role.
This allows us to use Linked Databases to pull in mentors by section, so we can have a mentor overview page that is easy to browse.
We Save Admin Time By Being Smart With Our Tools
There are a lot of member management tools out there. We’ve tried most of them, but due to our specific needs and unique point of view, we needed a tool that was flexible enough to let us set up the dashboards the way that we wanted, while also including the features we needed (collaborative editing, databases, tables with filters and views.)
Mind you, we also have our criticisms of Notion — oh, how we wish for better form tools to tie into our databases — but overall, we’re pretty pleased with what we’ve built.
We hope this was an interesting peek behind the scenes at TinySeed! If you’re curious about Notion, we hope it gave you some ideas on how to use it more effectively as well.
Next up: How we use Airtable to manage our portfolio data and applications. Stay tuned!
