Start Here: How To Use This Free Startup Template Workspace

This is an always-free Notion template created by the Founders in the FounderCulture community to give startups a "works right out of the box!" Notion template workspace you can use to build your startup. It’s chock full of hard-won learnings and best practices from other scaling Founders, which are sprinkled throughout the template like magic fairy dust to help you company-build and scale better and faster while avoiding the pitfalls we all fell into building our companies.

“Experience is what you get right after you need it.” - Every scaling Founder ever

Step 1: Duplicate This Template Workspace

If you’ve never used Notion before, you’ll need to make an account to use our Notion templates.

The first thing you’ll want to do is duplicate this template workspace so you have a version you can customize for your startup’s needs. Here’s how you do that:

1. Look for the Duplicate button top-right.
2. Duplicate the workspace or open any individual document to duplicate just that individual template.
3. Move the template into a shared workspace for your team to access (it will automatically duplicate as a private document).

When you duplicate the workspace or any template in the Unicorn Project, Notion will auto-create a bunch of other templates. You can clear these out if you don’t want them. Then, open the workspace for The Unicorn Company by clicking on the down arrow. That’ll get you the good stuff.

Step 2: Understand How To Use This Template Workspace

<aside> 💡 License: This startup template is free for you to duplicate and modify for your needs. We just ask that you share your learnings back into the FounderCulture community to improve this template as you scale your company so others can benefit from your learnings.

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This template workspace has everything you’ll need to get into kickass startup building and company scaling mode. It’s powered by the very expensive, hard-won learnings from hundreds of Founders in the FounderCulture community. The base template is always improving and always free.

FounderCulture Pro Tip

Here’s your first pro-tip: Notion is very powerful. It’s the workspace tool that we see the majority of venture-backed early-stage Founders using. If you don’t yet understand how & why Notion is different than other collab tools like Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, Confluence, etc. then your first step should be to better understand the power of Notion. The TL;DR is that Notion works as a series of relational databases in a very easy-to-use interface. This makes it flexible and powerful. You can learn more about Notion here.

Want some Notion consulting to make this workspace your own? We know a few Founders who are Notion experts and willing to help you customize this workspace for your startup. You can find that list here:

Consultants, Coaches & Advisors for Startup Founders

💰 How We Monetize This Community:

🙏 Thank you to our Patrons and Sponsors who make The Unicorn Project possible.

• A special thanks to Diamond sponsor Silicon Valley Bank

Want to support this project to help improve the odds? Become a Patron

You might be thinking holy smokes, a free Notion template workspace jam-packed with all the learnings from companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars — all for *free?!* What’s the catch?! And you’d be right! It seems too good to be true. Here’s how we monetize the hard-won expertise of the members in our community:

• FounderCulture exists to improve the odds of startup Founders worldwide. In pursuit of this goal, we make as much of our learnings as fully open & free as we can. So yes, this workspace is fully free!
• Some of the members of our community choose to make themselves available to share their expertise with you 1:1, should you want to do that. These tend to be very time-poor domain experts, so they set their own hourly rates to do dedicated calls with you. You can find that list of experts at .
  • We always summarize the content of any 1:1 consultant, coaching or advisor calls using our Storytell AI engine (removing confidential information from your call) so we can share those learnings back into our Founder community so everyone can benefit (and we can improve this template workspace). You can learn more about how that works at Storytell.ai.

Step 3: Let’s Dig In!