Kustom is a fintech company offering one of Europe’s leading checkout solutions. With the most efficient and customizable product on the market, they help merchants tailor their checkout to fit their shoppers’ needs. By gathering innovative and scalable features, Kustom ensures high conversion rates and drives repeat purchases. Today, Kustom has 24,000 connected merchants with sales in over 170 countries.
The Challenge
When Rasmus from Kustom reached out to us, they faced a unique situation. Kustom was a brand new company with less than 10 employees, but with a mature product that already served 24,000 merchants.
From the very start, the team was operating in hyper-growth mode and needed robust systems and processes to maximize traction. Adding to the challenge, Notion was new to the team as a business operating system, so there was a collective learning curve to navigate.
The challenge was clear: we had 8 weeks to build a fully functional Notion system, onboard the team, and ensure the company could execute its ambitious growth plans.
How we structured the Notion Consulting Process
Given the tight deadline and the need to build a Notion Workspace from scratch, we opted for our BTIM Process to get Kustom up and running immediately.
Similar to agile software development, we believe that the best way to build a Notion system is through rapid iterations and continuous feedback. Just as you wouldn’t want to spend months building a product without user testing, you shouldn’t build a Notion workspace in isolation.
This philosophy shapes our weekly sprint model within the BTIM Process. Each week, we:
- Hold a 30-minute sprint planning with key stakeholders
- Focus on 2-3 high-impact deliverables
- Create solutions that can be tested immediately
- Collect feedback and adjust course as needed
This approach meant that Kustom could start using parts of their new system within days, not weeks. It also helped us identify and solve real challenges as they came up, rather than trying to anticipate every possible scenario upfront.
The BTIM Process itself breaks down into three main phases:
- Week 1 & 2 – Build Phase: After conducting stakeholder interviews, we designed an MVP workspace tailored to Kustom’s unique situation as a new company with an established product. Working closely with their team, we delivered a first working version within two weeks.
- Week 2 & 3 – Train Phase: We conducted a series of workshops and one-on-one sessions with the team. Having an incredibly proactive internal champion at Kustom made this phase particularly effective – they helped ensure the team was engaged and ready to embrace the new system.
- Week 3 onwards – Iterate & Migrate Phase: As the team started using the system, we maintained open communication channels to collect feedback and make rapid improvements. This collaborative approach allowed us to fine-tune the workspace to match their exact needs while supporting their rapid scaling from 10 to 80+ team members.
Implemented Solutions
Thanks to the amazing Kustom team and the incredible dedication to the process, we were able to get Kustom from an empty Notion page to a fully functional operating system for 80+ team members in 8 weeks.
Kustom can now run their operations in Notion and is well prepared for hyper growth. Here are three core pillars of our implementation that make this possible.
A Product-led Project Management System
With a mature solution and more than 24,000 customers on day 1, the product is clearly at the core of Kustom. The founding team wanted this focus represented in the Project Management System, so we decided to build out a hierarchical four level system so that the company could go from high-level planning to day-to-day execution on a single page.
One of the challenges when designing Notion Systems for large organisations is to make sure that you have a scalable system where everyone speaks the same language – and you still can account for the individual needs of specific department workflows.
We solved this by combining a core set of global databases with tailored workflow databases where necessary.
This way, the whole company works with just 4 main building blocks (that together make up 90% of what a company needs to operate):
- Epics (aka Projects)
- Tickets (aka Tasks)
- Documents
- Meetings
Then, each team can add their own processes next to it, for example:
- A Hiring Pipeline for HR
- A Campaign Tracker for Marketing
This gives individual teams the tools they need to track their own workflows while making sure that everyone still speaks the same language. Tasks can easily be assigned across teams, documents don’t end up in silos and management can globally track workload and performance without getting lost in the weeds.
An AI-powered Single Source of Truth
One of the biggest unlocks for any company is creating a single source of truth in Notion – and that’s particularly true if you’re in a growth phase.
- You stop bottlenecks & knowledge gatekeeper before they arise
- You empower everyone on the team to solve their own problems
- You ensure that your Notion Workspace remains operational
The first two points are pretty clear – companies need to give their employees easy access to information so that they can do their job (and don’t have to continuously interrupt someone else to get what they need).
The last one is often underrated but no less important. Your Notion system is supposed to grow with you and support you whether you have a team of 15 or 150.
That requires a certain discipline. And structure. Without a central place to save all documents, it will quickly turn into a mess and you’re back to the “no one really uses our sharepoint” situation you were in before adopting Notion.
We solved all these problems for Kustom at once using our Notion Knowledge System Architecture.
Here, we create a single database to store all the information of the company.
And there is just one simple rule:
Whenever you create a new page in Notion, if it doesn’t go into a dedicated database because it’s a task, project, meeting etc – it goes into the company wiki
This single database is then connected to pretty much every other database in the system.
This allows you to create multiple connections and fallbacks if you ever need to find it again.
Sharepoint and Google Drive systems usually fail, because they only have two factors to sort information
- The document name
- The folder location
With this system in Notion, you can have near infinite factors that help you find it again
- Who created a document
- Who owns a document
- Which team a document belongs to
- When a document was created
- The meeting a document was linked to
- The project a document was linked to
- The category / tags / type of the document
And so on.
This makes it really easy for everyone on the team to self-serve and retrieve information – without having to remember a complex folder structure.
And it gets even better if you add Notion AI into the mix. With your information already pre-structured, it’s easy for AI to find the relevant documents whenever you ask it a question.
An Scalable HR System
A big priority for the team at Kustom was to build out the processes required to support their growth.
When we started working together, they had less than 10 people. Eight weeks later, they had just crossed 80 and were on track to hire more employees.
With a scalable project management system and a single source of truth already built, we knew that we had the structure in place to support this company size – now, it was time to build out the hiring and onboarding to get there quicker.
This involved:
- A role management system
- A dedicated hiring process
- A semi-automated onboarding in Notion
First, we integrated Notion with their main HR and payroll tool, Deel. This meant that every new hire would be automatically added to the employee directory in Notion.
From there, we created a role system that allowed upper management to structure their ideal company setup before everyone was hired. They could simply assign roles to a team and once a position was filled, that person was assigned to the role.
With that, the management has an easy way to see their target headcount, expected new joiners in the coming weeks and the most relevant open positions that need to be filled asap.
If they want to fill a new role, they can notify HR with the click of a button. All relevant information is collected from the hiring manager before HR takes over.
We also integrated Notion with Teamtailor which means that job postings are automatically generated once the process in Notion is complete.
And finally, as soon as a new joiner arrives, they receive a custom onboarding that walks them through their first days. They get to know the company, culture and are step-by-step introduced to the Notion system.
Of course, this doesn’t make it easy to grow a company from 0 to 150 in a matter of months. But it removes the typical roadblocks, bottlenecks and inefficiencies that bad tools and lacklustre systems create, so that everyone at Kustom can do their best work.
This is our mission.
You already have S Tier team members. Let’s remove everything that stops them from reaching their full potential.
