The Chinese-language Notion education program Raymond Hou and the 柚智夫妻 brand, Raymond Thirty, have produced since 2021 was Raymond’s first scaled online-course business after leaving employment. It has two levels: an introductory online course for the general public and the longer, high-support “Notion Boot Camp.” By 2024, the program had served more than 12,000 students. It was Hahow’s most popular course in 2021 and became a testing ground for Raymond’s later development of the The Product Funnel: From Mass Traffic to a Deep Community of One Hundred (product funnel and trust economy) and The KIT Model: Knowledge, Influence, and Time (KIT Model).
Origins
The course was not part of Raymond’s original plans for 2020. At the end of that year, he ran a 35-day online boot camp called “The Art of Retrospectives” for subscribers. Commercial online-learning SaaS products such as Teachable, Thinkific, and Kajabi had complete sales features but insufficient teaching features. He therefore built a learning system in Notion, similar to Google Classroom but with more interaction, where students could submit assignments, view one another’s work, and give feedback. Students repeatedly asked, “I didn’t know Notion could do so much. Raymond, why don’t you make a Notion course?” Yuzu suggested starting with the more familiar “online course” format to lower the barrier to entry. Raymond then invited Kevin, a partner who also created content about efficient living, to teach the course with him.
Raymond sees Notion as “a tool with a digital-era mindset”: it has no fixed answer and must be assembled to fit a need. This aligns with the Raymond Thirty brand belief that tools should empower people and help them regain control over their lives, which was the core reason he chose to start with Notion.
Introductory Course and “Relationship-Building Product”
The Notion Practical Course launched for crowdfunding on Hahow on April 14, 2021, attracting more than 2,000 backers in 30 days. Classes officially began on June 18; enrollment doubled over the next three months, making it Hahow’s most popular course of 2021. 1 To avoid the obsolescence common to tool courses, Raymond deliberately began with established ideas such as GTD, OKR, PARA, and CODE, then showed how to implement them in Notion. This kept the content useful even when the software changed. The course was positioned as a “high-spec relationship-building product”: offer an affordable way to build goodwill, then guide people seeking deeper learning toward the boot camp.
Raymond repeatedly emphasizes a distinction in this product line: the value of a course lies in the Chinese character 程, meaning a process or journey, not 課, meaning a class. A one-way prerecorded video is merely a class. To count as a course, a complete service process must guide students through an effective learning experience. As a result, the team’s workload increased after launch. They expanded the original 366 minutes of material to 690 minutes and added a self-built course directory, student group, FAQ handbook, and student-project system.
Boot Camp: Networked Learning and the Quality-Control Handbook
The boot camp is the flagship format: a roughly 40-day course with more than seven livestreams, weekly assignments, and continuous feedback from dedicated teaching assistants. Raymond calls its core “networked learning”: students learn not only from the instructor but also from one another. They can view and review each other’s assignments, which eventually become portfolios they can take away, putting “Learning by making” into practice. By early 2023, the boot camp had served nearly 1,000 students and continued to iterate; by mid-2026 it had reached its eleventh cohort.
The instructor team represents the boot camp ecosystem’s transition from “Raymond teaches everything himself” to team delivery. In July 2024, Raymond looked back publicly on the instructor team’s first year, during which it had delivered 23 in-person courses, talks, and corporate workshops. He also described his own boundary-setting: external invitations had gone from 60 a year to 40 and then 20, and he gradually limited himself to about 15 a year at most, handing more teaching opportunities to teaching-assistant partners. 2 This made the boot camp more than a single course; it became an education system able to develop instructors, replicate teaching quality, and extend its reach.
The development mechanism does not recruit experienced instructors directly. Students first practice inside the boot camp, and outstanding students can move into assistant and instructor roles. After each session, the instructor team turns its observations into an improvement list for the next one, covering student sticking points, consistency of explanations, and material order. Raymond gradually moved from lead instructor to trainer and backstop. 3 This public entry focuses on the team mechanism and how roles evolved; it does not assess individual members’ abilities or personalities.
A “quality-control handbook” supports the boot camp. It records the teaching team’s methodology for the boot-camp model since 2020. The handbook was initially built in GitBook, then moved back to Notion because of the cost of multi-person editing and team expansion. It was later restructured when Notion Wiki launched: pages use codes such as “101, 102, 201,” icons and colors mark sections, and each page has an owner and a verification deadline. The result is a mature team knowledge base. 4 The handbook itself is an example of “using Notion to teach Notion.”
Designing Ritual: Digital Student IDs
Raymond treats the learning experience as a product to iterate, using end-of-course surveys to identify improvements after each cohort. One representative design was the digital student ID introduced in the seventh cohort. It was inspired by polarized feedback on the fourth cohort’s opening pledge ceremony. Raymond replaced the ceremony with an ID students could display on their desktop or even print, preserving a sense of ceremony and shareability. The design took cues from Notion and Discord profile cards, reflecting the two tools most commonly used by the team.
Teaching Method: PAI and KIT
Years of teaching Notion led Raymond to develop the original knowledge-management framework PAI Knowledge and Project Management System (Project / Action / Inbox). He argues that many people mistake a “Second Brain” for collecting and organizing information, allowing information to steal their attention. He instead puts action records and project management at the center, making collections support action. PAI later became the foundation for advanced courses and The Super Individual’s Way of Working. It also marked Raymond’s transition from “teaching tools” to “teaching workflows,” reflecting his principle of Output Drives Learning (learning driven by output). Students often say it “feels less like a Notion boot camp and more like a workflow boot camp.”
The challenge in this teaching method is not simply completeness of knowledge. It is breaking down Raymond’s highly customized, long-iterated system into a “simplified version” beginners can start using. In a July 2025 preparation retrospective, Raymond compared the work to altering a bespoke suit into a version suitable for ordinary people to try on: simplify too much and the context disappears; retain too much and a student new to Notion is overwhelmed by complexity. 5 This account adds the productization work behind Notion teaching: rather than displaying the most complete personal system, design an entry point that students can understand, start using, and keep adapting into their own version.
Platform Strategy and Tensions
Raymond’s choice of sales channel went through a cycle. Early on, he used Hahow’s marketing resources to reach new audiences. He later Bringing Courses Back from Hahow to a Self-Hosted Platform (lifehacker.tw), returning the marketing savings to students in exchange for control and the freedom to update quickly. At the end of 2024, to expand reach and support public-benefit access, he listed two Notion courses on Hahow again. They were mainly intended to reach schools and government audiences, while serious learners continued to be directed to his own platform and post-course Discord community. 6
The boot camp’s high-support format also creates ongoing strain: long hours of feedback, coaching, and management place heavy demands on the team. Around the tenth cohort, Raymond and Yuzu publicly discussed whether to stop running this “cornerstone of the brand,” reflecting a tradeoff between the “right scale” and long-term operational health. 7
Impact
This product line was Raymond’s starting point for testing the idea that “this is not just an online course; it is a way to change online learning.” It brought him together with teaching partners and students from many industries, forming an ecosystem that later produced the instructor team and invitations to talks and workshops across Taiwan. The Notion instructor team, developed from boot-camp assistants and outstanding students, can independently teach school classes and in-house training for large associations, and respond to students from different backgrounds. Raymond gradually transferred incoming teaching invitations to the instructor team, taking on a supporting and training role. The program established Raymond Thirty’s approach of building a small, deep community through trust and support, and turned tool teaching into transferable methodology—a key step in the brand’s move from content creation to systematic educational products.
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “Not Just an Online Course, but the Beginning of Changing Online Learning,” WordPress, 2021-09-29. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “One Year Since the Notion Instructor Team Was Formed,” public Facebook post, 2024-07-09. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “100 Points of Ability, 60 Points of Articulation,” public Facebook post, 2026-06-06. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “Notion Wiki Use Case: Building a Team Knowledge Base, Collaborative Project Documents, and Training | Online Boot Camp Quality-Control Handbook,” WordPress, 2023-05-01. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “Course-Preparation Bottleneck and a Simplified Notion Template,” public Facebook post, 2025-07-09. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “Raymond’s Notion Online Course Series Is Back on Hahow—What’s My Reasoning?” WordPress, 2025-01-21. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “The Notion Boot Camp Has Reached Its Tenth Cohort. Should It Stop?” public Facebook post, 2025-05-13. View original ↩