YouSaid · the spoken record

Zoelle Egner

lines on the record: 89
first: 2023-01-29
most recent: 2023-01-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, absolutely. Love advising early stage companies. I'm especially helpful for pre-seed and seed usually. Anything PLG positioning, messaging, figuring out your channels, experimentation, all that early fun stuff. I love it. Happy to help anytime. And we are hiring across all of the teams, but especially mine. So if you would like to come and do all sorts of fun experimentation and also help people online safe, come look up Block Party. I'd love to have you on my team.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am on Twitter at Zoelle. I'm also on LinkedIn. So, I'll ignore come find me there. Otherwise, how can you be useful to me? Mostly like go for us and believe in customer success and talk to your users, number one, because I am an avid user of technology and I want it all to be better. Number two, no, that's all I got. Just go do those things. And I will be so happy. Also, if you want to talk about customer success anytime, hit me up in here.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing. Okay, so there is a specialist VC firm called MKT1. It's run by Emily Kramer and Kathleen Estrich. Sorry if I pronounced your last name there wrong, Kathleen. It's all about marketing. They are marketing experts and operators who now invest, but they make the best frameworks that you can immediately apply. And there's like templates and all sorts of super, super tactical stuff, which a lot of tactical marketing content is terrible because it's actually content marketing for some bad platform. There's just not it is genuinely good. Go check it out.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then. I don't know if I love it, but I use Zoom so much that I feel like I must say it because I spend so much of my time on it and it's categorically better than Google Meet.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But Google Docs is like my best friend And then there is a personal CRM company that I invested in. So sorry, maybe this is not allowed, but it's called Clay. And it is like the only way of ever being able to keep track of my relationships in a real way.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, then I will try and avoid any company that I have worked for. I really like using Figma. It's nice when designers let me play with things. I've been really enjoying working with Webflow. Also means that I can do stuff on my own. This is maybe spicy, but I actually love Google Docs. I'm not a Notion stand. Sorry.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, okay. So this one is related to customer success. It's my favorite question of all. People hate it. Sorry, but I like to ask anyone who's going to be in a customer facing role who needs to be able to keep their cool and also learn stuff on the fly and respond to customers to solve an unfamiliar problem using Zapier. And they can use the internet to look things up, whatever. But I basically lay out for them a problem that I as the customer want to solve and have them build it for me live. This both is surprising for most people. So you get to see how they respond to an unfamiliar situation, which every client will give you at some point. And it shows how they learn things in a very concrete way, which is really interesting. So check it out. It works really well for customer success.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Movie Everything Everywhere All At once, and TV show there's a Korean drama called Extraordinary Attorney Wu that I really enjoyed.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first one, a little bit academic, highly recommend it though. It's a book called Computing Taste by Nick Siever. He's a professor of anthropology, and he did this study of people and companies who build music recognitions algorithms. And it's a really interesting book for a bunch of reasons, including that it's the sort of like academic take on both tech culture and more specifically the unspoken and underlying assumptions that many workers who are building in this space have. It can be a little spicy and not uncomfortable for a person in tech to read, but I think it is a fascinating perspective and very relevant to the stuff that's going on in ARI right now. So go check it out, computing taste by Nick Siever. The second is a fiction book, but the ancillary justice series by Anne Lecky about a spaceship AI that ends up separated from its ship and trapped in a body. I'm going to leave it at that. Worth reading for different way of thinking about AI.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I hate this question because I take pride in making highly targeted recommendations, but I will do it anyway. So I'm pretty sure you mostly talk to product and growth people Right now, obviously, AI is a big topic of conversation. So here are two books that will enrich your mental model for artificial intelligence and encourage”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. The simplest way to do this is to write a template email for yourself that you can send out very easily that essentially says like, hey, thank you so much for using the product. I would really love to hear about your experience so far and get your feedback. Do you have 10 minutes to talk on the phone? And it is important that it's on the phone and not a survey because you get way more instinct from unstructured conversation than you're going to get from sending them three things in a Google survey. Set it up, come up with a hypothesis of the type of person that you want to talk to and then like run a query against your database, find someone, and send like three of those emails a week. And it's not like exciting, but you can automate most of it. And it will be helpful. None of this stuff has to be complicated. You just got to have a system.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot for people within that profession. There's not as much for founders out there right now, unfortunately. This is an area that I very eagerly am looking for more resources to share with people. Minimally, I'll say if you care about this, like send me a message. I will give you some advice. All of our industry will be better if there are more people working on customer success. So like I will help you send me a note. Otherwise, I'll try and dig up some other things and maybe you can share them. But there's not a ton. People in customer success, please share your learnings more with founders. All of us would like to see it.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mostly just like all of this is easier if you talk to your customers more. So build a system for yourself that will allow you to have those touch points. That's not just like making everyone answer customer support tickets, though I do think that is a great idea because it gives so much empathy and is really helpful. Like you as a founder, if you're a founder or a product manager or whatever else, should find a way to get that on your calendar like weekly or monthly. Go talk to people. It makes it better. You will have a better mental model. The other thing is strongly consider investing in customer success if you are a B2B company early. Airtable hit before sales, which is a very unconventional approach, but early is worth it. It has huge dividends if you actually listen to them. If you're not going to listen to them, though, don't hire them because that's sad.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To stay top of mind, to create momentum with your users, and to show up in lots of different places because audiences respond to novelty. It gives them a reason to care about your company. And so like, yeah, have your big annual launch or whatever, but also have one two months from then and another one and another one. Find ways to use that novelty to your advantage and to get into communities that you think are going to be good fits for your company.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because in both cases, they have a different distribution mechanism, right? In hiring, you're going to include that in an email that you're sending to a candidate. And so it's going to increase the likelihood that they take you seriously and get excited about the company and maybe actually end a ultimately joining your team. Cold outbound, you're using it as credibility to say like, hey, we're a real company you can trust. Great. Both of those things are all emails that you are proactively sending. You know exactly who they're going to, and you know that that asset is going to have hopefully the impact that you're looking for. And you can kind of measure whether it makes a difference or not. But just getting a piece of PR to get a piece of PR is like, it'll help with your internal morale. I'm not sure it's going to do much help for you. So happily clear goals and have realistic goals where you will be disappointed. Launches, however, do not need to just be about PR. In fact, in many cases, PR is a distraction. And instead, you can have not just one big launch, but like a series of launches that allow you.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you are creating a launch or doing a piece of PR, what are the breadcrumbs that bring someone back to something that can actually convert? If you have your big tech crunch piece and it's super exciting, it says all these great things about you, and it maybe links to you once somewhere in the 12th paragraph or whatever, how many people are actually going to click on that link. Not that many people. How many people are going to like read that and remember to go Google it? Not as many as you want, okay? There's going to be so much coming out of the funnel. It is not like a useful acquisition mechanism. What it is good for is credibility. And that's where if you have really clear goals and you know how you're able to leverage the asset of a piece of PR coverage, then it can be helpful to you. So the two goals I always recommend to founders when thinking about using PR are either hiring or maybe improving the response rate for your cold outbound. Those are the two that I think make them the most sense.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So just getting PR is not a good goal. I know that's been well stated in the market, but just to reiterate it, like. Most of the time, PR is not going to get you leads or users. It's just not. And you have to think about like,”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still, maybe helpful, like maybe for you, it makes sense to do the SEO play. Just know that that is not a small play. It is an investment. It is not just like have some people make some templates. You got to do way more than just that. It's not going to be sufficient.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it could have been. We would have needed to hire more humans. Airtable was an incredibly lean team for a very, very long time. From like 2015 when I joined until 2017 or 2018, like we had like. Barely 50 people. Like it was small for many, many years. And so we had to make really difficult choices about what to prioritize and what not to prioritize. Should we have hired more people and done more things? Like I would argue in retrospect, absolutely yes. There were opportunities that were left on the table. But in early days, like you leave good opportunities because you have to focus on other things.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over the fact that people thought that was a big source of traffic because it was not. We did not optimize them for that. Good luck finding them in search most of the time, like not at all useful. Where they were helpful, you know, narrowing that surface area, helping with sort of matching patterns, helping people understand how the product worked. Super helpful. Expansion within companies, tremendously useful. But they were not a top-of-funnel mechanism for us because we didn't put the work in to do that. Like we did not have an SEO engine. We weren't Zapier. Zapier has done a great job with that. They get a ton of traffic because they built it as a programmatic SEO play. But you have to be clear about what your goals are and what problem may are solving because otherwise it is very easy to be like, I'll just build a bunch of templates and then all of the leads will appear. And like that's not going to happen unless you invest in a lot more than at least Airtable did. So it can be useful to build them, know what you're doing it for and how you're going to measure it. Or otherwise you will waste your time.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think they can be tremendously helpful if you were horizontal because they help to narrow the surface area for a user so they understand how to connect the dots between their problem and your product. And if it is not obvious to someone how they can solve a specific problem, they're going to be like, oh, hey, that seems really cool. When I think of something, I'll definitely come back and then you have lost them. And so if you can be like, here are three templates that a person like you might be excited about, that can be really helpful. Where people sometimes get confused about templates or have the wrong expectations about templates is when they think that templates are going to be an acquisition mechanism and they don't build in the foundation that is necessary for that to be true. So a lot of people think that templates were what drove like Airtables top of Sunnel. That is not the case. I was having a conversation with someone who worked a lot on SEO at Airtable in the much later days and sort of laughing.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Data Dog has done a pretty good job of that. I think where I get excited is when the companies do this in a way that feels less self-serving or less obviously self-serving. And that means that sometimes you have to be willing to invest in things that will not have super obviously immediate ROI for you, but they will for the community and for building the community. Oh, actually, one really good example, I think like Notion has actually done a pretty good job of this. People are really, really invested in the templates that they create because it feels like you're not pushing notion. You're pushing like the beautiful creation that you have to solve a problem. I think they've done a really nice job on that process and several of their competitors, I think, have done a pretty decent job as well, but they certainly come to a great way.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a good question. Certainly, the two that I mentioned, the sort of helped rebrand some of the professions, the gain sites of the world. I'm blanking a little bit on the ones that have done this for DevOps really effectively, but there's certainly some that have.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is always the goal. Like, how can you make them the hero of the story and not you? Because no one cares about your company, what they care about is themselves, frankly.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either an existing or a brand new job and say, this is really important for much broader business metrics, whatever else, we're going to create community for those people to come together. And it's all about the job and not about you. That can be very powerful. And they'll take them with you. You become like part of the identity of that career. Amazing. Do that for sure. But like the Gartner Square, there's some opportunities for that where it makes sense. A lot of the times it doesn't. Don't do that.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not always sure that it's helpful to have like your super teeny, tiny little niche over here where you're like, oh, we have no competitors. Like, that's not actually how buyers work. It's not really worth it. That said, there are things you can do that feel like category creation that are actually effective and that I do think make more sense. And specifically, if you can elevate a profession instead of a category, that can make way more sense. So the great example of this is a gainsite creating customer success or like many companies altogether carving out DevOps or like rebranding DevOps to be a thing that was suddenly a sexy job to have. And I think that's valuable because a job is an identity. People will fight for an identity, right? A category of software is like a line item on your budget. No one is excited about that. But people are very excited about their job being meaningful and their job being important and being taken seriously. And so if you can hold up an”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Branded session. Probably not that many people, and then you will spend so much money and gotten nothing for it. Go to the event. Do not spend your money on the sponsorship. It's stupid. And then the second one, which is definitely a very spicy opinion, but I'm going to go there. A lot of people think that the epitome of product marketing is creating your own category. While I agree that it is useful to have strong differentiators, because it is, I think creating a category like getting a new thing in Gartner or whatever is often a waste of your time. It is a huge lift, absolutely enormous, particularly in B2B SaaS.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool. Okay, I'm going to start with things to avoid because I try and not to make too many blanket statements on this that I have a couple that I am willing to make. So this is all with the caveat that channel market fit is really real. And like sometimes these things might work for you. Don't like discount just because I say that they don't work for me. There are certain types of like flashy event marketing and sponsorships that you will get relentlessly invited to do that will seem like they're going to be really great for signaling purposes or for leads or whatever. And like they're almost always a waste of your time. Unless you are in an industry where you desperately need to get to like a trade show because that's where everyone hangs out at that point. Like, yeah, of course, you're going to have to go do that. But if you're in like more standard B2B sauce or that's not really a thing, there are better ways to get in front of those people than having your logo out there. That doesn't tell them anything. Maybe you get a branded session at the conference or whatever, but who's going to go to that?”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I hadn't CSNs literally like, they had really strong relationships. We were actually tracking it. It was a little embarrassing, but it worked really well.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Figure out if there's ways to bring more of that to your process because it will make what you are doing more effective. And frankly, there's not a better evangelist than a person whose career you have materially helped to improve based on matching the right person to the solution so that they can have more impact at their company. So much that one of my unofficial metrics for both marketing and customer success at Airtable, unofficial, was like how many people we've gotten promoted for using the product. I had sort of a running tally of those people. I knew if we were getting those at the major accounts we were trying to win, like something good was happening and we were going to be successful with really large deals.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is my spicy opinion. But both of them have to do kind of the same things, right? They have to identify customer needs. They have to help the customer see your product as a solution to those needs. They need to remove friction from the process of getting value. They are hopefully both encouraging those customers to share with other people. And both of them should be engaged in translating insights from those individuals into resources that can help everybody. They use different tactics, right? Like marketing is going to use more scalable tactics. Customer success is going to be in the weeds really talking to individual people. But all of the things they care about are actually the same thing. They just use different ways to do it. And if you as a marketer are not pretty confident in being able to say like what I'm doing is getting the right people to get genuine value from this product so much so that they want to tell other people about it because it's going to make them look good, then like maybe.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conveyor belt, it will be much easier to scale. It will be much easier to come up with genuinely compelling content because it's coming from your customers. So they already care about it. You have strong signal that it's going to be valuable if you already built it for them. Use that to your advantage. Make that into a little machine. And it makes all of the sort of go-to-market that you need to do later easier.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think those are the big ones that I would highlight. The only other small note I would make from a process perspective is if you are going to overinvest in customer success, which I recommend, make sure that you have also set up a process to take the insights that your customer success people are coming up with and turn them into as much content as you can, because that's where you're going to find scale in the long run. So for us, what that meant was we would talk to a bunch of customers and customer success would have like helped them build bases. And then we would create templates. So we're not exact copies because we're not trying to steal their intellectual property, but we would say like, what is the fundamental workflow here that other companies might have? How do we make a template that is useful from this? And like some blog posts that explain it, whatever else that we can then put out into the market. And the next time a smaller company that's not a Fortune 500 wants this sort of thing, someone can just email them that template. And we don't have to go through this whole build process. They have something to start with. If you can find those insights and put them genuinely into use as a little”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Admittedly, more people were in the office back then. Now they are more remote, and this would not work as well. But back in the day, if you gave people something really good, like not a pen or a sticker, really good, they would show it off to absolutely everyone that they talked to because they were so excited they got branded arpods. People would ask about it walking by their desks. It sounds so like trivial, but for that like, you know, a couple hundred bucks that we spent knowing like, hey, this person's already a champion. And if someone asks them, they're going to give a really good pitch. Totally worth it. Sometimes better to not skimp on swag. Hard to measure, very effective.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hopefully not. Hopefully not. But once you actually get in with folks, it's very difficult to remove it, right? So like. Suddenly, your attention rates are incredible. Your word of mouth is incredible if you're willing to do that initial work. A lot of people think that Airtable is like a pure product-led growth company and missed that huge customer success component that was always very, very important in the early days. And that helped us ultimately move more towards that PLG motion for a while, but was essential to getting it set up in the first place. The other one that we did related to this Champions at Scale was we spent a hilarious amount of money on really fancy swag. I know this sounds silly, but like branded AirPods level of fancy swag.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suddenly, you have the ability to create whatever workflow that you want, there's actually some education that needs to go into it in order to be able to make that successful. It's not enough to just make an Airtable base that's pretty that functions. You can't get your team to use it effectively if it doesn't fit into the broader context of the organization, it's still going to fail. And so a lot of this was us figuring out like, okay, how do we help these people not only use our product, but like build something that is going to be durable so that we do see that growth so they don't see it as a failure so it doesn't fail at that second order moment when it starts to get spread out to more people?”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I think what's interesting here is it helped us sort of bootstrap two things. One was, to your point, like building out the personas and champions and so on. And ultimately, there's more scalable ways to sort of reach those people in the long run. But secondarily, it also helped us deal with like a real product education problem that we had in the early days because the product is really complicated. Airtable, unfortunately, has two education issues that it needs to solve. It's not just how do I put the Lego blocks together. It is also how do I design a piece of software and a workflow. And unfortunately, if you're selling to a content marketing manager or a UX researcher, there's no guarantee that they know how to make a workflow. Most software is opinionated and it does that work for you and you like it either works for you or doesn't. And like maybe you're frustrated about what it forces you to do in order to work, but you can't really control it, which means when”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dynamics that many companies do not have. But for us, the person who is going to And so we weren't initially looking for buyers. We were looking for champions in part so that we could then go to IT six months down the line and be like, look, you have 500 people using this product. It's been very useful for them. It is time for you to pay now. Not sure IT loved those conversations, but they were really effective for us and meant that it was very, very easy to sell.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideally, though, we don't, we were always very privacy minded, so we couldn't actually get much information about what they were doing in Airtable. We could never see their data because that would be a tremendous failure of trust to go back to what we were talking about before. So a lot of this we would have guesses and maybe we could see that they'd use certain templates, but we didn't otherwise really know. And that was part of the reason why we wanted to talk to them in the first place. The second reason is that if we could talk to them early, we could help them build their first base. And from there, if they were successful, they would have the tools to go and help other people within their organization. So if we catch them at the beginning, make sure one person was successful by overinvesting in them, then they essentially became like support for everybody else. I should also clarify, these were not necessarily people who were going to be the buyers. The buyers and the champions here look very, very different for Airtable, which is a really interesting.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going into just like having an efficient way to talk to as many people as possible to build those mental models. That's number one.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seconds to reach out to a ton of different people being like, hey, we'd really love to get your feedback and help make sure you're as successful as possible on your table. This is not scalable in the long term because it's a whole bunch of sending emails and doing meetings. But what it meant is that we were able to start building our mental model for what these champions looked like in practice by finding sort of the patterns across them and building the foundations what ultimately became our customer success motion very early. And then we were able to sort of like say, okay, we found like five people who have a content calendar use case with this type of title. And now we'll be able to go like run an ad campaign based on that. We can build a bunch of templates based. Here's all these different hooks we can use because we know this is what a champion can look like in a way that was not going to be obvious if we hadn't talked to a ton of people. So it seems really unobvious as like an investment per se, but tremendous number of human hours.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a superhero internally because I like helped you build this whole new thing. Look at me, I'm amazing. And they suddenly have fully done a sales pitch for Airtable without us having to do any work or understand their use case, which is great and very necessary when you are as horizontal as we are. So we had to figure out essentially how do we catalyze that word of mouth and build champions at scale. All that is to say, the two sort of interesting things that we did were all around that. In the very early days, what that meant in practice was we literally had a slack integration that we pulled in a whole bunch of information about anyone who signed up for Airtable, including their title, like the company that they worked at, et cetera. And literally would sit there and like had a little button in each of the records that came in that would allow us to email them immediately if we had decided that they might be someone we want to talk to. And we set up this whole automated system so that it would take like two.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In more and more efficient ways. And then the third piece here is no one had a good generic explanation of Airtable that worked for everybody. This is perhaps partially my fault as like, you know, marketing. But it's also the fault of the fact that the market was not ready for the good generic explanation to mean anything, like I mentioned before. People just did not care about the generic explanation. And the magic verity was always seen in its specificity. We knew If we can get to the right people and we can connect the dots to them to the correct use case so that they like want to go and evangelize to improve their careers. They will do that both externally and within their companies and more importantly within the companies they'll be able to go to their friends and say, hey, I'm using your table as a content calendar, but you have a UX research problem and I understand your table enough that I can like help you build a system and now”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because of the types of industries that we are often very successful in. Had a very similar network effect that we would see where basically it was within specific professions, we would see people who, in order to distinguish themselves in that job market, would build a brand around the tools that they used essentially. We found different ways to sort of accelerate the process of identifying those roles versus like really, really helpful to build a brand for yourself so that you could hop around to different jobs more quickly, accelerate your process, et cetera, and thus bring along a tool with you and evangelize for it a lot. So that's one sort of set of things we were trying to achieve. The second set of things we were trying to achieve that's also useful context here is although industry virality was really important for us, even more important with inside of company virality, that was like the real superpower of Airtable. We go from like 10 people to a thousand people a year. And so we were always looking for ways to make that happen within companies.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and it's not a good idea anymore. Don't do it now. Back in the day, it was great. Now I would not recommend. But I have some unconventional ones that I can suggest that are Facebook. There's a few different things, but I want to give some context first for people who are not as familiar with Airtable's business because they do think these are really helpful pieces of context. The first is...”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but what you can do is you can say that type of person often likes these types of media. You know, we've heard that they often are really into these podcasts, so they're really into, you know, reading about this type of personal development. And often that is associated with people who have these broad set of roles but have this typical mentality, right? So we would find sort of clusters of like interests that people might have that often were shared by those people and do targeting around that. And then when that worked lookalike based on it.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We couldn't really use super generic messaging, but to go really specific into verticals, which we did end up ultimately doing, didn't give us sort of the broad coverage to go find new opportunities. Like you go really deep into one particular vertical or two particular verticals at a time with a small team. But then we weren't surfacing new opportunities that might be even more important. So we tried to balance that vertical specific work that we did with also trying to find this type of person who we had discovered was going to be the best champion for us. And this is like a sort of tinkerer persona, someone who likes new technology. They like putting together the Lego building blocks of things. And you couldn't really find tankerers magazine. There's not like a place those people hang out. They don't just have one title. It's a psychographic profile of the type of person that could have many different roles.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We spend a lot of time thinking about a psychographic profile for our users. So the challenge of Airtable is that you can use it for anything. It can be used in every department within an organization. It can be used for personal stuff, like you name it. It has a use because you're functionally building your own software. And you can build software for anything. Unfortunately, if you go out to the market with a message of like build your own software, the vast majority of people are like, I want to do that. That sounds hard.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say they were the highest ROI, but they are certainly one of the more interesting things that we did. They were useful, don't get me wrong, but I think maybe some other ones are more interesting. The boring answer that I will caveat this with is that one of the pieces of our acquisition playbook that was very standard that did work quite well was like some unconventionally targeted Facebook ads. That era is over. So like don't expect that that is going to work for your B2B business now because that's totally changed.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you don't need to get a million, right? And I'm not suggesting you go get one on 101. Good luck to you on that. That's expensive. But you can get one that's, you know, in a reasonable neighborhood in New York for way less money than you might expect if you're willing to do remnants.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source