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

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“It really, really depends. So I'm hesitant to give you a number because which metro you're in, it ranges vastly. I would say you can expect that some of that inventory is in like the low thousands of dollars, which is way lower than you might expect.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We got mostly remnant inventory, which is like at the end of a particular buying cycle. Sometimes they haven't fully sold everything. And you can get the like slightly less good ones that are still maybe where you want them for really, really cheap. And everyone thinks that you only buy billboards if you're huge. So that small signaling thing was a way for us to make sure that we remove some of the risk of not being able to close deals because we were so small. So you can get kind of creative about it. Most of the time you're not going to do that most of the time. It's like reread your emails, but you can also sort of push it even further if you need to.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some bigger things you can do if you really need to. My favorite silly example of this. Airtable back in the day got kind of roasted on Twitter for having billboards that were not super specific about like a specific problem or whatever. They're just billboards that we had out. And everyone was like, this makes no sense. Why are you doing this? We don't understand. They were actually super effective for us because we had a different goal than everyone thought that we did. For us, it was all about signaling to some very large companies that we were a legitimate and large enough company that they could trust. And we had geographical concentration in specific areas because we were in like the fashion industry, the media industry in New York. We knew exactly where all of their offices were. And we knew if they saw our billboards walking to work and then got the request to IT for the budget in order to pay six figures for Airtable, they were more likely to be like, oh, it's not just some weird startup we never heard of. Like, oh, I've seen that billboard. They must be legitimate. And that sounds really silly, but like it wasn't actually that expensive.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“15 minutes, but aren't going to spend like an extra week trying to obsessively QA everything. You don't want to go that far. Just who have that sort of bent towards detail can be very helpful. Also, just make yourself a checklist. Like it doesn't have to be complicated. Every time we put out a blog post, these are the three things we're going to do. Every time we send out an email, like it needs to be seen by at least one other person. None of this is rocket science. You just need to make a little process for yourself and then it can be very fast and lightweight. But the dividends are worth it, I think.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. I'd say there's one of two approaches, and you sort of articulated them here. One is you can have the founder that is the avatar of quality, who is just like relentlessly being like, hey, we're going to do the 15-minute check. Yes, we're going through it. Yes, I'm going to send you a copy of this email and someone else going to click every link in it and make sure they're not broken. Or you can have someone else be the avatar of that who's in the company. I would say in many of the companies I have worked at, that has been me because I've been sort of the like marketing human who cares, but it doesn't have to be a marketing person. It can be someone on product. It can be honestly even someone on customer success if you're willing to let them provide their feedback on the way that you're showing up in the world, which you should because they have fantastic insight. There just needs to be someone. And I think building that into how you interview can be very helpful as well. So finding people who understand those trade-offs in that balance and who are willing to put in the extra.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worked on this were thinking about me as a customer. They built it with me in mind. And that means that And that builds up both the brand trust that we've talked about, but also sort of the personality of the company and makes people want to root for you. And frankly, when you are small, you need everyone looking for you that you can possibly get. So those little bits of polish that don't take a ton of time are absolutely worth it. The last thing I would say is making sure that in your public communications launches, if you ever talk to press, which some companies can and some companies can't, having more of a point of view than just about your product, you can try and say like, we are part of something bigger. Here's the broader circle or movement that we are a part of. It makes it feel more inevitable and more like you are not just sort of like self-servedly talking about your tiny corner of the world, but it's actually part of this much bigger trend. It will be more compelling and it feels like you're operating at a different level of sophistication that can be really helpful.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of these things are like very unsexy but very useful. One, like make sure that your landing pages and your emails and other things have like a level of polish that makes them feel a little bit more done. I think there is sometimes a recommendation or an instinct to just like ship things super, super quickly and get them out there. And I'm not saying don't move fast. Obviously, you need to move fast in the early days, but like make sure someone rereads your email so that it sounds good. invest in having like a decent photo or a decent illustration. If you have sample content, this is actually a big one. Sample content for your productivity app, as an example. Take the time to not have it be like Jane Doe 12 times in the name list. Have it be references to your industry so that people are like, oh, hey, that's a joke about Steve Jobs. I'm a designer. This person is thinking about me. It's small stuff, but it tells that person like the people who”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did a lot of calling from the hallway and Airtubel. Also, from this weird internal patio, you could only get two through climbing through a window. The window kept breaking. And so at one point remember someone getting stuck outside, trying to interview someone with the windows, like utter, utter like ridiculous nonsense. But, you know, that's all the fun things that happened in the early days before you become bigger.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they were like running some of their most important processes with our product. I think I was on the phone with Slack at one point and they were like, oh, well, you guys are probably about the same size company as we are, right? And I was like, not quite. Smaller, just an entire order of magnitude. No big deals. Totally fine. Roshan. We'll take care of you. Gonna great. But it makes a difference, you know, all those little things.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of become a huge driver of growth for the company. Of course, the outcome of this in practice is really funny. So I revenge really distinctly having to invite customers to go out to lunch with us when they would come to San Francisco back in the airtable days because we had like 15 people in a teeny tiny office. It's not that I wanted to mislead anyone, but I didn't need to like reinforce the fact that they were sending six figures with us when we had 15 people. Like if they had gone to live on LinkedIn, they could have figured that out. But like, we don't need to remind them that we were so small.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customer service experiences. Every single one of those moments is building a brand that is adding or removing trust. So for me, in the early days, that means thinking about like, what are the signals that I can provide to future customers that say we understand you specifically and our solution is designed for a person like you? And two, that will say, hey, we're actually operating on a much higher level than you might expect for a company of our size or our stage. We take this really seriously. We have all the things in place to take care of you. So you shouldn't be afraid to spend six figures or put your safety in our hands because we've got your back. We're doing this the right way has tremendous dividends when you're in a business that is often driven by word of mouth. Because if you take care of people and you follow up that sort of brand experience, the product experience that is really powerful and actually does the things that says it's going to do, then your word of mouth can.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Practice what that means is I often end up working at companies that are in a position to really punch above their weight from a brand perspective. They're typically much lower head count than you would ever expect. They're typically way earlier stage than you would expect. But I've been able to sort of put together a brand or an experience that allows people to invest themselves into the company with a high level of trust, I guess. So like I'll be more specific because that's really ambiguous. Airtable. It manages mission critical workflows, highly sensitive data. It's super important. You only use tools you can trust for that type of thing. The same thing is true at Brock Party, right? Like online safety, you have to trust the company that you're interested in your safety to. And in my experience, people, and especially founders really underestimate how much every single touch point her customer has from word of mouth or the ad that brings them in the door, landing pages, signup flows.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few pieces that go into how I choose companies that create that bread. And part of this is about me wanting to sort of match what I think I'm really good at with what will have the greatest leverage for a company that I work at. So I've mentioned like I'm a writer, really care about telling stories and helping people to understand new or novel things. I also really care about product quality. I'm like a little bit of a product snob. And one of my sort of strengths is enthusiasm. So if I can't genuinely go to a customer and tell them like this product is going to solve a real problem for you and it's going to be amazing, like I kind of can't do my job. So all of the companies that I've chosen to go to have had this foundation of an incredible product experience. That maybe people didn't fully understand and where I could come in and help connect the dots between that amazing product that's going to be really, really helpful and sort of the opportunities for a much wider range of people to benefit from that.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So we're an online safety company. We help users have more control over their digital experience. And our first product is anti-harassment and anti-spam tools for Twitter.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, didn't end up finding anything that I felt like so much conviction that it was worth blowing up absolutely everything else about my life in order to go heads down in a company. So eventually decided to go in-house with one of the companies I had been advising, block party. And now I run marketing a griffin.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was definitely not the expected outcome, but one that was very exciting. So got to go run those programs for a couple years through the IPO, which is a whole education in and of itself, to see sort of how comms changes when you become a public company. And then I was on Hacker News obsessively at the time, and I saw the beta for Airtable come out, immediately signed up, and became obsessed with the product and like evangelizing it to everybody that I knew. and ultimately ended up figuring out a way to like finagle my way into that role as employee 11 there. It sounds like we're going to talk about Airtable more. So I won't belabor that, but marketing and customer success step ended up leaving for vaccinate CA. And then the last little bit here is just when that ended, I really thought I wanted to start my own company. So I gave myself like a certain window in which to try out different ideas and at the same time was sort of advising and consulting.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, we appreciate it. So that sort of got acquired by Box. And when I went over to Box, they had never had paying developers before. So we were bringing over like seven figure contracts. So I started developer success programs there. And then in a totally wild shift, ended up moving over to run their social media editorial and internal comms, which doesn't sound related to developer success, but I had always been a writer and I wrote this blog post about what it was like to be an early stage non-technical employee. There was a little spicey talking about some of the challenges. I didn't tell anyone I was going to do it and I got this email from PR being like, we need to have a meeting. And I was like, oh, they're going to fire me. I went too far. I thought I was being like, you know, circumspect. I went too far. And in the meeting, they were like,”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I ended up sort of using my studies of the space to get into a role as employee one at a developer focus who I see back to startup. And the funny story on that is that I got that role by cold emailing the CEO while I was still in college. And then he actually followed up with me almost immediately because I offered to introduce him to some professors, which was useful for the type of business. And then I ignored him for two years because I got busy with my thesis and got other jobs and whatever, and came back to it and wrote this like ridiculous apology email being like, I promise I respond to emails faster. I see that you're hiring like, would you give me a second chance? Please, can I come work for you? I have no experience that's useful, but like I work really hard. And I figured he would either laugh me off of the internet or give me a job. And very fortunately for me, he gave me a job. So thanks, Ryan. Appreciate that. That was how I got into tech.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, I don't think I have it anymore. I might be able to dig it up, but alas, I think it may have been lost in one of my many moved since then.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I was closely tracking Y combinator and like that whole ecosystem. So I knew I wanted to find a smaller company where they maybe were having more difficulty hiring because they were less well known or a little bit less like sexy. But while they were still connected into that broader sort of group because it has a pedigree that people would take you seriously if you had worked at a YC backed startup. Anyway, I got like really pointy hat strategic about this, but it was effective. Do you still have”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like who was influential in what way? Because I was non technical. I tried, you know, programming and I hated it, frankly. And so I was like, okay, it's 2010. It's 2011. There's not clear ways to get into the industry as a non-technical person. I need to figure out how to do this with people because otherwise I'm not sure why someone would take a chance on me with what I have done historically. And that sounds a little insane, but it's very effective and ended up getting my start in tech basically by identifying a company where I thought I had sort of a unique set of connections or like understanding the space they were working in where I thought I could maybe like email the CEO and be helpful.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So you can imagine in any community, there are sort of like nodes of influence, people who know a lot of folks. They have money, whatever it might be, and they're able to direct how that community or that ecosystem evolves, right? So in the tech industry, typically like VCs will often play a role in this, but so will certain types of executives. And you can follow how they move between different companies and who they worked with and then see that that influences like who gets investment in the future. It influences the different partnerships that evolve. It influences the sort of like assumed wisdom in various different careers. And because I'm a big old nerd, I was like literally drawing diagrams based on people's blog posts.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Okay. So I'll try and be brief. I worked in tech for more than a decade, mostly marketing and customer success, a little bit of ops. Before I got into tech, I was a little bit of a dilatant. So some nonprofit, healthcare, dying big box retail. I graduated right into the recession and I was certain no one would hire me. Turns out that was actually wrong. But on the plus side, now I know what dysfunction looks like at great scale, which is actually quite an education and very useful But I always knew I wanted to get into tech, partially because I'm from the Bay Area and partially because I had been sort of obsessively power mapping the industry and like looking at its flocking patterns and like who had what types of influence because I'm a nerd. And I really wanted to see if I could get in in the first place.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, have the correct information. Sounds trivial is not at all at that scale. And I was totally wrong about all my assumptions. You know, I thought we were going to have to have totally different types of oversight. I thought we were going to have totally different tooling. And it turned out we could do something way lighter weight that would allow us to move much faster as the regulatory landscape kept changing as all the rulemaking at individual places kept changing. And that agility, that willingness to do just like the smallest possible thing is obviously a little bit of a trope in the industry. People talk about it a lot, but it's never been driven home to me so much because we're talking about something that had incredibly high stakes as people's health and we're still able to do it in that context. So if we could do it there, you can imagine that the applications of that in other industries are just tremendous. So yeah, if you're listening to this and you were thinking maybe you needed to add more stuff, I bet you could prune.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What else you can? I'd say my last learning was really about the power of having like a laughably small MVP for something. By the end of this, right, we were covering the entire United States. We had an API. We had like custom software on the front end, this whole kind of behemoth of stuff that we got to in four months or something. In the beginning, it was truly basically a spreadsheet and like phones and that was it. Even that for the first few weeks while we were getting the rest of the infrastructure really going, not only had tremendous impact at one of the most important parts in the pandemic, but also gave us so much information about what we actually needed to build that was going to be helpful. And I remember having all of these sort of assumptions about what was going to be necessary to manage this coalition of people to make sure that we had really good data quality because one of the most important things you can do if you're trying to be a trusted source of truth.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've worked with some leaders who never wanted to. They're like, no, this is like, it's going to be boring for people. And you just have to be like, honestly, most people are never listening as much as you think that they are. We wish that they would, but you have to say it like 12 different ways in writing and out loud, all this other stuff. It's like, you're never as important as you think you are, unfortunately, when it comes to that.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number two and three. I'll try and be more brief. Number two, I would say just the importance of relentlessly repeating the exact same stuff over and over again, even if you feel like everyone definitely knows. This is something that I've seen play out in every single leadership role that I've had, but it was never more acute than here, particularly because we had this sort of broad coalition of hundreds of people with very different backgrounds, some people coming to the meeting, some people not, whatever else. I think I repeated the same like three talking points about why what we were doing mattered like five thousand times. Cannot overemphasize how many times I said the same stuff. And so did every other member of the board. It really is important and it really people will fill in the blanks with totally wild things if you don't continuously have that discipline of repeating yourself. You just have to get used to saying the same stuff. And if you do it correctly, it's super motivating. Even if you're sitting there being like, oh my gosh, I have to say it again.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are. I love great B2B software. I've spent like most of my career on it, but I agree with you. I think if you have an authentic mission and people aren't just like, oh, sure, okay, you're connecting the world, but really it's, you know, some like telephony startup, like, okay If people feel like it's genuinely authentic to what you're building, it can be incredibly Meaningful”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't have to be hesitant to jump into these problems. It's important to engage with experts in the field, not to say that tech solutionism is always the answer. And again, this is not super sophisticated technology, but because we are able to go in and talk to people who are actually affected, get into sort of the system that already existed and make something really simple, really fast, it actually did have a huge difference. And that's really exciting”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We often don't jump into these problems. This was not like sophisticated technology. It was phones, Discord, and like Airtable mostly being used like a spreadsheet, right? Like it wasn't anything wild. Even that very simple infrastructure was enough to make a huge difference. And we have some evidence that we saved a lot of lives as a result of it, which is pretty, pretty special. So I think part of it is also just saying like,”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'd say probably three things. So one, the incredible power of sort of a simple idea to bring people together. One of the reasons why vaccinates CA was so powerful and got so many people to help is everybody immediately understood why it would be useful and how they specifically could be making a difference. And combining those two things was an incredible way to bring a lot of people on board very quickly because from a messaging perspective, messaging is something very important to me as a marketer, it was so concise, right? Like pick up phone to help save lives really straightforward. People really, really got that. It sort of allowed them to feel like they had agency in a time when everything felt really, really out of control. I think there's a lot of opportunities we have to sort of activate our communities and give people that sense of control that like are both going to be helpful more broadly for society, but also just for those individuals as well to make them feel a little bit more safe, a little bit more like they can actually have a difference in things. I think in 10.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we did something which is not common. We actually decided to shut it down after six months. Partially, that's because the existing system finally caught up. And frankly, we didn't want to be in a place where we were pulling away resources that could be put towards other things that are going to be more impactful. We always saw ourselves as a stockgap. And once we got to the place where we felt like we weren't really being additive, we wanted to give people time back so they could work on other things. So it doesn't exist anymore. I think you can still go check out the archive. We found some researchers who are doing like interesting research on it because there's very fascinating data in there about sort of the equitability of some of the distribution of the vaccine based on where it was available. But the organization is gone. We had that beautiful moment in time and have all moved on, hoping we don't have to get the band back together.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. We built an entire insane database. And then eventually custom software on top of that to make the people who are making the phone calls more easily get the information in. It is a whole thing. Very cool to see, though, not just tech people get involved. We had in our volunteer base, like people from absolutely every walk of life, not just in California globally. I remember there was a volunteer who said that he decided to join. He was based in Israel and he had had no trouble getting the vaccine whatsoever, but it seen something on Twitter about it and just decided like he wanted to make sure that people were able to get the vaccine as easily as he did. And he spent dozens of hours calling folks, even though he was in a totally different time zone. But it really like lovely to sort of see all these different people, retired teachers, you know, like I think we had a bunch of 12-year-olds who are helping out on the code of all things, all who just really wanted to make sure that they could keep their community safe.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, exactly. So I came in initially, a colleague of mine at Airtable had been helping out with the building out of the back end. And I started getting media attention and they thought, oh, well, like this will help more people understand that this resource is available. So I got brought in to do some like PR help, basically help them figure out how to get the word out. And then ended up actually quitting my job at Airtable to work on it full time Yeah, I went on the board and also managing all outreach and other stuff. So we did lots of really cool education, helping people understand their eligibility at all, build a bunch of fun tools for that as well. But it was a pretty incredible six months where we filled like a really critical gap in the infrastructure of the country.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And scrape all the official sources as they started coming out and then validate them because they were not always correct. And eventually we had the most comprehensive database and map of locations in the entire country, including more comprehensive than the federal government in most of the states because they had really complicated limitations on what they couldn't publish based on some relationships they had. We didn't have those limitations. So it meant that we became this like kind of clearinghouse essentially for this information and we built an API. We were working directly with Google. And if you ever looked up like vaccine locations on Google Maps, that was us feeding that to them, which was really cool. And we also made maps you could see on county websites. So it would help you understand what was available in your area. One of the coolest things that I've ever worked on.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So this organization was founded essentially by a tweet by Patrick McKenzie. For those of you who are on Hacker News Patio 11, and he had basically this really simple premise, which is if you call pharmacist and you ask them who they can give a vaccine to and what vaccine they have, and then you put that answer on a map, someone else doesn't have to make the same phone call, and that takes lots of pressure also as a healthcare system and also helps people to sort of match supply and demand. Surprisingly, somehow that like tweet, which is essentially like call people, put in spreadsheet, put online, turned into an entire full nonprofit that was mostly on Discord, Zoom, Airtable, and not only had this entire like hundreds of volunteers who were making phone calls in the state of California eventually actually nationally, we became vaccinated to state eventually. We were also doing this thing called web banking. So we would go.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The federal and state systems didn't really exist yet. And so everything was this horrible hodgepodge where eligibility depended on not only like what state you were in, it was down to the county and even sometimes the individual facility. Like you would be at a Walgreens and talk to them and they'd be like, oh, you have to be over 65. And also in one of these like 12 categories of employment in order to get the vaccine. And then you go like a mile away and they would tell you something totally different. So people would stand in line for hours. There were phones going off the hook, utterly madness and really, really scary for a lot of people who are trying to figure out like how to keep themselves safe.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. So vaccinate CA existed to help people in California find and get a COVID vaccine as quickly as possible. And that sounds really trivial right now, but you have to sort of wind back to January of 2020 when vaccines were first coming out. And it was really hard. So just as a reminder, because most of us have blocked that from our memory.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is sometimes a recommendation or instinct to just ship things super, super quickly and get them out there. And I'm not saying don't move fast. Obviously, you need to move fast in the early days. But make sure someone rereads your email so that it sounds good. Invest in having a decent photo or a decent illustration. If you have sample content, this is actually a big one. Sample content for your productivity app as an example. Take the time to not have it be like Jane Doe 12 times in the name list. Have it be references to your industry so that people are like, oh, hey, that's a joke about Steve Jobs. I'm a designer. This person is thinking about me. It's small stuff, but it tells that person, like, the people who worked on this were thinking about me as a customer. They built it with me in mind. And that means that it is more likely that this is going to fit my needs than something generic. And that builds up both the brand trust that we've talked about, but also sort of the personality of the company and makes people want to root for you.”
2023-01-29 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source