Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner
Zoelle Agner, former Airtable employee #11 and current Head of Marketing/Growth at Block Party, shares insights on how startups can "punch above their weight." She discusses Airtable's growth tactics, the power of customer success, effective marketing investments, and strategic approaches to PR and launches.
Deep Dive Analysis
15 Topic Outline
The Genesis and Impact of Vaccinate CA
Key Lessons from Building and Scaling Vaccinate CA
Zoelle Egner's Path into the Tech Industry
Block Party: Online Safety and Anti-Harassment Tools
Strategies for Startups to 'Punch Above Their Weight'
Airtable's Strategic Use of Billboards
Airtable's Early Growth Tactics: Identifying and Nurturing Champions
The Synergy Between Customer Success and Marketing
Marketing Activities Startups Should Avoid
The Power and Pitfalls of Product Templates
Effective Goals for PR and Product Launches
Recommended Books for AI and Tech Culture
Favorite Podcasts, Movies, and TV Shows
Zoelle's Favorite Interview Question and SaaS Products
Recommended Marketing Resources for Non-Marketers
4 Key Concepts
Flocking Patterns
A method of analyzing influence within an industry or community by tracking how influential individuals (e.g., VCs, executives) move between companies and how their networks direct the evolution of the ecosystem. This helps identify key nodes of influence and potential opportunities.
Punching Above Your Weight
A startup strategy to appear more established, trustworthy, and sophisticated than its actual size or stage. This is achieved by meticulously focusing on high-quality customer touchpoints, strategic signaling (like billboards), and cultivating a compelling brand narrative to build trust.
Psychographic Profile
A user segmentation approach that focuses on psychological attributes, interests, values, and lifestyle, rather than just demographics or job titles. Airtable used this to identify a 'tinkerer persona' who enjoyed new technology and building things, allowing for more targeted marketing.
Elevating a Profession
A marketing strategy that focuses on making an existing or new job role feel important, meaningful, and taken seriously. By building community and resources around a profession (e.g., Customer Success, DevOps), companies can become integral to that career's identity and gain strong evangelists.
10 Questions Answered
Vaccinate CA was a nonprofit that helped Californians find and get COVID vaccines quickly by crowdsourcing and validating information on eligibility and availability. It became the most comprehensive database nationally, feeding data to Google Maps and county websites, and filled a critical gap in infrastructure.
Key lessons include the incredible power of a simple idea to unite people, the importance of relentlessly repeating core messages, and the effectiveness of starting with a laughably small Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to gather insights and move quickly.
Startups can punch above their weight by ensuring a high level of polish and attention to detail in all customer touchpoints (e.g., emails, landing pages, sample content), and by articulating a point of view that connects their product to a larger trend or movement, making them seem more sophisticated and inevitable.
Airtable used billboards primarily for strategic signaling to large enterprise companies. The goal was to convey legitimacy and sufficient scale, particularly in geographically concentrated areas where target clients would see them, making those companies more likely to trust Airtable with six-figure contracts.
Airtable used a Slack integration to pull in signup information (like title and company) for new users. They then manually emailed potential champions, offering to get feedback and help them build their first successful Airtable bases, effectively over-investing in key individuals to drive internal company virality.
Both customer success and marketing share the fundamental goals of identifying customer needs, positioning the product as a solution, removing friction to value, encouraging sharing, and translating customer insights into broader resources. While they use different tactics, their objectives are identical, making close alignment highly beneficial.
Startups should generally avoid flashy event marketing sponsorships (unless it's a critical industry trade show) and creating new software categories solely for the sake of it. These activities often yield low ROI and are less effective than focusing on genuine customer value and community building.
Templates are highly valuable for horizontal SaaS products as they narrow the user's focus, helping them connect their specific problem to the product's solution and understand its functionality. However, a common pitfall is expecting templates to be a top-of-funnel acquisition mechanism without also investing heavily in programmatic SEO or other distribution strategies.
For early-stage startups, PR is most effective for building credibility, specifically to aid in hiring or improve the response rates for cold outbound sales efforts. Product launches should be a series of continuous events, not just one big annual push, to maintain momentum and leverage novelty with audiences.
Founders can write a template email to send to users, thanking them for using the product and asking for 10 minutes to discuss their experience and feedback. They should identify a hypothesis about the type of person to talk to, query their database, and send about three such emails per week, conducting phone calls for unstructured insights.
37 Actionable Insights
1. Talk to Customers Regularly
Founders and product managers should schedule weekly or monthly conversations with users to build better mental models and gain empathy. This unstructured feedback is more valuable than surveys for understanding user experience.
2. Invest in Early B2B CS
Prioritize customer success early, even before sales, to overinvest in making initial users successful. This unconventional approach yields huge dividends by turning successful users into internal champions.
3. Overinvest in Early Champions
Identify and support early adopters who can become internal evangelists for your product within their organizations. Ensuring their success makes them a powerful, organic sales force.
4. Relentlessly Repeat Core Message
Continuously articulate your company’s core message and mission across all communications, even if it feels repetitive. This prevents misinterpretation, keeps everyone motivated, and ensures alignment.
5. Start with Small MVP
Begin with the smallest possible viable product, like a spreadsheet and phones, to quickly gain impact and gather crucial information. This agility allows for rapid adaptation as the market or regulatory landscape changes.
6. Every Touchpoint Builds Trust
Recognize that every customer interaction, from ads to support, either adds or removes trust in your brand. Focus on sending signals that you understand customers and operate with seriousness and care.
7. Polish All Customer Touchpoints
Ensure landing pages, emails, and all public-facing content have a high level of polish and attention to detail. This makes your company appear more established and trustworthy, encouraging customer loyalty.
8. Designate Quality Avatar & Checklists
Assign a “quality avatar” (founder or team member) to relentlessly review external communications for accuracy and polish. Implement simple checklists for tasks like blog posts and emails to maintain consistent quality.
9. Develop Psychographic User Profiles
Go beyond demographics to understand the psychographic profile of your ideal users, such as “tinkerers.” This enables more effective, unconventional targeting by identifying shared interests and mentalities.
10. Proactive Early Customer Outreach
Implement a system to quickly reach out to new sign-ups, especially potential champions, to offer help and gather feedback. This builds early relationships and helps you understand user patterns and use cases.
11. Convert CS Insights to Content
Establish a process to transform insights and successful customer solutions from your customer success team into scalable content like templates and blog posts. This leverages direct customer experience to create genuinely compelling resources.
12. Create Templates from Workflows
Develop templates based on fundamental workflows observed from successful customer implementations. This helps horizontal products narrow the surface area for new users, making the product’s utility clear.
13. Align Marketing & Customer Success
Recognize that marketing and customer success share core objectives: identifying needs, presenting solutions, and encouraging sharing. Align these functions to ensure both focus on delivering genuine customer value and fostering evangelism.
14. Elevate a Profession, Not Category
Aim to elevate an entire profession or job role rather than just creating a new software category. People identify with and fight for their professional identity, making this a powerful way to integrate your product into their career.
15. Articulate a Broader Vision
Frame your company’s mission as part of a larger trend or movement, rather than just self-servingly talking about your product. This makes your company feel more compelling, inevitable, and sophisticated.
16. Make Customers Superheroes
Focus on how your product empowers customers to achieve their goals and become more impactful in their roles. When customers feel like heroes, they become natural evangelists for your product.
17. Conceal Small Size Strategically
When dealing with large clients, avoid overtly highlighting your startup’s small size, especially if they are entrusting you with critical workflows. Focus on projecting legitimacy and capability to build trust.
18. Invest in High-Quality Swag
Provide “branded AirPods level” fancy swag to your most enthusiastic champions. This encourages them to proudly display and talk about your product, generating organic word-of-mouth.
19. Use Templates for Horizontal Products
Leverage templates to help users of horizontal products, which can be used for anything, connect their specific problems to your product’s capabilities. This reduces friction and clarifies utility for diverse use cases.
20. Plan a Series of Small Launches
Instead of one large, infrequent launch, plan a continuous series of smaller launches to maintain momentum and stay top-of-mind. Audiences respond to novelty, providing ongoing reasons to engage.
21. Use PR for Hiring/Credibility
Focus PR efforts on specific, measurable goals like improving hiring response rates or adding credibility to cold outbound sales. Avoid chasing PR solely for general awareness, as it rarely translates directly to leads.
22. Tactical Customer Outreach System
Create a simple, templated email to invite specific customer segments for 10-minute phone calls to gather unstructured feedback. Send 3 such emails weekly to maintain consistent customer interaction.
23. Prune Features & Complexity
Regularly evaluate and remove unnecessary features or complexity from your product. This maintains agility and prevents overbuilding, even in high-stakes environments.
24. Simple Mission for Engagement
Craft a mission statement that is simple, clear, and immediately understandable, showing people how they can make a difference. This effectively mobilizes volunteers and employees by giving them a sense of agency.
25. Simple Tech for Big Impact
Don’t hesitate to tackle significant problems with simple, unsophisticated technology like spreadsheets and basic communication tools. Engaging with affected people and building fast can yield huge differences.
26. Know When to Stop
Be prepared to shut down initiatives, even successful ones, when they are no longer additive or the existing system has caught up. This frees up resources for more impactful endeavors.
27. Map Industry Influence
Proactively analyze your industry to identify influential individuals, VCs, and companies, and understand their “flocking patterns.” This strategic mapping can guide career decisions and identify opportunities.
28. Cold Email with Value
When cold emailing, especially for career opportunities or partnerships, offer specific value upfront, such as introductions or insights. This significantly increases the likelihood of a positive response.
29. Authentic Product Belief
Ensure you genuinely believe your product solves a real problem and will be amazing for customers. This authentic enthusiasm is crucial for effective marketing and customer engagement.
30. Signal Understanding & Maturity
Provide clear signals to potential customers that you understand their specific needs and that your company operates at a higher level than its size might suggest. This builds trust and confidence in your solution.
31. Hire for Detail-Oriented Balance
When hiring, seek individuals who possess a natural bent towards detail and are willing to invest extra minutes in quality, without becoming obsessively slow. This helps maintain high standards across the team.
32. Use Billboards for Legitimacy
Consider using remnant billboard inventory in strategic locations to signal legitimacy to large enterprise clients. This cost-effective tactic can make a small company appear larger and more trustworthy.
33. Track Customer Promotions KPI
Implement an unofficial metric to track how many customers get promoted due to their successful use of your product. This indicates genuine value creation and strong advocacy within key accounts.
34. Avoid Flashy Event Sponsorships
Be wary of investing in expensive, flashy event sponsorships that rarely provide a good return on investment for leads or signaling. Instead, attend events to network without the sponsorship cost.
35. Avoid Category Creation Goal
While differentiation is important, avoid making “category creation” your primary product marketing goal, especially in B2B SaaS. It’s a massive effort that often doesn’t align with how buyers make decisions.
36. Don’t Chase PR for Leads
Understand that general PR coverage is unlikely to directly generate significant leads or users. Focus on its value for credibility in specific contexts rather than as an acquisition channel.
37. Templates Not Acquisition Engine
Recognize that templates, while great for user education and in-company expansion, are not inherently a top-of-funnel acquisition mechanism. Significant additional investment in programmatic SEO is required for that goal.
5 Key Quotes
If you're listening to this, and you were thinking maybe you needed to add more stuff, I bet you could prune.
Zoelle Egner
Invest in having a decent photo or a decent illustration. If you have sample content... take the time to not have it be like Jane Doe 12 times in the name list. Have it be references to your industry...
Zoelle Egner
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.
Zoelle Egner
No one cares about your company. What they care about is themselves, frankly.
Zoelle Egner
I think I repeated the same like three talking points about why what we were doing mattered like 5,000 times.
Zoelle Egner
2 Protocols
Building Champions at Scale (Airtable Early Days)
Zoelle Egner- Use a Slack integration to pull in signup information (including title and company) for new Airtable users.
- Identify potential champions based on this information.
- Use a pre-built system to quickly email these individuals, offering to get their feedback and help them succeed with Airtable.
- Overinvest in helping these initial champions build their first successful Airtable bases.
- Track their success and use them as internal evangelists to spread Airtable within their companies.
- Provide fancy, branded swag (e.g., AirPods) to further excite and incentivize champions to show off the product.
Simple Customer Feedback System
Zoelle Egner- Write a template email for yourself that essentially says, '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?'
- Come up with a hypothesis of the type of person that you want to talk to.
- Run a query against your database to find someone matching your hypothesis.
- Send like three of those emails a week.
- Conduct phone conversations (not surveys) to get more nuanced insights from unstructured conversation.