Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner

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.