Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner

1. 0:00 – 5:00

   How VaccinateCA helped bridge a gap in infrastructure

   1. ZEZoelle Egner0:00

      ... 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 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 through the personality of the company and makes people want to root for you. And frankly, when you are small, you need everyone...

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:58

      (laughs)

   3. ZEZoelle Egner0:58

      ... (laughs) rooting for you that you can possibly get.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00

      (intro music plays) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Zoelle Egner. Zoelle was one of the earliest employees at Airtable, where she led their early marketing and customer success teams, and generally just helped Airtable grow into the legendary business that it is today. She also spent time at Box. She's advised dozens of startups on marketing and growth, and is now head of marketing and growth at a startup called Blockparty. In our conversation, Zoelle shares how to punch above your weight as a startup, the most effective and impactful growth and marketing tactics throughout Airtable's history, including their use of billboards, marketing investments that are often high ROI and those that are rarely a good use of time, why PR launches are actually useful to startups, and also when they aren't, and a lot more. It was so much fun chatting with Zoelle, and I'm really excited for you to learn from her. With that, I bring you Zoelle Egner after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by OneSchema, the embeddable CSV importer for SaaS. Customers always seem to want to give you their data in the messiest possible CSV file, and building a spreadsheet importer becomes a never-ending sink for your engineering and support resources. You keep adding features to your spreadsheet importer, but customers keep running into issues. Six months later, you're fixing yet another date conversion edge case bug. Most tools aren't built for handling messy data, but OneSchema is. Companies like Scale AI and Pave are using OneSchema to make it fast and easy to launch delightful spreadsheet import experiences, from embeddable CSV import to importing CSVs from an SFTP folder on a recurring basis. Spreadsheet import is such an awful experience in so many products. Customers get frustrated by useless messages like, "Error on line 53," and never end up getting started with your product. OneSchema intelligently corrects messy data so that your customers don't have to spend hours in Excel just to get started with your product. For listeners of this podcast, OneSchema is offering a $1,000 discount. Learn more at oneschema.co/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Pando, the always-on employee performance platform. How much do you love the performance review process? Mm, yeah. It's time-consuming, subjective, biased, and there's rarely any transparency. With the rapid shift to distributed work, it's a struggle to create the structure and transparency that you want to help your employees have the highest impact and growth in their careers. Pando is disrupting the old paradigm of performance management, introducing a continuous, employee-centric approach so employees stay engaged, see their progression in real time, and know exactly when and how they can level up. With Pando, managers can leverage competency-based frameworks to effectively coach and develop their teams and align on consistent growth standards, resulting in higher quality feedback and higher performing teams. Visit pando.com/lenny for more info, and get a special discount when you sign up and reference this podcast. That's pando.com/lenny. Zoelle, welcome to the podcast.

   5. ZEZoelle Egner4:12

      Hi. Thanks for having me.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky4:14

      It's very much my pleasure. Something that is pretty cool is that we actually met in my newsletter Slack community. I actually looked this up of how we actually started chatting, and it was me cold DMing you to get a discount on Airtable for the new- newsletter subscribers, and you very happily got me that, hooked us up, and then you became my go-to Airtable person for, like, advice on what Airtable did right and wrong over the years. And so, thank you for being that person, and also, I'm really excited to have you on this podcast and to learn from you.

   7. ZEZoelle Egner4:43

      I am super excited to chat.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky4:45

      Awesome. So you're probably best known for your time at Airtable, which, correct me if I'm wrong, you're employee number 11?

   9. ZEZoelle Egner4:53

      That's right.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky4:54

       Okay. And at Airtable, you led marketing, you led the customer success teams. So we're gonna chat about all that stuff. But before we

2. 5:00 – 18:04

   Zoelle’s lessons from her time at VaccinateCA

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky5:00

      get into that, I want to chat briefly about this other project that you worked on that from the outside felt like a really fascinating thing and a really impactful project and a really cool team, and it's called Vaccinate California, I think is how you pronounce it?

   2. ZEZoelle Egner5:13

      Mm-hmm. Vaccinate CA.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky5:14

      Vaccinate CA. Okay. Could you just talk a little bit about what this was? Like, what, what were you trying to do? What was the impact you had? How did it all go?

   4. ZEZoelle Egner5:21

      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, 'cause most of us have blocked out from our memory-

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky5:41

      Yeah.

   6. ZEZoelle Egner5:41

      ... uh...

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky5:41

      Yeah.

   8. ZEZoelle Egner5:41

      ... the federal and state systems, like, 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, um, 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'd 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 were trying to figure out, like, "Do-... how to, how to keep themselves safe.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky6:17

      Yeah. I remember those days well.

   10. ZEZoelle Egner6:19

       Yeah. So this organization was founded essentially by a tweet, by Patrick McKenzie, for those of you who are on hacker news, Patio11. And he had basically this really simple premise, which is if you call a 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 off of the healthcare system, and also, like, helps people to sort of match supply and demand. So surprisingly, somehow, that, like, tweet (laughs) , 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, uh, in the state of California, and eventually actually nationally, we became Vaccinate the State eventually. We were also doing this thing called web banking, so we would go and scrape all the official sources as they started coming out and then validate them, 'cause they were not always correct. And eventually, we had the most comprehensive database, uh, 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 could and couldn't publish, based on some relationships they had, and we didn't have those limitations. So, it meant that we became this, like, kind of clearing house essentially for this information, um, and we built an API. Uh, we were working directly with Google, and, uh, if you ever looked up, like, vaccine locations on Google Maps, that was us, uh, feeding that to them, which was really cool. And we also made maps you could see on, like, county websites that would help you understand what was available in your area. One of the, like, coolest things that I've ever worked on, so...

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky8:01

       Okay. That's exactly I imagined how, uh, epic this was. Just to make sure people understand what you're describing, basically you had hundreds of people sitting there on phones calling vaccine locations, getting the specifics of who is able to get a vaccine there and then just-

   12. ZEZoelle Egner8:15

       Yeah.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky8:16

       ... giving people a pointer of where they can get a vaccine.

   14. ZEZoelle Egner8:18

       Exactly. Exactly. So I came in initially, a colleague of mine at Airtable had been helping out with the, like, building out of the backend. And they started getting media attention, and they thought, "Oh, 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 (laughs) at Airtable to work on it full-time.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky8:40

       Oh, wow.

   16. ZEZoelle Egner8:41

       Yeah. (laughs) I went on the board and also managing sort of all outreach and other stuff. So we did lots of really cool education, helping people understand, like, their eligibility at all, built a bunch of fun tools for that as well. But it was, it was a pretty incredible six months, where we filled, like, a really critical gap in the infrastructure of the country.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky8:58

       It's wild that that was the best solution, is just call people and (laughs) create your own-

   18. ZEZoelle Egner9:03

       You know?

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky9:03

       Your... I imagine there was an Airtable was at the f- Was, were you using to store the data?

   20. ZEZoelle Egner9:07

       Oh, yes.

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky9:07

       Okay. (laughs)

   22. ZEZoelle Egner9:07

       We built, uh, an entire, like, insane database and then eventually, like, custom software on top of that to make the people who were making the phone calls more easily get the information in. It was a whole thing. Very cool to see though. Not just, like, 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, like, said that he decided to join... He was based in Israel, and he had had, like, no trouble getting the vaccine whatsoever, but had 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 (laughs) who were helping out on the code of all things.

   23. LRLenny Rachitsky10:00

       Wow.

   24. ZEZoelle Egner10:00

       All who had just really wanted to make sure that they could keep their community safe.

   25. LRLenny Rachitsky10:03

       What happened with this organization? It's like a nonprofit that now continues to run, or what's happening there?

   26. ZEZoelle Egner10:06

       No, we, we did something which is not common. We actually decided to shut it down-

   27. LRLenny Rachitsky10:10

       Mm-hmm.

   28. ZEZoelle Egner10:10

       ... 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 were going to be more impactful. We always saw ourselves as a stopgap, and once we got to the place where we felt like we weren't really being additive, we wanted to get people's 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. Um, 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- we had that beautiful moment in time, and- and have all moved on, uh, hoping we don't have to get the band back together-

   29. LRLenny Rachitsky10:55

       Yeah. (laughs)

   30. ZEZoelle Egner10:55

       ... because hopefully, hopefully it's not necessary anymore.
3. 18:04 – 19:01

   How Zoelle broke into the tech industry

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky18:04

      just fill in some gaps on your background briefly. Can you just highlight some of the other wonderful things you've done in career? Airtable, we talked about. VaccinateCA. Just broadly, what else? What else have you been up to?

   2. ZEZoelle Egner18:13

      Yeah. 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 dilettante, so some nonprofit, healthcare, dying big box retail.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky18:28

      Hmm.

   4. ZEZoelle Egner18:29

      (laughs) Because I graduated right into the recession and I was, like, 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.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky18:41

      (laughs)

   6. ZEZoelle Egner18:41

      Um, but I always knew I wanted to get into tech, um, 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, because...

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky18:59

      Wait, can you talk about this, this... Which,

4. 19:01 – 24:21

   Flocking patterns

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky19:01

      what is it you did? (laughs) What did you call, flocking pattern?

   2. ZEZoelle Egner19:04

      S- sure. So i-... 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, um, 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-

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky19:48

      Whoa.

   4. ZEZoelle Egner19:48

      ... like, reading people's blog posts (laughs) of, like-

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky19:50

      (laughs)

   6. ZEZoelle Egner19:50

      ... who was influential in what way. Because I was non-technical, like, I, I tried, you know, programming and I hated it, frankly. And so it's like, "Okay, it's 2010, it's 2011, there's, like, 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 was 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 of the space that they were working in, where I thought I could maybe, like, email the CEO and be helpful.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky20:28

      And did this connect to that diagram you drew? Like, did this help you point in that direction?

   8. ZEZoelle Egner20:32

      Yeah, yeah.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky20:33

      All right.

   10. ZEZoelle Egner20:33

       Absolutely. So, like, I was, 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, uh, like, sexy. But while they were still connected into that broader sort of group, because it has sort of the pedigree that people would take you seriously if you had worked at a YC-backed startup.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky20:55

       Right.

   12. ZEZoelle Egner20:55

       Anyway, I got, like, really pointy hat strategic about this, but it was effective.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky21:00

       Do you still have this diagram, by the way? It'd be so funny to look at it right now.

   14. ZEZoelle Egner21:03

       No, no. I don't think I have it anymore. I might be able to dig it up, but, uh, alas, I think it, it may have been lost in one of my many moves since then. (laughs)

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky21:11

       All right. No problem.

   16. ZEZoelle Egner21:12

       It's been more than a decade. (laughs)

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky21:13

       Okay. I imagine that was true. Okay, so I think I cut you off. You had... You were talking about some of the things you've done in your career.

   18. ZEZoelle Egner21:20

       Yeah. So, I ended up sort of using my studies of the space to get into a role as employee one at a developer-focused YC-backed 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, 'cause I offered to introduce him to some professors, which was useful for the, the type of business. And then I ignored him for two years, because I, like, got busy with my thesis and got other jobs and whatever, and (laughs) then 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. (laughs) So thanks, Ryan. Appreciate that. Uh, that was how I got-

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky22:10

       Thanks, Ryan.

   20. ZEZoelle Egner22:12

       ... into tech.

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky22:12

       Good job, Ryan.

   22. ZEZoelle Egner22:12

       Yes. We appreciate it. So that startup got acquired by Box, and when I went over to Box, they had never had paying developers before. Uh, so we were bringing over, like, seven-figure contracts. So I started developer success programs there, and then in a totally w- 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, uh, I wrote this blog post about what it was like to be an early stage non-tech employee that was a little spicy, talking about some of the challenges. And I didn't tell anyone I was gonna do it, and I got this email from PR being like, "We need to have a meeting." And I was like, "Oh, they're gonna fire me." I went too far. I thought I was being, like, you know, circumspect, but I went too far. And in the meeting they were like, "Hey, we really think you should apply for this job. We would love to have you run social media." Which is not the outcome I expected.

   23. LRLenny Rachitsky23:05

       That's a cool learning there. Just, like, do stuff, you know? Don't be afraid.

   24. ZEZoelle Egner23:08

       Yeah. It was definitely not the expected outcome, but one that was very exciting. So got to-

   25. LRLenny Rachitsky23:14

       Great.

   26. ZEZoelle Egner23:14

       ... uh, go run those programs for a couple years through the IPO, uh, 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, uh, that role as employee 11 there. And it sounds like we're gonna talk about Airtable more, so I won't belabor that, but marketing and customer success stuff, uh, 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, a certain window in which to try out different ideas, and at the same time was sort of advising and consulting. Ultimately didn't end up finding anything that I felt, like, so much conviction that it was worth, like, blowing up absolutely else, everything else about my life, uh, in order to go heads down on a company. So eventually decided to go in-house with one of the companies I'd been advising, Blockparty, and now I run marketing at Grifter.

   27. LRLenny Rachitsky24:19

       Can you just explain Blockparty briefly?

5. 24:21 – 24:32

   What Block Party does

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky24:21

   2. NANarrator24:21

      Sure, yeah.

   3. ZEZoelle Egner24:21

      Absolutely. So we're an online safety company. Uh, we help users have more control over their digital experience. And our first product is anti-harassment and anti-spam tools for Twitter.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky24:30

      So you've worked at Box,

6. 24:32 – 29:15

   Zoelle’s storytelling

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky24:32

      Airtable, now Blockparty.

   2. ZEZoelle Egner24:34

      Mm-hmm.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky24:34

      You've advised a lot of companies around marketing, product-led growth,I'm curious if there's a thread that has kind of maintained through all of those experiences in terms of what works well for marketing, and growth, and, and things you've learned that just consistently works.

   4. ZEZoelle Egner24:52

      A few pieces that go into how I choose companies that create that thread, 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, like, 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 (laughs) . 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 gonna solve a real problem for you and it's gonna 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 gonna be really, really helpful and sort of the opportunities for a much wider range of people to benefit from that. So, in 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 a 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 l- high level of trust, I guess. So, like, I'll be more specific 'cause 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 of Rock Party, right? Like, online safety, you have to trust the company that you're, uh, entrusting your safety to. And, in my experience, people and especially founders really underestimate how much every single touchpoint a per- customer has from word of mouth, or the ad that brings them in the door, landing pages, sign-up flows, 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, you know, six figures or, like, put, 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 with a product experience that is really powerful and actually does the things it says it's gonna do, then your word of mouth can sort of become a huge driver of growth for the company. Of course, the outcome of this in practice is really funny. So, like, I remember (laughs) 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 spending six figures with us when we had 15 people. Like, if they had gone to look on LinkedIn, they could have figured that out, but, like, we didn't need to remind them that we were so small. And they were, like, running some of their most important processes with our product. Uh, like, 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. A little smaller. Just an entire order of magnitude. No big deal. It's totally fine. We're awesome. We'll take care of you. It's gonna be great." But it really-

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky28:28

      Amazing.

   6. ZEZoelle Egner28:28

      ... it makes a difference, you know, all the, all those little things.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky28:31

      That reminds me, I heard stories of early, like, very early Airb- Airbnb days where they had to take meetings in a bathroom or in the hallway.

   8. ZEZoelle Egner28:38

      Yep.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky28:38

      And they did interviews, I think, in, in the hallway 'cause there was no space.

   10. ZEZoelle Egner28:41

       We did a lot of calling from the hallway in, in Airtable. Uh, also from this, like, weird internal patio that you could only get to through c- climbing through a window. The window kept breaking, and so, like, I, at one point remember someone, like, getting stuck outside trying to interview someone with, like, the window (laughs) closed. Like, utter, utter, like, ridiculous nonsense, but, you know, that's all the, the fun things that happen in the early days before you become bigger.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky29:06

       Yeah. I love those early days stories.

   12. ZEZoelle Egner29:08

       Yeah.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky29:08

       Uh, I really love the concept of punching above your weight as a startup. What else did you do at

7. 29:15 – 31:30

   Tactics for punching above your weight as a small startup

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky29:15

      Airtable or other places that helped you do that? So, one is just don't s- don't let them see how small you are, necessarily. Are there any other tactical things you recall that, like, "Oh, here's things that really worked really well for punching above our weight as a small company at that point"?

   2. ZEZoelle Egner29:28

      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. Like, I think there is sometimes a recommendation or an instinct just to, 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. Like, invest in having, like, a decent photo or a decent illustration. Uh, 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 gonna fit my needs than something generic. And that builds up both the brand trust that we've talked about, but also through the personality of the company and makes people want to root for you. And frankly, when you are small, you need everyone rooting for you (laughs) that you can possibly get. Uh, 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, you know, some companies can, some companies can't, having more of a point of view than just about your product. If you can try and say, like, "We are part of something bigger. Here is the broader circle or movement that we are a part of," it makes it feel more inevitable and more like you are ... you're not just sort of, like, self-servantly talking about, you know, your tiny corner of the world, but that'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.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky31:28

      I love that. On the first

8. 31:30 – 33:33

   The importance of having a highly detail-oriented person on staff

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky31:30

      point, basically it's attention to detail and obsession with quality is what I'm hearing.

   2. ZEZoelle Egner31:34

      Yes.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky31:34

      Just to make it clear, like, this isn't just, like, a tiny team just, like, pushing stuff out. I imagine most founders w- would be like, "Yes, I would love t- Like, we are gonna focus on quality, and we will make sure everything looks great." In, in reality, though, it always is kind of this trade-off against other things they could be doing.

   4. ZEZoelle Egner31:50

      Yep.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky31:50

      What do you think folks can do to help keep that level of quality? Is it just, like, one person being obsessed and just reviewing everything, like a founder? Is, like, some- having someone like you that's just, like, very detail-oriented just, like, review everything? How do you actually execute that when you have a thousand things to do?

   6. ZEZoelle Egner32:05

      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 gonna 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

   7. NANarrator32:19

      (laughs)

   8. ZEZoelle Egner32:19

      ... is 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 is 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, m- marketing human who cares (laughs) . 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, uh, provide their feedback on the way that you're showing up in the world, which you should, because they have fantastic insights. 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 and that balance and who are willing to put in the extra 15 minutes, uh, but aren't gonna spend, like, an extra week trying to, like, obsessively QA everything. You don't want to go that far. Just who have that sort of bent towards detail, uh, 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 gonna 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, the dividends are, are worth it, I think.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky33:31

      I like how simple this is, just to

9. 33:33 – 36:43

   Why Airtable used billboards

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky33:33

      look like a bigger company. It's just paying attention and focus on the little things. Like, it's not a big ol' thing.

   2. ZEZoelle Egner33:39

      There, there are some-

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky33:40

      Yeah, okay.

   4. ZEZoelle Egner33:40

      ... bigger things you can do if you really need to. My, uh, my favorite silly example of this is, 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 were 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, 'cause we were in, like, the fashion industry, the media industry in New York. We knew exactly where all of their, like, offices were, and we knew if they saw our billboards walking to work and then got the I- the request to IT, like, for the budget in order to, you know, 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. Uh, 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, right? So you can get kind of creative about it. Most of the time, you're not gonna do that. Most of the time, it's, like, re-read your emails. But you could also sort of push it even further if you need to.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky35:12

      What is that full rough cost of billboards like? Is there ... Like, 'cause I think people think about billboards, and, like, it's hard to even know what, what they cost. Like, what's, like, a number?

   6. ZEZoelle Egner35:20

      It really, really depends. So I'm hesitant to give you a number, because which metro you're in, like, 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.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky35:34

      For, like, one billboard?

   8. ZEZoelle Egner35:36

      Yeah. So you don't need to get a million, right? Like, uh, and I'm not suggesting you go get one on, like, 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 remnant.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky35:52

      Are you hiring? Or on the flip side, are you looking for a new opportunity? Well, either way, check out lennysjobs.com/talent. If you're a hiring manager, you can sign up and get access to hundreds of hand-curated people who are open to new opportunities. Thousands of people apply to join this collective, and I personally review and accept just about 10% of them. You won't find a better place to hire product managers and growth leaders. Join almost 100 other companies who are actively hiring through this collective. And if you're looking around for a new opportunity, actively or passively, join the collective. It's free, you can be anonymous, and you can even hide yourself from specific companies. You could also leave any time, and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from. Check out lennysjobs.com/talent. Following this thread a bit,

10. 36:43 – 42:29

    Growth and marketing strategies at Airtable

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky36:43

       my next question is, and this may be the answer, is when you think about Airtable's growth strategy, growth tactics over time-

    2. What would you say are one, or two, or three of the most impactful marketing or growth tactics-

    3. ZEZoelle Egner36:58

       Yeah.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky36:58

       ... that, uh, work best over, over time? And maybe billboards are one of them.

    5. ZEZoelle Egner37:02

       I wouldn't say they were the highest ROI, but they are certainly one of the more interesting things that we did. They were, they were useful, don't get me wrong, but, eh, 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 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 (laughs) going to work for your B2B business now, because that, that's totally changed.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky37:29

       When you say unconventional, what do you mean?

    7. ZEZoelle Egner37:31

       We spent 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. Uh, 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 don't wanna do that. That sounds hard. That sounds stupid. No." And so we couldn't really use, like, super generic messaging. But to go really specific into verticals, which we did end up ultimately doing, didn't give us the, sort of the broad coverage to go find new opportunities. Like, you could 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, like, vertical-specific work that we did with also trying to find this type of person who we had discovered, uh, was gonna 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, like, Tinkerer's 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, um, many, many different roles. And so instead-

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky38:56

       And Facebook doesn't let you... Like, Facebook doesn't let you do that anymore, right? The targeting-

    9. ZEZoelle Egner38:59

       No, no.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky39:00

        Yeah.

    11. ZEZoelle Egner39:00

        You can't target based on, like-

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky39:02

        Yep, good to know.

    13. ZEZoelle Egner39:02

        ... they have a tinkerer mentality, unfortunately.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky39:04

        (laughs) Okay, got it.

    15. ZEZoelle Egner39:04

        It's very sad. (laughs) But-

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky39:05

        Okay, yep. I see how that's not possible.

    17. ZEZoelle Egner39:07

        Yeah, but what you can do is you can say, "That type of person often likes these types of media." Uh, and 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, you know, like, 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, build lookalike based on it.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky39:38

        Did not expect Facebook Ads as one of these answers, so that's interesting.

    19. ZEZoelle Egner39:41

        No, and it's not, it's not a good idea anymore. Don't, don't do it now. (laughs)

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky39:44

        Disclaimer.

    21. ZEZoelle Egner39:44

        Back in the day it was great.

    22. LRLenny Rachitsky39:45

        Noted.

    23. ZEZoelle Egner39:45

        Now I would not recommend. But I have some unconventional ones that I, I can suggest that are-

    24. LRLenny Rachitsky39:52

        Get into it.

    25. ZEZoelle Egner39:52

        ... uh, not Facebook. There's a few different things, but I wanna give some context first, is, for people who are not as familiar with, like, Airtable's business, 'cause I do think these are really helpful pieces of context. The first is, because of the types of industries that we're often very successful in, had, like, a very similar network effect that we would see where, like, basically it was within specific professions. We would see people who, in order to distinguish themselves in that job market, uh, 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 where it was, like, really, really helpful to build a brand for yourself so that you could hop around to different jobs more quickly to 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 was inside of company virality. That was like the real superpower of Airtable. We'd go from like 10 people to 1000 people in a year. And so we were always looking for ways to make that happen within companies, uh, 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. Uh, but it's also the fault of the fact that, like, the market was not ready for the good generic explanation to mean anything, like I meant- mentioned before. Like, people just did not care about the generic explanation. And the magic of Airtable's always seen in its specificity. So, we knew if we can get to the right people and we can connect the dots to them to the correct use case so they, like, wanna 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, you know, I'm using Airtable as a content calendar, but you, you have a UX research problem, and I understand Airtable enough that I can, like, help you build a system and now I'm a superhero internally because I, like, helped you build this whole new thing. Look at me, I'm amazing." And they subtly have, like, 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 of that is to say the two sort of interesting things that we did were all around that. In the very early days

11. 42:29 – 50:59

    Using data provided by your customers to build features that help future customers

    1. ZEZoelle Egner42:29

       what that meant in practice was we literally had a S- Slack integration that we pulled in a whole bunch of information about anyone who signed up for Airtable, including their title, the, 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 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 Airtable." This is not scalable in the long term 'cause 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 look 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 on that. 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 gonna be obvious if we hadn't talked to a ton of people." So it seems really un-obvious as, like an investment per se, but tremendous number of human hours 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.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky43:57

       That is fascinating. So essentially you weren't even sure who would be excited about Airtable. Part of this is, like figure out the personas and groups of people that we believe are the right target to kind of encourage and help support. And then part of that is get it spreading within a company once you figure out these folks within a company. Such a cool idea to just, like have a feed of ... Like, I imagine this bot had certain attributes of the person, like, here's the company they work at. Here's how big it is. And then they talk about, like there's a mention of what they're using it for. Is that, is that part of this?

    3. ZEZoelle Egner44:31

       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, 'cause that would be a tremendous, like 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've used certain templates, but we didn't otherwise really know and it was part of the reason we wanted, 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 space. 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 is successful by over-investing in them, then they essentially became, like support for everybody else. I should also clarify, these were not necessarily people who were gonna be the buyers. The buyers and the champions here look very, very different for Airtable, which is a really interesting, uh, an interesting dynamic that many companies do not have. But for us, the person who was gonna, like sit down with a glass of wine on a Friday and build an Airtable base was not the person who had the budget who was gonna pay for this thing. And so, we weren't initially looking for buyers. We were looking for champions. In part, so that we could then go to IT, you know, 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.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky45:57

       Fascinating. It, it makes me think a lot about the product, like sales movement and how this is essentially that, but even earlier, because it's, people just signed up and you're just helping them be successful versus, like, this company's got 14 people using it. Should you go try to sell them an enterprise contract? Essentially this was a tool to help you figure out how to ... Like basically scaling customer success and helping you prioritize who to go after-

    5. ZEZoelle Egner46:19

       Yeah.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky46:19

       ... and being very hands-on with the strongest potential future big buyers.

    7. ZEZoelle Egner46:24

       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, 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's 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're like, it either works for you or it 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 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 or that functions. If you can't get your team to use it effectively or if it doesn't fit into the broader context of the organization, it's still gonna 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.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky47:53

       That's a really good tactic for any SaaS product that just, just is hard to understand-

    9. ZEZoelle Egner47:58

       Yeah.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky47:58

        ... and needs ... Like, Airtable had both problems. Like, "I don't know what this is for and I don't know exactly how it's gonna fit into my workflow." I imagine most companies don't have to deal with both those problems.

    11. ZEZoelle Egner48:07

        No. Hopefully not, hopefully not.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky48:08

        Yeah.

    13. ZEZoelle Egner48:08

        But once you actually get in with folks, it's very difficult to remove it, right? So, like suddenly your retention 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, and miss that, like huge customer success component that was always very, very important in the early days. Um, 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.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky48:35

        Fascinating.

    15. ZEZoelle Egner48:36

        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. 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 'cause they were so excited they got branded AirPods. People would ask about it walking by their desks. It sounds so, like, trivial, but for that, like, you know, couple of hundred bucks that we spent knowing, like, "Hey, this person's already a champion and if someone asks them, they're gonna give a really good pitch." Totally worth it. Sometimes better to not skimp on swag. Hard to measure, very effective.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky49:27

        That's a great tip, and it connects to the general idea of find your champions and just do a lot to make sure they're successful, excited, want to evangelize, and an AirPod here and there feels like a really good ROI investment.

    17. ZEZoelle Egner49:40

        It was for us.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky49:41

        Anything else along those lines?

    19. ZEZoelle Egner49:42

        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're going to over-invest 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 gonna find scale in the long run. So for us what that meant was we would talk to a bunch of customers and then customer success would have, like, helped them build bases, and then we would create templates. They were not exact copies because we're not trying to steal their intellectual property, but we'd 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, this little 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 gonna 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.

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky50:57

        I know that you have a strong opinion that customer

12. 50:59 – 52:56

    Why customer success and marketing should be one team

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky50:59

       success and marketing are basically the same thing and should be maybe one team. Can you speak to that?

    2. ZEZoelle Egner51:05

       Yeah. This is, this is my spicy opinion. But, like, both of them have to do kind of the same things, right? They have to identify customer needs, they have to help the, 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 help everybody. They use different tactics, right? Like, marketing is gonna use more scalable tactics. Customer success is gonna 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 gonna make them look good," then, like, maybe 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, like, there's not a better evangelist than a person whose career you have materially helped to improve based on, like, matching the right person to the solution so that they can have more impact at their company. Uh, so much so that one of my unofficial metrics for both marketing and customer success at Airtable, unofficial, was, like, how many people we'd gotten promoted for using the product. I had like sort of a running tally of those people, and I knew if we were getting those at the major accounts we were trying to win, like, something, something good was happening and we were gonna be successful with really large deals.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky52:36

       So curious how you tracked that. I guess you just check in with them occasionally.

    4. ZEZoelle Egner52:40

       No, I had my CSNs literally, like, they had really strong relationships. We were, we were-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky52:44

       Mm-hmm.

    6. ZEZoelle Egner52:44

       ... actually tracking it. It was a little embarrassing, but it worked really well.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky52:47

       I love it. That's a great KPI. It's like dating apps and how many people get married, I guess.

    8. ZEZoelle Egner52:52

       Exactly.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky52:53

       Zooming out a little bit, you advise a lot of companies

13. 52:56 – 58:04

    Things to avoid in marketing

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky52:56

       on marketing, customer success, growth, and things like that. Maybe there's, like, a two-part question and see where you wanna take it.

    2. ZEZoelle Egner53:03

       Yeah.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky53:03

       One is just what are activities that marketing and growth and customer success teams often do that are impactful, and c- consistently impactful, things that you think startups should invest in but maybe they aren't, or they already are and they should definitely keep doing this? And on the flip side, things that don't work and-

    4. ZEZoelle Egner53:21

       Yeah.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky53:21

       ... things that, uh, maybe they should avoid. And yeah, so maybe let's start there and then there's gonna be a follow-up.

    6. ZEZoelle Egner53:26

       Cool. Okay. I'm gonna start with things to avoid because I try and, not to make too many blanket statements on this, but I have a couple that I am willing to make. So, like, 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 gonna 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 'cause that's where everyone hangs out. At that point, like, yeah, of course you're gonna have to go do that. But if you're in, like, more standard B2B SaaS where that's not really a thing, there are better ways to get in front of those people than having your logo out there. All ... Like, that doesn't tell them anything. Maybe you get a branded session at the, the conference or whatever, but who's gonna go to that branded session? Probably not that many people. And then you'll have spent so much money and gotten nothing for it. Go to the event. Do not spend your money on the sponsorship. It's stupid. Um, and then the second one, uh, which is definitely a very spicy opinion, but I'm gonna go there.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky54:40

       Go there.

    8. ZEZoelle Egner54:41

       A lot of people think that, like, the epitome of product marketing is creating your own category. And 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, and...... 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, like, Gainsight creating customer success or, like, many companies all together carving out DevOps or, like, rebranding DevOps to be a thing that was suddenly a, a sexy job to have. And I think that's valuable because a job is an identity and 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, uh, either an existing or a brand new job and say, like, "This is really important for much broader business metrics, whatever else, uh, we're gonna 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.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky56:34

       Amazing. I love that. Uh, is there more you wanted to add there?

    10. ZEZoelle Egner56:38

        No.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky56:38

        Okay.

    12. ZEZoelle Egner56:39

        I think that's enough on not to do.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky56:40

        What this reminds me of, broadly, is just stay focused on the customer and their problems, right? Like, don't obsess with who you are. It's who are you selling to and how will you make their life better? Reminds me of this old, uh, idea from Kathy Sierra. Does that ring a bell?

    14. ZEZoelle Egner56:54

        Yeah. Oh, totally.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky56:54

        Where you make your... Yeah. You make your customer a superhero.

    16. ZEZoelle Egner56:57

        Mm-hmm.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky56:57

        You want them to feel like a superhero-

    18. ZEZoelle Egner56:59

        It works.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky56:59

        ... and if they feel like a superhero... And that's... Yeah. That sounds like that's essentially what, what you did with Airtable and all of these companies you worked with.

    20. ZEZoelle Egner57:05

        That, that is always the goal. Like, how can you make them the hero of the story and not you? 'Cause no one cares about your company. What they care about is, is themselves, frankly.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky57:12

        Are there any products or companies you think of off the top of your head that are really good at this, that are just, like, they nailed this?

    22. ZEZoelle Egner57:18

        Yeah. That's a good question. Certainly, the two that I mentioned that have sort of, like, helped rebrand some of the, uh, the professions, so like the Gainsights of the world. I'm, I'm blanking a little bit on the ones that have done this for DevOps really effectively, but there's certainly some that have.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky57:32

        Maybe Datadog.

    24. ZEZoelle Egner57:33

        Yeah. Datadog has done a pretty good job of that. I, 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, like, super obviously immediate ROI for you, but they will for the community and for building the community. Oh, actually, one really good example. Uh, 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

14. 58:04 – 1:00:58

    The power of templates

    1. ZEZoelle Egner58:04

       not pushing Notion, you're pushing, like, the, the beautiful creation that you have to solve a problem. I think they've done a really nice job on that process and, and several of their competitors, I think, have done a pretty decent job as well, but they certainly come to mind.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky58:18

       Speaking of templates, I know Airtable's kinda known for templates being... And you've mentioned this, being a big part of the success. And I imagine a lot of companies now are just creating templates left and right because they imagine that's the core, what helped a lot of these companies, Notion being an example. What is your take on the power and importance of templates for software?

    3. ZEZoelle Egner58:38

       I think they can be tremendously helpful if you are horizontal because they help to narrow the surface area for a user so they understand how to connect the dots between, like, their problem and your product. And if it is not obvious to someone how they can solve a specific problem, they're gonna, like, 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, Airtable's top of funnel. That is not the case. I, I was having a conversation with someone who worked a lot on SEO at Airtable in the much later days and, and sort of laughing 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. They weren't... 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 they 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, that's not gonna 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.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:29

       Do you think Airtable could have taken advantage of that top of funnel approach if they invested from an SEO perspective or do you think it wasn't an opportunity? Uh, or-

    5. ZEZoelle Egner1:00:37

       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

15. 1:00:58 – 1:02:04

    Why Airtable did not prioritize templates for top-of-funnel revenue

    1. ZEZoelle Egner1:00:58

       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 i- in early days, like, you, you leave good opportunities because you have to focus on other things.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:13

       ... so. (instrumental music) Got it. And so, a takeaway here is templates could be really useful for customer success versus SEO top of funnel, right? That's kind of where they became powerful.

    3. ZEZoelle Egner1:01:21

       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, and not just like have some people make some templates. You gotta do way more than just that. It's not gonna be sufficient.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:35

       Final potential question, depending on where this goes.

    5. ZEZoelle Egner1:01:37

       Yeah. (laughs)

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:38

       And I'm curious how spicy this answer gets.

    7. ZEZoelle Egner1:01:40

       Oh, boy.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:40

       And it's, it's around launches and PR.

    9. ZEZoelle Egner1:01:43

       Mm-hmm.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:43

        Uh, you work with a lot of startups. I imagine founders are always trying to plan a launch, get PR. I'm curious your take on the value of investing a bunch of resources in a big launch, the value of just getting PR as an early stage startup.

    11. ZEZoelle Egner1:01:56

        Yeah. So just getting PR is not a good goal. I know that's, like, been well stated in the market, but just to reiterate it, like,

16. 1:02:04 – 1:04:57

    Why just getting PR to “get PR” is not a good strategy

    1. ZEZoelle Egner1:02:04

       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, 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, like, maybe links to you once somewhere in the 12th paragraph or whatever, how many people are actually gonna click on that link? Not that many people. How many people are gonna, like, read that and remember to go Google it? Not as many as you want. Okay? There's gonna 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 going 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 the most sense, because in both cases they have a different distribution mechanism, right? In hiring, you're gonna, like, 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 up 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. Uh, 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 gonna 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, but I'm not sure it's gonna do much else for you. Um, so have really clear goals and have realistic goals or 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 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 gonna be good fits for your company.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:26

       I love that advice. Any final thoughts before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

    3. ZEZoelle Egner1:04:34

       Mostly just, like, all of this is easier if you talk to your customers more. So spend, like, 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, if you're a founder or product manager, whatever else, should find a way

17. 1:04:57 – 1:05:51

    The importance of getting customer feedback and investing in customer success

    1. ZEZoelle Egner1:04:57

       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, like, strongly consider investing in customer success if you are a B2B company early. Airtable had it 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 gonna listen to them, though, don't, don't hire them, 'cause that's sad.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:21

       All right. I have follow-up questions then-

    3. ZEZoelle Egner1:05:23

       (laughs)

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:23

       ... on the customer success piece. Say someone wants to invest in customer success. Is there a resource or person or anything that you could point folks to to understand and think about how to do this well?

    5. ZEZoelle Egner1:05:36

       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

18. 1:05:51 – 1:07:53

    Simple strategies for getting customer feedback

    1. ZEZoelle Egner1:05:51

       me a message. I will, I will give you some advice. Um, all of our industry will be better if there are more people working in 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, uh, there's not a ton. So people in customer success, please share your learnings more with founders.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:09

       I've-

    3. ZEZoelle Egner1:06:09

       All of us would like to see it.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:10

       Yeah. I've actually been looking for someone to write a guest post in the newsletter about just how to set up a customer success team. And so-

    5. ZEZoelle Egner1:06:16

       Yeah.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:16

       ... if you're listening and you think you could be that person, let me know.

    7. ZEZoelle Egner1:06:18

       Uh, yeah. I, I have, um, some people that I will not put on the spot right now that I will send your way that I think could do a great job.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:26

       Amazing. Okay. Let's make this happen.

    9. ZEZoelle Egner1:06:27

       (laughs) Yeah.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:28

        And then I wanted to ask you a question on the first piece of advice, which is founders talk to their customers more often. Is there, like, one tactical piece of advice you could recommend for how to do that?

    11. ZEZoelle Egner1:06:37

        Yeah.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:37

        How to, like, find a customer, how to set it up consistently.

    13. ZEZoelle Egner1:06:40

        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?" Um, 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 gonna get from, like, sending them three, you know, 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, 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.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:23

        Great advice. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.

    15. ZEZoelle Egner1:07:27

        Yes (laughs) .

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:27

        I've got six questions for you. I'm gonna-

    17. ZEZoelle Egner1:07:30

        Okay.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:30

        ... go through 'em pretty quick. Whatever comes to mind. Let's see where it goes.

    19. ZEZoelle Egner1:07:34

        Okay.

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:34

        Question number one, what are two or three books that you recommend most to other people?

    21. ZEZoelle Egner1:07:39

        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.

    22. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:48

        Mm-hmm.

    23. ZEZoelle Egner1:07:49

        Right now, obviously, uh, AI is

19. 1:07:53 – 1:10:47

    Lightning round

    1. ZEZoelle Egner1:07:53

       a big topic of conversation, so here are two books that will enrich your mental model for artificial intelligence and encourage you to think about it from different perspectives. The first one, a little bit academic, highly recommend it though, it's a book called Computing Taste by Nick Seaver. Uh, 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, uh, book for a bunch of reasons, including that it's a 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 uncomfortable for a person in tech to read, but I think it is a fascinating perspective, uh, and very relevant to the stuff that's going on in ARI right now. So, go check it out. Computing Taste by Nick Seaver. The second is, uh, a fiction book, but, um, the Ancillary Justice series by Ann Leckie. It's about a spaceship AI that ends up separated from its ship and trapped in a body. I'm gonna leave it at that. Worth reading for a different way of thinking about AI.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:56

       I think we need a Zoel full episode on book recommendations. These are amazing. Let's keep going.

    3. ZEZoelle Egner1:09:02

       (laughs) . So good.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:02

       What's a favorite other podcast of yours that you love to listen to other than this podcast?

    5. ZEZoelle Egner1:09:07

       Probably either Happiness Lab or Gastropod. I love food and also psychology. One of those two.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:13

       All right. Interesting. Okay, we'll keep going. Favorite recent movie or TV show?

    7. ZEZoelle Egner1:09:17

       Movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once. Uh, and TV show, there's a, uh, Korean drama called Extraordinary Attorney Woo that I really enjoyed.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:26

       Favorite interview question that you like to ask?

    9. ZEZoelle Egner1:09:29

       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 gonna 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 a, like an unfamiliar problem using Zapier. And they can like use the internet to look things up, whatever, but I basically, like lay out for them a problem that I as the customer want to, 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

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:10

        I have not heard that one before. Fascinating. Top five SaaS products that you enjoy. And Airtable cannot be one of them.

    11. ZEZoelle Egner1:10:18

        Ugh. Okay. Uh, 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 m- maybe spicy, but I actually love Google Docs. I'm not a Notion stan, sorry.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:35

        Hey, I, I love them all.

    13. ZEZoelle Egner1:10:36

        (laughs) But Google Docs is like my best friend.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:37

        It looks great.

    15. ZEZoelle Egner1:10:38

        Yeah. And then there is a personal CRM company that I invested in, so sorry maybe this is not allowed. But th- called Clay. And it is like the only way I've ever been able to keep track of my relationships-

Episode duration: 1:13:51