Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Creating a New Category is Not Worth It
Creating your own category in product marketing may seem like the epitome, but it is often a waste of time. Having a small niche with no competitors is not how buyers work. However, there are effective alternatives that give the illusion of category creation.
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Zoelle Egner is best known for her time at Airtable (currently valued at $11 billion), where she was the 11th employee and built and led the initial marketing and customer success teams. Currently she’s the Head of Marketing and Growth at Block Party, a company that designs consumer tools for online safety and anti-harassment. In today’s episode, we explore the marketing strategies that helped Airtable punch above its weight and build an established brand. We also dig into how Airtable was able to find its first super-users, how customer success played a key role in getting early traction, and the do’s and don’ts for marketing investments. Zoelle also shares her experience working for VaccinateCA (which ended up playing a massive role in helping get people vaccinated during the pandemic) and several tips for obtaining valuable customer feedback.
Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-airtables-unconventional
Where to find Zoelle Egner:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/zoelle
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoelleegner/
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
Referenced:
• Patrick McKenzie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/patio11
• The Last of Us on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/the-last-of-us
• Airtable: https://www.airtable.com/
• Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/
• Block Party app: https://www.blockpartyapp.com/
• Kathy Sierra’s book Badass: Making Users Awesome: https://www.amazon.com/Badass-Making-Awesome-Kathy-Sierra/dp/1491919019
• Gainsight: https://www.gainsight.com/
• Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/
• Notion: https://www.notion.so/
• Zapier: https://zapier.com/
• Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation: https://www.amazon.com/Computing-Taste-Algorithms-Makers-Recommendation/dp/0226822974
• Ancillary Justice: https://www.amazon.com/Ancillary-Justice-Imperial-Radch-Leckie/dp/031624662X/
• The Happiness Lab podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/id1474245040
• Gastropod podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gastropod/id918896288
• Everything Everywhere All at Once on Showtime: https://www.sho.com/titles/3493875/everything-everywhere-all-at-once
• Extraordinary Attorney Woo on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81518991
• Figma: https://www.figma.com/
• Webflow: https://webflow.com/
• Clay: https://www.clay.com/
• MKT1 Newsletter: https://newsletter.mkt1.co/
• Emily Kramer on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-build-a-powerful-marketing-machine-emily-kramer-asana-carta-mkt1/
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) How VaccinateCA helped bridge a gap in infrastructure
(05:00) Zoelle’s lessons from her time at VaccinateCA
(18:04) How Zoelle broke into the tech industry
(19:01) Flocking patterns
(24:21) What Block Party does
(24:32) Zoelle’s storytelling
(29:15) Tactics for punching above your weight as a small startup
(31:30) The importance of having a highly detail-oriented person on staff
(33:33) Why Airtable used billboards
(36:43) Growth and marketing strategies at Airtable
(42:29) Using data provided by your customers to build features that help future customers
(50:59) Why customer success and marketing should be one team
(52:56) Things to avoid in marketing
(58:04) The power of templates
(1:00:58) Why Airtable did not prioritize templates for top-of-funnel revenue
(1:02:04) Why just getting PR to “get PR” is not a good strategy
(1:04:57) The importance of getting customer feedback and investing in customer success
(1:05:51) Simple strategies for getting customer feedback
(1:07:53) Lightning round
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.
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