Zoelle Egner
Founding Operator, Coalition Operators. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
operatorexecutive@zoelle ↗LinkedIn ↗
Egner was the 11th employee at Airtable, where she built and directed the company's initial customer success and marketing teams. She also co-organized the grassroots initiative VaccinateCA during the COVID-19 pandemic and drove marketing for online safety platform Block Party.
1shows
1appearances
27statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Zoelle Egner said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
VaccinateCA mapped COVID vaccines better than the US government
“And eventually we had the most comprehensive database and map of locations in the entire country, including more comprehensive than the federal government and most of the states, because they had really complicated limitations on what they could and couldn't p…”
Contrary to belief, templates did not drive Airtable's top-of-funnel traffic
“A lot of people think that templates were what drove like Airtable's top of Sunnel. That is not the case. I was having a conversation with someone who works a lot on SEO at Airtable in the much later days. And sort of laughing over the fact that people thought…”
Airtable bought remnant billboards in New York to signal enterprise legitimacy
“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 ge…”
Targeted Facebook ads no longer work for B2B user acquisition
“The boring answer that I will caveat this with is that one of the pieces of our acquisition playbook, it 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 goin…”
Airtable depended heavily on customer success early on, not pure PLG
“A lot of people think that Airtable was like a pure product led growth company and miss that, like
Huge customer success component that was always very, very important in the early days. And that helped us ultimately move more towards that PLG motion for a whi…”
Egner: Airtable tracked customer promotions as an unofficial growth KPI
“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 maj…”
Event sponsorships are almost always a waste for B2B SaaS startups
“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 going to be really great for signaling purposes or for leads or whatever. And like, They're almost always a waste o…”
Egner: Elevating a profession is far more effective than category creation
“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 altogether carving out DevOps or like rebranding DevOps to be a thing that was…”
Egner: PR is ineffective as a direct user acquisition channel for startups
“Most of the time, PR is not going to get you leads or users. It's just not.”
Egner: VaccinateCA provided the COVID-19 vaccine location data for Google Maps
“And we built an API. We were working directly with Google, and if you ever looked up, like, vaccine locations on Google Maps, that was us feeding that to them, which was really cool.”
Airtable hosted enterprise clients off-site to hide their 15-person office
“I remember 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 ne…”
Egner: Remnant billboard inventory can cost in the low thousands
“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.”
Egner: Pitching 'build your own software' alienates most potential users
“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 want to do that. That sounds hard. That sounds stupid. No.”
Inside-company virality scaled Airtable accounts from 10 to 1,000 users yearly
“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 a thousand people a year.”
Egner: Airtable champions building bases were distinct from budget buyers
“The buyers and the champions here look very, very different for Airtable, which is a really interesting 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 A…”
Egner: Accumulating 500 internal champions made enterprise IT sales easy for Airtable
“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 convers…”
Egner: The best product evangelists are users whose careers you materially improved
“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.”
Egner: Startups should execute repeated launches instead of one big launch
“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 …”
Egner: Live Zapier problem-solving tests reveal customer success candidate capabilities
“I like to ask anyone who's going to 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 th…”
Egner: VaccinateCA shut down after six months once public systems caught up
“We actually decided to shut it down after six months. Partially that's because the existing system finally caught up. And frankly, we didn't want to be in a place where we were pulling away resources that could be put towards other things that are gonna be mor…”
Egner: VaccinateCA operated on simple tools like Discord, phones, and Airtable
“It was phones, discord, and like Airtable mostly being used like a spreadsheet, right? Like it wasn't anything wild. Even that very simple infrastructure was enough to make a huge difference, and we have some evidence that, like, we saved a lot of lives as a r…”
Tailoring sample app data builds customer trust and connection
“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 …”
Egner: Flexible Software Must Teach Workflow Design, Not Just Features
“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?”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Zoelle's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Founding Operator, Coalition Operators | 1 | 27 | 100% 4/4 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |