Airtable

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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?”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“Employees of a company build onboarding for customers, but they build what they think customers want rather than what customers actually want. And that manifests in an onboarding experience that's not very helpful. So there are two patterns that I typically se…”

“When we started to personalize, generally we found bucketing customers by their learning style and their building style was more effective than more classic segmentation. Like, do you work in marketing? Do you work in product management? Do you work in operati…”

“Overall, the investments we made in onboarding over about a six to eight month period that included the wizard, the mole with ongoing education, and also some personalization together drove a 20% lift in activation rate for Airtable.”

“I would say that the guided onboarding wizard, which is the immersive wizard that helps you figure out how to get started was the most impactful thing we did.”

“We actually, at the organizational level on the Airtable Growth Org, changed our North Star metric a couple times, which is a big deal that, you know, manifests for several teams. Roughly the arc of that change for us was shifting from being a Growth Org focus…”

“So we didn't just use our activation rate metric week four multi-user active to make all of our decisions. We introduced a few more and one of them was purely a retention metric for an individual. Are you week two retained? Are you week four retained? The othe…”

“We had one North star metric, which was what we called our team activation metric. So this representative, a team of people were activated on air table product and using it in a way that suggested they would be long-term retained. And for us, that was week fou…”

“And if you look at other hyper-growth companies, Airtable, Miro, both of those I know from the inside have had strategies where the salespeople really only engage after some threshold has been hit of number of users that have already been paying for the produc…”

“And I think product market fit, when you start with the market first, it's accelerated, but I will say this, I think that it's also capped on the upside. Because you're starting with the market. Versus the Airtable and the Figma, which started with the technic…”

“Basically none of it was true. And I mean, the surprising thing to me was how viral this tweet went when, frankly, like I actually looked back at this person's other tweets. I think they worked at CB insights. And the irony is like the whole point of that busi…”

“And if you can't really introspect and say like, look, I think I'm better off doing this with the pieces that I have for my existing business and product, then I think you should sell, right? Like you should find a buyer. For that company and then go and like,…”

“Even when we had to do, ah, two riffs, right, that, that significantly, you know, kind of reduced our head count, you know, we had just, like, way too quickly grown and overscaled the business at a certain point but even when we did our riffs, we were still ac…”

“I think the same is true for Figma, which you know, actually like had a very parallel timeline to us. Like we both were founded around the same time, both spent two and a half years building the product like hands on you know, that early team before launching.”

“I guess I'm just more and more skeptical that that, like, hands off, you know, pure delegation you know, and process management role ever works as a CEO.”

“I'm pretty sure I'm still the I just checked this recently, but like I take pride in being the number one most expensive An inference cost user of Airtable AI not just within our own company, but I think for a long time I was globally across all our customers …”

“They did also issue a correction though all in did a follow-up episode a few, few I think weeks later saying like, hey, like, you know, we got the numbers wrong, like you know, we were revising our case and kind of a view on Airtable.”

“If anyone wants to just literally block out a day or frankly, even a week and like have the ultimate excuse, like you can use, like, you know, you can say that I told you to do it, right? Like if you want to cancel all your meetings for like a day or for an en…”

“You tend to think incrementally when everyone's remit is actually like a feature that they incrementally improve by definition, as opposed to thinking about like a mission or like a outcome goal, right? That might need to, you know coordinate, you know, dramat…”

“Our data store, HyperDB, that now can handle, like, multi-hundred million record data sets.”

“And yet if you have an agent that has to generate every single bit of that app from scratch from code, it's going to be very unreliable. There's going to be bugs. There's going to be data and security issues. And then you're also going to have a context collap…”

“There's a strong advantage to any of those Three roles who can kind of cross over into the other two, right? Like kind of the hybrid unicorn types, right? So if you're a designer who. Can be just technical enough to kind of be dangerous and understand a little…”

“And in our case, like we just like made the entire product experience AI centric, right? Like it used to be that like, you know, we had kind of this like secondary thing that you could ask questions to the assistant sidebar. We now made our agent the default w…”

“We're implementing this new capability that can use basically a long running AI crawler agent that goes and researches the web, you know, for a specific type of object or entity. So it's a little bit different from deep research, similar to deep research, but …”

“Now we have a weekly, Basically sprint check in on all of our AI execution stuff, which now is like half the company or half the EPD org is working on AI capabilities.”

“We're doing this new thing that's about to ship where, you know, not only can you describe the app you want to build and then iterate on it with, you know, kind of our conversational agent Omni, but and it builds it with like the existing air table platform ca…”