Jan 29, 2023 · 1h 13m · lennys-podcast
Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner
0:00 / 0:00
▶ Watch on YouTube →
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, former Airtable growth leader Zoelle Egner shares unconventional strategies for scaling early-stage startups, building enterprise brand trust, and transforming passionate users into internal champions. She debunks common marketing traps while detailing practical frameworks for bottom-up virality, customer success alignment, and iterative product launches.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 22.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 3.9 Guest teaching 6.4 Guest disagreement 0.4 Lenny pushing back 0.0
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 54:40 Pushing back against category creation
Zoelle directly challenges conventional product marketing advice, arguing that trying to define Gartner categories is a massive waste of resources compared to elevating professional identities.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 1:00:37 Lenny presses on missed SEO opportunitiesLenny challenges Zoelle on whether Airtable made a strategic mistake by not investing in programmatic template SEO early on.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 58:50 Correcting the narrative around Airtable templatesZoelle educates listeners and dispels the widespread industry belief that Airtable grew primarily through programmatic template SEO.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 45:24 Connecting tactical CS outreach to product-led salesLenny demonstrates his domain expertise by synthesizing Zoelle's early Airtable tactics with the emerging framework of product-led sales motions.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cold Outreach Beginnings and Connecting on Slack | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Lenny establishes how he and Zoelle met and prompts her to unpack the VaccinateCA initiative. Zoelle explains the logistical chaos of early COVID vaccine distribution and how an ad-hoc volunteer network built a national source of truth. | |
| Three Core Lessons from Scaling an Ad-Hoc Emergency Organization | 5 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Zoelle outlines three leadership lessons from emergency scaling: simple messaging, relentless repetition, and a laughably small MVP. Lenny synthesizes these points with observations from his portfolio founders. | |
| Zoelle Egner's Career Path: Power Mapping, Box, and Airtable | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Zoelle details her early non-traditional career path, including diagramming tech power networks and flocking patterns to land her first tech role. Lenny is amused and asks follow-ups about her power mapping diagram. | |
| Punching Above Your Weight and Establishing Brand Trust | 3 | 7 | 0 | 0 | Zoelle breaks down the philosophy of punching above your weight by delivering brand trust and intentional customer touchpoints. She shares humorous anecdotes about keeping customers from noticing Airtable only had 15 people. | |
| Tactical Polish and Airtable’s Unconventional Billboard Campaign | 4 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Zoelle explains why Airtable bought remnant billboards in NYC to establish credibility with corporate buyers rather than generate direct attribution. Lenny inquires about the actual pricing mechanics of billboard inventory. | |
| Sponsor Spotlight: Lenny’s Jobs Collective | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | After an ad break, Zoelle reveals how Airtable targeted tinkerer psychographics on early Facebook ads. Lenny notes his surprise at Facebook ads being an effective enterprise SaaS driver. | |
| Intra-Company Virality and Cultivating Internal Champions | 4 | 7 | 0 | 0 | Zoelle describes Airtable's early Slack bot integration that triggered immediate outreach to new signups to build internal champions. Lenny compares this hands-on motion to modern product-led sales workflows. | |
| Solving Product Education, High-End Swag, and Content Machines | 4 | 7 | 0 | 0 | Zoelle discusses the double education problem of flexible software, high-end swag like custom AirPods, and turning customer success solutions into reusable templates. | |
| Aligning Customer Success with Marketing and Career Progression Metrics | 4 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Zoelle presents her perspective that marketing and customer success share identical core goals. She reveals her unofficial KPI of tracking how many users received job promotions from using Airtable. | |
| Avoiding Marketing Traps: Category Creation vs. Elevating Professions | 4 | 7 | 2 | 0 | Zoelle advises against category creation and generic conference sponsorships, arguing startups should instead elevate existing professions like Gainsight did with customer success. Lenny references Kathy Sierra's superhero customer framework. | |
| The Strategic Reality of Templates and SEO Foundations | 4 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Zoelle debunks the myth that Airtable's templates were a programmatic SEO acquisition engine like Zapier, clarifying they were built for user activation and onboarding. Lenny asks whether Airtable missed a massive SEO opportunity by remaining lean. | |
| Reframing PR and Driving Momentum Through Frequent Launches | 4 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Zoelle explains why PR fails as a direct lead generation tool and how it should instead be leveraged for hiring and cold outbound credibility. She champions frequent smaller product launches to maintain audience momentum. | |
| Direct Customer Engagement and Early Customer Success Investment | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Zoelle gives practical advice on building customer feedback routines using lightweight email templates and phone calls, emphasizing the value of early customer success investments. | |
| Lightning Round: AI Books, Interview Tactics, and Favorite Tools | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Lenny conducts the lightning round covering AI anthropology books, live Zapier problem-solving interviews for CS hires, and marketing resources like the MKT1 newsletter. |
Statements from this episode (27)
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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 …”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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: 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?”
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…”
Airtable gifted branded Apple AirPods as high-end swag for user champions
“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.”
Egner: Turn Customer Success Insights Directly into Scalable Content
“If you are 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 …”
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: 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…”
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…”
Zapier generates massive top-of-funnel traffic through programmatic SEO integration templates
“Zapier has done a great job with that. They get a ton of traffic because they built it as a programmatic SEO play”
Egner: Airtable had barely 50 employees between 2015 and 2018
“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.”
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: 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…”