Zoelle Egner describes the lean headcount of Airtable's early years to explain why certain growth opportunities were deferred.
Assertion Supported
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Disclosure
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…”
Opinion
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Disclosure
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…”