Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner

**Zoelle Egner** (0:00)
There is sometimes a recommendation or an instinct to just ship things super, super quickly and get them out there. And I'm not saying don't move fast. Obviously, you need to move fast in the early days, but make sure someone rereads your email so that it sounds good.
Invest in having a decent photo or a decent illustration. If you have sample content, this is actually a big one, sample content for your productivity app, as an example. 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 that person, the people who worked on this were thinking about me as a customer. They built it with me in mind, and that means that it is more likely that this is gonna fit my needs than something generic.
And that builds up both the brand trust that we've talked about, but also through the personality of the company and makes people want to root for you. And frankly, when you are small, you need everyone living for you that you can possibly get.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:02)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Zoelle Egner. Zoelle was one of the earliest employees at Airtable, where she led their early marketing and customer success teams, and generally just helped Airtable grow into the legendary business that it is today. She also spent time at Vox. She's advised dozens of startups on marketing and growth, and is now head of marketing and growth at a startup called Block Party. In our conversation, Zoelle shares how to punch above your weight as a startup, the most effective and impactful growth and marketing tactics throughout Airtable's history, including their use of billboards, marketing investments that are often high ROI, and those that are rarely a good use of time, why PR launches are actually useful to startups, and also when they aren't, and a lot more. It was so much fun chatting with Zoelle, and I'm really excited for you to learn from her. With that, I bring you Zoelle Egner, after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.
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Zoelle, welcome to the podcast.

**Zoelle Egner** (4:12)
Hi, thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:14)
It's very much my pleasure. Something that is pretty cool is that we actually met in my newsletter Slack community. I actually looked this up of how we actually started chatting. And it was me cold DMing you to get a discount on Airtable for the newsletter subscribers.