there is sometimes a recommendation or an instinct just like 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 like make sure someone rereads your email so that it sounds good invest in having like 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 like 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 this is going to 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 looking for you that you can possibly get welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their
hard-wing experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies today my guest is a well egner zowell 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 in box 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 up the most effective and impactful growth and marketing tactics throughout airtables 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 am really excited for you to learn from her with that I bring you zoell
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the always-on employee performance platform how much do you love the performance review process yeah it's time consuming subjective biased and there's rarely any transparency with the rapid shift to distributed work it's a struggle to create the structure and transparency that you want to help your employees
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hi thanks for having me 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 and you very happily got me that hooked us up
and then you became my go-to air table person for like advice on what airtable did right and wrong over the years and so thank you for being that person and also I'm really excited to have you on this podcast and to learn from you I am super excited to chat awesome so you're probably best known for your time at
airtable which correct me if I'm wrong you're employee number 11. that's right okay and at our table you let marketing you led the customer success teams so we're gonna chat about all that stuff but before we get into that I want to chat briefly about this other project that you worked on that from the outside
felt like a really fascinating thing and a really impactful project and a really cool team and it's called vaccine in California I think is how you pronounce okay can you just talk a little bit about what this was like what what were you trying to do what was the impact you had how did it all go yeah absolutely so
vaccinate CA existed to help people in California find and get a coveted vaccine as quickly as possible and that sounds really trivial right now but you have to sort of wind back to January of 2020 when vaccines were first coming out and it was really hard so just as a reminder because most of us have blocked
that from our memory uh yeah the federal and state systems like didn't really exist yet and so everything was this horrible hodgepodge where eligibility depended on not only like what state you were in it was down to the county and even sometimes the individual facility like you would be at a Walgreens and talk to them and they'd be like oh you
have to be over 65 and also in one of these like 12 categories of employment in order to get a vaccine and then you go like a mile away and they would tell you something totally different so people would stand in line for hours there were phones going off the hook utterly Madness and really really scary
for a lot of people who are trying to figure out like how to how to keep themselves safe yeah I remember those days well yeah so this organization was founded essentially by a tweet by Patrick McKenzie for those of you who are on Hacker News patio 11 and he had basically this really simple premise which is if you call a pharmacist and
you ask them who they can give a vaccine to and what vaccine they have and then you put that answer on a map someone else doesn't have to make the same phone call and that takes lots of pressure also as a healthcare system and also like helps people to sort of match supply and demand so surprisingly somehow that like tweet
which is essentially like call people put in spreadsheet put online turned into an entire full non-profit that was mostly on Discord Zoom Air table and not only had this entire like hundreds of volunteers who are making phone calls uh in the state of California and eventually actually nationally we became
vaccinate the state eventually we were also doing this thing called Web Banking so we would go and scrape all the official sources as they started coming out and then validate them because they were not always correct and eventually we had the most comprehensive database uh and map of locations in the entire
country including more comprehensive than the federal government in most of the states because they had really complicated limitations on what they couldn't couldn't publish based on some relationships they had we didn't have those limitations so it meant that we became this like kind of Clearinghouse essentially for this information
um and we built an API uh 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 and we also made Maps you could see on like County websites that would help you understand what was available in your area
one of the like coolest things that I've ever worked on so okay that's exactly I imagined how epic this was just to make sure people understand what you're describing basically you had hundreds of people sitting there on phones calling vaccine locations getting the specifics of who is able to get a vaccine there
and then just giving people a pointer of where they can get a vaccine exactly exactly so I came in initially a colleague of mine at airtable had been helping out with the like building out of the back end and I started getting media attention and they thought oh like this will help more people understand
that this resource is available so I got brought in to do some like PR help basically help them figure out how to get the word out and then ended up actually quitting my job at airtable to work on it full time oh wow yeah I was on the board and also managing sort of all Outreach and other stuff so we did lots of really cool education helping
people understand like their eligibility at all build a bunch of fun tools for that as well but it was it was a pretty incredible six months where we filmed like a really critical Gap in the infrastruct structure of the country it's wild that that was the best solution is just call people and create
you and I imagine there was an air table was it was were you using to store the data oh yes we built uh an entire like insane database and then eventually like custom software on top of that to make the people who are making the phone calls more easily get the information in there's a whole thing very cool to see
though not just like tech people get involved we had in our volunteer base like people from absolutely every Walk of Life not just in California globally I remember there was a volunteer who like said that he decided to join he was based in Israel and he had had like no trouble getting the vaccine whatsoever
but it seen something on Twitter about it and just decided like he wanted to make sure that people were able to get the vaccine as easily as he did and he spent dozens of hours calling folks even though he was in a totally different time zone but it really like lovely to sort of see all these different people
retired teachers you know like I think we had a bunch of 12 year olds who are helping out on the code of all things all who just really wanted to make sure that they could keep their Community safe what happened with this organization it's like a non-profit that now continues to run or what's happening
no we we did something which is not common 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 are going to be more impactful we always saw ourselves as a
stock Gap and once we got to the place where we felt like we weren't really being additive we wanted to get people's time back so they could work on other things so it doesn't exist anymore I think you can still go check out the archive um we found some researchers who are doing like interesting research on it
because there's very fascinating data in there about sort of the equitability of some of the distribution of the vaccine based on where it was available but the organization is gone we had that beautiful moment in time and and have all moved on uh hoping we don't have to get the band back together yes hopefully
hopefully it's not necessary anymore oh man I'm watching The Last of Us right now about this mushroom mushroom-based uh disease and that scares me now yep anyway on this podcast I try to get to things people learn from these experiences and so I have to ask what you learn about forming something like this just like ad hoc
like pulling a bunch of people together and having them focus and get things done or just like scaling it or even shutting down I guess what what have you taken away from that experience that you maybe will bring to either future one-off things like this or even just your work in general yeah I'd say probably three things so one the the
incredible power of sort of a simple idea to bring people together one of the reasons why vaccine ACA was so powerful and got so many people to help is everybody immediately understood why it would be useful and how they specifically could be making a difference and combining those two things was an incredible way to bring a
lot of people on board very quickly because from a messaging perspective messaging you know something very important to me as a marketer it was so concise right like pick up phone help save lives really straightforward people really really got that it sort of allowed them to feel like they had
agency in a time when everything felt really really out of control I think there's a lot of opportunities we have to sort of activate our communities and give people that sense of control that like are both going to be helpful more broadly for society but also um just for those individuals as well to make them
feel a little bit more safe a little bit more like they can actually have a difference in things uh you know I think in Tech we often don't jump into these problems this was not like sophisticated technology it was phones Discord and like airtable mostly being used like a spreadsheet right like it wasn't 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 result of it which is pretty pretty special so I think part of it is also just saying like we don't have to be hesitant to jump into these problems it's important to engage with you know experts in the
field is not to say that like tax solutionism is always the answer and again this is not super sophisticated technology but because we were able to go in and like talk to people who are actually affected get in just for the system that already existed and make something really simple really fast it
actually did have a huge difference and that's really exciting just to double click on that one actually reminds me some founders of companies I've invested in I often hear how much easier it is for companies that have a mission that people are excited about for them to hire versus companies that don't and so
it's a really good reminder of just the power of having a mission and a vision that is really compelling to people versus you know some B2B software that people aren't excited about even though there's great reasons to upgrade B2B software a lot of B2B there are I love great B2B software I've spent like most of my career on it but I I agree with
you I think if you have an authentic Mission and people aren't just like oh sure okay you're connecting the world like the real really it's you know some like telephony startup like okay if people feel like it's genuinely authentic to what you're building uh it can be incredibly meaningful yeah I'm just I just remember a Founder who's
just like he is the second company's first company did not have an amazing Mission the second one did wow so much easier to hire for this new service so totally absolutely okay number two and three number two and three I'll try and be more brief it's all good number two I would say just the importance of like a
relentlessly repeating the exact same stuff over and over again even if you feel like everyone definitely knows this is something that I've seen play out in every single leadership role that I've had but it was never more acute than here particularly because we had this sort of broad Coalition of hundreds of
people with very different backgrounds some people coming to the meeting some people not whatever else I think I repeated the same like three talking points but why what we were doing mattered like five thousand times cannot over emphasize how many times I said the same stuff and so did every other member of
the board it really is important and it really people will fill in the blanks with totally wild things if you don't continuously have that discipline of repeating yourself you just have to like get used to saying the same stuff and if you do it correctly it's super motivating even if you're sitting there
being like Oh my gosh I have to say it again it's worth it this reminds me I don't know where I saw this it's just in my head right now that the CEO and Founders job their actual title is repeater in Chief it absolutely should be I've worked with some leaders who never wanted to they're like no this is like it's gonna be boring for people and
you just have to be like honestly most people are never listening as much as you think that they are yeah we wish that they would but you have to say it like 12 different ways in writing and out loud all this other stuff it's like you're you're never as important as you think you are unfortunately right oh
these are great lessons Okay what else what else you do I say my last learning it was really about the power of having like a laughably small MVP for something by the end of this right we were covering the entire United States we had an API we had like custom software on the front end this whole like kind of
Behemoth of stuff that we got to in you know four months or something in the beginning it was truly basically a spreadsheet on like phones and that was it even that for the first few weeks while we were getting the rest of the infrastructure really going not only had tremendous impact at one of the most
important parts in the pandemic but also gave us so much information about we actually needed to build that was going to be helpful and I remember having all of these sort of assumptions about what was going to be necessary to manage this Coalition of people to make sure that we had really good data quality because one
of the most important things you can do if you're trying to be a trusted source of truth is actually have the correct information sounds trivial is not at all at that scale and I was totally wrong about all my assumptions you know I thought we were going to have to have totally different types of oversight I thought we were going to have totally
different tooling and it turned out we could do something way lighter weight that would allow us to move much faster as like the regulatory landscape kept changing has all the like rulemaking at individual places kept changing and that agility that willingness to do just like the smallest possible thing is obviously
a little bit of a Trope in the industry people talk about it a lot but it's never been driven home to me so much because we're talking about something that had incredibly high stakes this is People's Health and we're still able to do it in that context so if we could do it there you can imagine that the
applications of that in other Industries are just tremendous so yeah if you're if you're listening to this and you were thinking maybe you needed to add more stuff I bet you could prune and it's nice to have the forcing function where the world is changing so quickly and the team's probably small where you kind of are forced to build
small which I think is why this reminder is so important like oftentimes you have more resources and you end up building more just because you can and yeah what you're saying is oftentimes I'll shoot you in the foot yes amazing I didn't expect to get into this much detail with vaccinates here and so uh so I'm glad we
did let's zoom out a little bit and just fill in some gaps on your background briefly you can just highlight some of the other wonderful things you've done in career your table we talked about vaccinesia just broadly what else what else have you been up to absolutely okay so I'll try and be brief I worked in
tech for more than a decade mostly marketing and customer success a little bit of Ops before I got into Tech I was a little bit of a dilettante so some non-profit Healthcare dying big box retail because I graduated right into the recession and I'm certain no one would hire me turns out that was actually wrong but on the
plus side now I know what dysfunction looks like at Great scale which is actually quite an education and very useful um but I always knew I wanted to get into Tech um partially because I'm from the Bay Area and partially because I had been sort of obsessively power mapping the industry and like looking at its
blocking patterns and like who had what types of influence because I'm a nerd and I really wanted to see if I could get in in the first place wait can you talk about this this which what is it you did what did you call a flocking pattern start so you can imagine in any Community there are sort of like nodes
of influence people who know a lot of folks they have money whatever it might be and they're able to direct how that Community or that ecosystem evolves right so um in the tech industry typically like zcs will often play a role in this but so will certain types of Executives and you can follow how they move between different companies
and who they worked with and then see that that influences like who gets investment in the future it influences different Partnerships that evolve it influences the sort of like assumed wisdom in various different careers and because I'm a big old nerd I was like literally drawing diagrams based on people's blog posts of like it was
influential in what way because I was non-technical like I I tried you know programming and I hated it frankly and so I was like okay it's 2010 it's 2011 there's if not queer ways to get into the industry as a non-technical person I need to figure out how to do this with people because otherwise I'm not sure
why someone would take a chance on me with what I have done historically and that sounds a little insane but it's very effective and I ended up getting my start in Tech basically by identifying a company where I thought I had sort of a unique set of connections or like understanding of the space they were
working on where I thought I could maybe like email the CEO and be helpful and if this connect to that diagram you drew like did this help you point in that direction yeah yeah absolutely so like I was I was closely tracking my combinator and like that whole ecosystem so I knew I wanted to find a smaller company where
they maybe were having more difficulty hiring because they were less well-known or a little bit less like sexy but while they were still connected into that broader sort of group because it has with the pedigree that people would take you seriously if you had worked at a YC back to Startup right anyway I got like
really pointy hat strategic about this but it was effective we still have this diagram by the way it'd be so funny to look at it right now no no I don't think I have it anymore I might be able to dig it up but uh alas I think it it may have been lost in one of my many moved since it's been a problem decade okay I
imagine that was true okay so I think I cut you off you had you were talking about some of the things you've done in your career yeah so I ended up sort of using my studies of the space to get into a role as in play one at a developer Focus if I see back to Startup and the funny story on that is that I
got that role by Cold emailing the CEO while I was still in college and then he actually followed up with me almost immediately because I offered to introduce him to some professors which was useful for the the type of business and then I ignored him for two years because I got busy with my thesis and got other jobs and whatever a student
came back to it and wrote this like ridiculous apology email being like I promise I respond to emails faster I see that you're hiring like would you give me a second chance please can I come work for you I have no experience that's useful but like I work really hard and I figured he would either laugh me off of
the internet or give me a job and very fortunately for me he gave me so thanks Ryan appreciate that uh that was how I got into Tech right yes we appreciate it so that startup got acquired by box and when I went over to box they had never had paying developers before uh so we were bringing over like seven figure
contracts so I started developer success programs there and then in a totally wild shift ended up moving over to run their social media editorial and internal comms which doesn't sound related to developer success but I had always been a writer and I wrote this blog post about what it was like to be an early stage non-technical employee it
was a little spicy talking about some of the challenges I didn't tell anyone I was gonna do it and I got this email from PR being like we need to have a meeting and I was like oh they're gonna fire me I went too far I thought I was being like you know circumspect I went too far and in the meeting they were
like hey we really think you should apply for this job we would love to have you run social media which is not the outcome I expected that's a cool learning there just like do stuff yeah don't be afraid yeah it was definitely not the expected outcome but one that was very exciting so got to uh go run
those programs for a couple years through the IPO uh which is a whole education in and of itself to see sort of how comms changes when you become a public company and then I was on Hacker News obsessively at the time and I saw the beta for airtable come out immediately signed up and became obsessed with the product and like
evangelizing it to everybody that I knew and ultimately ended up figuring out a way to like finagle my way into uh that role as employee 11 there it sounds like we're going to talk about your table more so I won't belabor that but marketing and customer success staff I ended up leaving for vaccinate CA and
then the last little bit here is just when that ended I really thought I wanted to start my own company so I gave myself like a certain window in which to try out different ideas and at the same time with sort of advising and Consulting ultimately didn't end up finding anything that I felt like so much conviction that it was worth like
blowing up absolutely everything else about my life uh in order to go heads down on a company So eventually decided to go in-house one of the companies I've been advising block party and now I run marking a griffin can you just explain the block party briefly absolutely so we're an online safety company uh we
help users have more control over their digital experience and our first product is anti-harassment and anti-spam tools for Twitter so you've worked at box airtable and block party you advised a lot of companies around marketing product with growth I'm curious if there's a thread that has kind of maintained through all of those
experiences in terms of what works well for marketing and grows and and things you've learned that just consistently a few pieces that go into how I choose companies that create that bread and part of this is about me wanting to sort of match what I think I'm really good at with what will have the greatest
leverage for a company that I work at so I've mentioned like I'm a writer I really care about telling stories and like helping people to understand new or novel things I also really care about product quality I'm like a little bit of a product snob and one of my sort of strengths is enthusiasm so if I can't
genuinely go to a customer and tell them like this product is going to solve a real problem for you and it's going to be amazing like I kind of can't do my job so all of the companies that I've chosen to go to have had this Foundation of an incredible product experience that maybe people didn't fully understand and
where I could come in and help connect the dots between that amazing product that's gonna be really really helpful and sort of the opportunities for a much wider range of people to benefit from that so and practice what that means is I often end up working at companies that are in a position to really punch above their
weight from a brand perspective they're typically much lower head count than you would ever expect they're typically a way earlier stage than you would expect but I've been able to sort of put together a brand or an experience that allows people to invest themselves into the company with a high level of trust I
guess to like I'll be more specific because that's really ambiguous irritable it manages Mission critical workflows highly sensitive data it's super important you only use tools you can trust for that type of thing the same thing is true at Brock party right like Online safety you have to trust the company that you're uh interesting your
safety to and in my experience people and especially Founders really underestimate how much every single touch point of her customer has from word of mouth or the ad that brings them the door landing pages sign up flows customer service experiences every single one of those moments is building
a brand that is adding or removing Trust so for me in the early days that means thinking about like what are the signals that I can provide to Future customers that say we understand you specifically and our solution is designed for a person like you and two that will say hey we're actually operating on a much higher level than
you might expect for a company of our size or our stage we take this really seriously we have all the things in place to take care of you so you shouldn't be afraid to spend you know six figures or like put put your safety in our hands because we've got your back we're doing this the right way has tremendous dividends when you're in a
business that is often driven by word of mouth because if you take care of people and you follow up that sort of brand experience with a product experience that is really powerful and actually does the things it says it's going to do then your word of mouth can sort of become a huge driver of growth for the
company of course the outcome of this in practice is really funny so like 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 air table 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 need to like reinforce the fact they were sending six figures with us when we had 15 people like if they had gone to live on LinkedIn they could have figured that out but like they don't need to remind them that we were so small and they were like running some of their most important processes with our product I
like I think I was on the phone with slack at one point and they were like oh well you guys are probably about the same size company as we are right and I was like not quite a little smaller just an entire order of magnitude no big deal it's totally fine we're awesome we'll take care of you it's gonna be
great but it really it makes a difference you know although all those little things that reminds me I heard stories of early like very earlier Airbnb days where they had to take meetings in a bathroom or in the hallway yeah they did interviews like in the hallway because we did a lot of calling from the hallway and airtable uh also
from this like weird internal patio you could only get two through climbing through a window the window kept breaking and so like I at one point remember someone like getting stuck outside trying to interview someone with like the wind gloves like utter utter like ridiculous nonsense but you know that's all the fun things that happened
in the early days before you become bigger yeah I love those early days stories yeah I really love the concept of punching above your weight as a startup what else did you do at airtable or other places that helped you do that so one is just don't don't let them see how small you are necessarily are there any
other technical things you recall that like oh here's things that really work really well for punching above our weight as a small company at that point a couple of these things are like very unsexy but very useful one like make sure that your landing pages and your emails and other things have like a
level of polish that makes them feel a little bit more done like I think there is sometimes a recommendation or an instinct to like 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 like make sure someone rereads your email so that
it sounds good like invest in having like 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 like 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 this is going to fit my needs and 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 looking for you that you can possibly get so those little bits of polish that don't take a ton of time are absolutely
worth it the last thing I would say is making sure that in your public Communications launches if you ever talk to press which you know some companies can some companies can't having more of a point of view than just about your product you can try and say like we are part of something bigger here is the
broader Circle or movement that we are a part of it makes it feel more inevitable and more like you are you're not just sort of like self-servedly talking about you know your tiny corner of the world but that's actually part of this much bigger Trend it will be more compelling and it feels
like you're operating at a different level of sophistication that can be really helpful I love that on the first point basically it's attention to detail and Obsession of qualities that I'm hearing just to make it clear like this isn't just like a tiny team just like pushing stuff out I imagine most Founders would be like
yes I would love to like we are going to focus on quality we'll make sure everything looks great in reality it always is kind of this trade-off against other things they could be doing yep what do you think folks can do to help keep that level quality is it just like one person being obsessed and just reviewing everything like a Founder is
like someone having someone like you that's just like very detail-oriented just like review everything how do you actually execute that when you have a thousand things to do 100 I would say there's one of two approaches and you sort of articulated them here one is you can have the founder that is the Avatar
of quality who is just like relentlessly being like Hey we're gonna see the 15 minute check yes we're going through it yes I'm going to send you a copy of this email and someone else going to click every Link in it and make sure they're not broken or you can have someone else be the Avatar of that who is in the
company I would say in many of the companies I have worked at that has been me because I've been sort of the like marketing human who cares but it doesn't have to be a marketing person it can be someone on product it can be honestly even someone on customer success if you're willing to let them uh provide their feedback on
the way that you're showing up in the world but you should because they have fantastic insights there just needs to be someone and I think building that into how you interview can be very helpful as well so finding people who understand those trade-offs and that balance and who are willing to put in the extra 15 minutes
but aren't going to spend like an extra week trying to like obsessively QA everything you don't want to go that far just who have that sort of bent towards detail uh can be very helpful also just make yourself a checklist like it doesn't have to be complicated every time we put out a blog post these are
the three things we're going to do every time we send out an email like it needs to be seen by at least one other person none of this is rocket science you just need to make a little process for yourself and then it can be very fast and lightweight but the the Dividends are worth it I think I like how simple this is just to look like a bigger
company is just pay attention and focus on the little things like it's not a big old thing there are some bigger things you can do if you really need to my uh my favorite silly example of this is airtable back in the day got kind of roasted on Twitter for having Billboards that were not super specific about like
a specific problem or whatever they're just Billboards that we had out and everyone was like this makes no sense why are you doing if you don't understand 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 geographical concentration in specific areas because we were in like the fashion industry the media industry in New York we knew exactly where all of their like offices were and we knew if they saw our Billboards walking to work
and then got the I the request to it like for the budget in order to you know pay six figures for airtable they were more likely to be like oh it's not just some weird startup we never heard of like oh I've seen that billboard they must be legitimate and that sounds really silly but like it wasn't actually
that expensive uh we got mostly Remnant inventory which is like at the end of a particular buying cycle sometimes they haven't fully sold everything and you can get the like slightly less good ones that are still maybe where you want them for really really cheap and everyone thinks that you only buy Billboards if
you're huge so that's small signaling thing was a way for us to make sure that we remove some of the risk of not being able to close deals because we were so small right so you can get kind of creative about it most of the time you're not going to do that most of the time it's like reread your emails but
you can also sort of push it even further if you need to what is that full rough cost of billboards like is there like because I think people think about Billboards and like it's hard to even know what they cost like what's like a number it really really depends so I'm hesitant to give you a number because which Metro you're
in like it ranges vastly 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 for like one billboard yeah so you don't need to get a million right like and I'm not suggesting you go get one on like 101. good luck to you on that that's
expensive but you can get one that's you know in a reasonable neighborhood in New York for way less money than you might expect if you're willing to do remnant are you hiring or on the flip side are you looking for a new opportunity well either way check out lennysjobs.com Talent you're a hiring manager you can sign up
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following this thread a bit my next question is and this may be the answer is when you think about air tables growth strategic tactics over time what would you say or one or two or three of the most impactful marketing or growth tactics yeah work best over or Diamond maybe Billboards are one of them
I wouldn't say they were the highest Roi but they are certainly one of the more interesting things that we did they were they were useful don't get me wrong but I think maybe some other ones are more interesting the boring answer that I will caveat this with is that one of the pieces of our acquisition Playbook 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 going to work for your B2B business now because that that's totally changed and when you say unconventional what do you mean we spent a lot of time thinking about a
psychographic profile for our users so the challenge of airtable is that you can use it for anything uh it can be used in every Department within an organization it can be used for personal stuff like you name it it has a use because you're functionally building your own software and you can build software for anything 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 and so we couldn't really use like super generic messaging but to go really specific into verticals which we did end up ultimately doing didn't give
us sort of the broad coverage to go find new opportunities like you go really deep into one particular vertical or two particular verticals at a time with a small team but then we weren't surfacing new opportunities that might be even more important so we tried to balance that like vertical specific work that we
did with also trying to find this type of person who we had discovered uh was going to be the best Champion for us and this is like a sort of tinkerer persona someone who likes new technology they like putting together the Lego building blocks of things and you couldn't really find like tinkerers magazine there's not
like a place those people hang out they don't just have one title it's a psychographic profile as a type of person that could have many different um many many different roles and so in fact it doesn't let you like Facebook doesn't let you do that anymore no no you can't Target based on like they have a tinkerer mentality unfortunately okay
yeah but what you can do is you can say that type of person often likes these types of media uh you know we've heard that they often are really into these podcasts so they're really into you know reading about this type of personal development and often that is associated with people who have these like broad
set of roles but have this typical mentality right so we would find sort of clusters as like interests that people might have that often were shared by those people and do targeting around that and then when that worked look alike based on it did not expect fake pick ads is one of these answers so that's interesting no and it's not it's
not a good idea anymore don't don't do it now back in the day it was great now I would not recommend but I have some unconventional ones that I I can suggest that are uh Facebook there's a few different things but I want to give some context first for people who are not as familiar with like your table's business
because they do think these are really helpful pieces of contacts the first is because of the types of industries that we are often very successful in had like a very similar Network effect that we would see where like basically it was within specific professions we would see people who in order to
distinguish themselves in that job market uh would build a brand around the tools that they used essentially we found different ways to sort of accelerate the process of identifying those roles whereas like really really helpful to build a brand for yourself so that you could hop around to different jobs more quickly accelerate your
process Etc and thus bring along a tool with you and evangelize for it a lot so that's one sort of set of things we were trying to achieve the second set of things we were trying to achieve that's also useful context here is although industry virality was really important for us even more important with inside
of company virality that was like the real superpower of airtable we go from like 10 people to a thousand people in a year and so we were always looking for ways to make that happen within companies uh in more and more efficient ways and then the third piece here is no one had a good generic explanation of airtable
that worked for everybody this is perhaps partially my fault as like you know marketing uh but it's also the fault of the fact that like the market was not ready for the good generic explanation to mean anything like I mentioned before like people just did not care about the generic explanation
and the magic Verity was always seen in its specificity so we knew if we can get to the right people and we can connect the dots to them to the correct use case so they like want to go and evangelize to improve their careers they will do that both externally and within their companies and more importantly within the companies they'll
be able to go to their friends and say Hey you know I'm using your table as a Content calendar but you you have a ux research problem and I understand our table enough that I can like help you build a system and now I'm a superhero internally because I like helped you build this whole new thing look at me
I'm amazing and they suddenly have like fully done a sales pitch for airtable without us having to do any work or understand their use case which is great and very necessary when you are as horizontal as we are so we had to figure out essentially how do we catalyze that word of mouth and build Champions at scale all that is
to say the two sort of interesting things that we did were all around that in the very early days what that meant in practice was we literally had a slack integration that we pulled in a whole bunch of information about anyone who signed up for airtable including their title the like the company that they
worked at Etc and literally would sit there and like cut a little button in each of the records that came in that would allow us to email them immediately if we had decided that they might be someone we want to talk to and we set up this whole automated system so that it would take like two seconds to reach out
to a ton of different people being like hey I would really love to get your feedback and help make sure you're as successful as possible on your tubal this is not scalable in the long term because there's a whole bunch of sending emails and doing meetings but what it meant is that we were able to start
building our mental model for what these Champions look like in practice by finding sort of the patterns across them and building the foundations what ultimately became our customer success motion very early and then we were able to sort of like say okay we found like five people who have a Content Calendar use case with
this type of title and now we'll be able to go like run an ad campaign based on that we can build a bunch of templates based on that here's all these different hooks we can use because we know this is what a champion can look like in a way that was not going to be obvious if we hadn't talked to a ton of people so it
seems really unobvious as like an investment per se but tremendous number of human hours going into just like having an efficient way to talk to as many people as possible to build those mental models that's number one that is fascinating so essentially you weren't even sure who would be excited about airtable
part of this is like figure out the personas and groups of people that we believe are the right target to kind of encourage and help support and then part of that is get it spreading within a company once you figure out these folks within a company it's such a cool idea to just like have a feed of like I imagine this bot had
certain attributes of the person like here's the company they work out here's how big it is and then they talk about like there's a mention of what they're using it for is that is that part of this ideally though we don't we were always very privacy minded so we couldn't actually get much information about what they were doing in airtable
we could never see their data because that would be a tremendous like failure of trust to go back to what we were talking about before so a lot of this we would have guesses and maybe we could see that they'd use certain templates but we didn't otherwise really know and it was part of the reason why we wanted
to talk to them in the first place the second reason is that if we could talk to them early we could help them build their first space and from there if they were successful they would have the tools to go and help other people within their organization so if we catch them at the beginning make sure one person
was successful by over investing in them then they essentially became like support for everybody else I should also clarify these were not necessarily people who were going to be the buyers the buyers and the Champions here look very very different for airtable which is a really interesting uh an interesting Dynamic that many
companies do not have but for us the person who is going to like sit down with a glass of wine on a Friday and build an airtable base was not the person who had the budget who's going to pay for this thing and so we weren't initially looking for buyers we were looking for champions in part so that we
could then go to I.T 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 conversations but they were really effective for us and meant that it was very very easy to sell fascinating it makes me think a lot
about the product let sales movement and how this is essentially that but even earlier because it's people just signed up and they're just helping them be successful versus like this company's got 14 people using I should go try to sell them on an Enterprise contract essentially this was a tool to help you
figure out how to like basically scaling customer success and helping you prioritize who to go after and being very Hands-On with the strongest potential future big buyers exactly and I think what's interesting here is it helped us sort of bootstrap two things one was to your point like building out the personas and champions and so on and
and ultimately there's more scalable ways to sort of reach those people in the long run but secondarily it also helped us deal with like a real product education problem that we had in the early days because really complicated 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 and unfortunately if you're selling to a Content marketing manager or a ux researcher there's no guarantee that they know how to make a workflow most software is opinionated and it does that work for you and you like it either
works for you or doesn't and like maybe you're frustrated about what it forces you to do in order to work but you can't really control it which means when suddenly you have the ability to create whatever workflow that you want there's actually some education that needs to go into it in order to be able to make that
successful it's not enough to just make an airtable base pretty or that functions you can't get your team to use it effectively if it doesn't fit into the broader context of the organization it's still going to fail and so a lot of this was us figuring out like okay how do we help these people not only use our
product but like build something that is going to be durable so that we do see that growth so they don't see it as a failure so it doesn't fail at that second order moment when it starts to get spread out to more people it's a really good tactic for any SAS product that just just is hard to understand and needs like your table had
both problems like I don't know what this is for and I don't know exactly how it's going to fit into my workflow imagine most companies still have to deal with both those problems hopefully not hopefully not but once you actually get in with folks it's very difficult to remove it right so like suddenly your
retention rates are incredible your word of mouth is incredible if you're willing to do that initial work a lot of people think that airtable was like a pure product-led Growth Company and and missed that like huge customer success component that was always very very important in the early days um and that helped us ultimately move
more towards that plg motion for a while but was essential to getting it set up in the first place fascinating the other one that we did was dated 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
admittedly more people are in the office back then now they are more remote and this would not work as well but back in the day if you gave people something really good like not a pen or a sticker really good they would show enough to absolutely everyone that they talked to because they were so excited they got
branded airpods people would ask about it walking by their desks it sounds so like trivial but for that like you know a couple hundred bucks that we spent knowing like hey this person's already a champion and if someone asks them they're going to give a really good pitch totally worth it sometimes better to not
skimp on swag hard to measure very effective that's a great tip and it connects to the general idea of fighter Champions and just do a lot to make sure they're successful excited when evangelize and an airpod here and there feels like a really good Roi investment well it's for us anything else along those lines I
think those are the big ones that I would highlight the only other small note I would make from a process perspective is 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 you're going to find scale in the long run so for us what that meant was we would talk to a bunch of customers and customer success would have like helps them build bases and then we would create templates so we're not exact copies because we're not trying to steal
their intellectual property we would say like what is the fundamental workflow here that other companies might have how do we make a template that is useful from this and like some blog posts that explain it whatever else that we can then put out into the market and the next time a smaller company it's not a
Fortune 500 wants this sort of thing someone can just email them that template and we don't have to go through this whole build process they have something to start with if you can find those insights and put them genuinely into use as a little conveyor belt it will be much easier to scale it will be much easier to come up with genuinely
compelling content because it's coming from your customers so they already care about it you have strong signal that it's going to be valuable if you already built it for them use that to your advantage make that into a little machine and it makes all of the sort of go to market that you need to do later
easier I know that you have a strong opinion that customer success and marketing are basically the same thing and should be maybe one team do you speak to that yeah this is this is my spicy opinion but like both of them have to do kind of the same things right they have to identify customer needs they have to help the the customer see your
product as a solution to those needs they need to remove friction from the process of getting value they are hopefully both encouraging those customers to share with other people and both of them should be engaged in translating insights from those individuals into resources that can help everybody they use different
tactics right like marketing is going to use more scalable tactics customer success is going to be in the weeds really talking to individual people but all of the things they care about are actually the same thing they just use different ways to do it and if you as a marketer are not pretty confident in being able to say like what I'm doing is
getting the right people to get genuine value from this product so much so that they want to tell other people about it because it's going to make them look good then like maybe figure out if there's ways to bring more of that to your process because it will make what you are doing more effective and frankly
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 uh so much that one of my unofficial metrics for both marketing and customer success at airtable
unofficial was like how many people we've 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 major accounts we were trying to win like something something good was happening and we were going to be successful with really large deals so
curious how you tracked that I guess you just type in with them occasionally no I had my csn's literally like they had really strong relationships we were we were actually tracking it it was a little embarrassing but it worked really well I love it the great kpi it's like dating apps and how many people get married I guess exactly zooming out a
little bit you advise a lot of companies on marketing customer success growth and things like that maybe there's like a two-part question and see where you want to take it what is just what are activities at marketing and growth and customer success teams often do that are impactful and consistently impactful
things that you think startups should invest in that maybe they aren't or they already aren't they should definitely keep doing this and on the flip side things that don't work things that maybe they should avoid and yeah so maybe let's start there and there's gonna be a follow cool okay I'm going to start with things
to avoid because I try and not to make too many blanket statements on this but I have a couple that I am willing to make so like this is all with the caveat the channel Market fit is really real and like sometimes these things might work for you don't like discount just because I say that they don't work for
me 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 of your time unless you are in an industry where you desperately need to get to
like a trade show because that's where everyone hangs out at that point like yeah of course you're gonna have to go do that but if you're in like more standard B2B software that's not really a thing there are better ways to get in front of those people than having your logo out there all like that doesn't
tell them anything maybe you get a branded session at the the conference or whatever but who's gonna go to that branded session probably not that many people and then you will spend so much money and gotten nothing for it go to the event do not fund your money on the sponsorship it's stupid
um and then the second one uh which is definitely a very spicy opinion but I'm gonna go there yo there a lot of people think that like the epitome of product marketing is creating your own category and while I agree that it is useful to have strong differentiators because it is I think creating a category like getting
a new thing in Gartner or whatever is often a waste of your time it is a huge lift absolutely enormous particularly in Beauty SAS and I'm not always sure that it's helpful to have like your super teeny tiny little niche over here where you're like oh we have no competitors like that's not actually how Buyers work it's not really
worth it that said there are things you can do that feel like category creation that are actually effective and that I do think make more sense and specifically if you can elevate a profession instead of a category that can make way more sense so the great example of this is a gain site creating customer success
or like many companies all together carving out devops or like rebranding devops to be a thing that was suddenly a sexy job to have and I think that's valuable because a job is an identity and people will fight for an identity right a category of software is like a line item on your budget no one is
excited about that but people are very excited about their job being meaningful and their job being important and being taken seriously and so if you could hold up an uh either an existing or a brand new job and say like this is really important or much broader business metrics whatever else uh we're going to
create Community for those people to come together and it's all about the job and not about you that can be very powerful and they'll take them with you you become like part of the identity of that career amazing do that for sure but like the Gartner square there's some opportunities for that where it makes me
sense a lot of the times it doesn't don't do that amazing I love that uh is there more you wanted to add there no okay that's enough fun not to do what this reminds me of broadly is just stay focused on the customer and their problems right like don't obsess with who you are it's who are you selling to and how will you
make their life better reminds me of this old uh idea from Kathy Sierra dude is that ring a bell where you make your yeah you make your customer a superhero you want them to be like a superhero and if they work as a superhero and that's yeah that sounds like that's essentially what you did with their table a lot of
these companies you worked with that that is always the goal like how can you make them the hero of the story and not you because no one cares about your company what they care about is themselves frankly are there any products or companies you think of of tap your head that are really good at this that are just like the nailed this
yeah that's a good question certainly the two that I mentioned the sort of like helped Rebrand some of the uh the professions so like the game sites of the world I'm blanking a little bit on the ones that have done this for devops really effectively but there's certainly some that have maybe data dog yeah
datadog has done a pretty good job of that I think where I get excited is when the companies do this in a way that feels less self-serving or less obviously self-serving and that means that sometimes you have to be willing to invest in things that will not have like super obviously immediate Roi for you but they will for the community and for
building the community oh actually one really good example I think like notion has actually done a pretty good job of this people are really really invested in and the templates that they create because it feels like you're not pushing notion you're pushing like the the beautiful creation that you have to
solve a problem I think they've done a really nice job on that process and several of their competitors I think have done a pretty decent job as well but they certainly come to avoid thinking of templates I know airtable kind of known for templates being any mentioned this being a big part of the success and I imagine
a lot of companies now are just creating template left and right because they imagine that's the core what help a lot of these companies notion being an example what is your take on the power and importance of templates or software I think they can be tremendously helpful if you were horizontal because they
helped to narrow the surface area for a user so they understand how to connect the dots between like their problem and your product and if it is not obvious to someone how they can solve a specific problem they're gonna like be like oh hey that seems really cool when I think of something I'll definitely come back
and then you have lost them and so if you can be like here are three templates that a person like you might be excited about that can be really helpful where people sometimes get confused about templates or have the wrong expectations about templates is when they think that templates are going to be an acquisition
mechanism and they don't build in the foundation that is sorry for that to be true so a lot of people think that templates were what drove like air tables top of funnel that is not the case I I was having a conversation with someone who worked a lot on SEO at airtable in the much later days and and sort of laughing over the fact that
people thought that was a big source of traffic because it was not we did not optimize them for that good luck finding them in search most of the time like not at all useful where they were helpful you know narrowing that surface area helping with sort of matching patterns helping people understand how the
product worked super helpful expansion within companies tremendously useful but they were not a top of funnel mechanism for us because we didn't put the work in to do that like we did not have an SEO engine they weren't we weren't zapier zapier has done a great job with that they get a ton of traffic because they
built it as a programmatic SEO play but you have to be clear about what your goals are and what problem they are solving because otherwise it is very easy to be like I'll just build a bunch of templates and then all of the leads will appear and like that's that's not going to happen in unless you invest in
a lot more than at least airtable did so it can be useful to build them know what you're doing it for and how you're going to measure it or otherwise you will waste your time do you think your table could have taken advantage of that topple funnel approach if they invested from an SEO perspective or do you think it wasn't an opportunity I think it
could have been we would have needed to hire more humans airtable was an incredibly lean team for a very very long time 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 and so we had to make really difficult choices about what to prioritize and what not to prioritize
should we have hired more people and done more things like I would argue in retrospect absolutely yes there were opportunities that were left on the table but in early days like you you leave good opportunities because you have to focus on other things so got it and so a takeaway here's templates could
be really useful for customer success versus SEO top of funnel right that's kind of where they became powerful still maybe helpful like maybe for you it makes sense to do the SEO play just know that that is not a small play it is an investment it is not and not just like have some people make some templates you
got to do way more than just that it's not going to be sufficient final potential question depending on where this goes and I'm curious how spicy this answer gets oh boy it's around launches NPR and I work with a lot of startups I imagine Founders are always trying to plan a launch the pr I'm curious your take on the value of
investing a bunch of resources in a big launch the value of just getting PR as an early stage startup yeah so just getting PR is not a good goal I know that's like been well stated in the market but just to reiterate it like most of the time PR is not going to get you leads or users it's just not and you
have to think about like when you are creating a launch or doing a piece of PR what are the breadcrumbs that bring someone back to something that can actually convert if you have your big Tech crunch piece and it's super exciting it says all these great things about you and it like maybe links to you once somewhere in the 12th
paragraph or whatever how many people are actually going to click on that link not that many people how many people are gonna like read that and remember to go Google it not as many as you want okay there's gonna be so much coming out of the funnel it is not like a useful acquisition mechanism what it is good
for is credibility and that's where if you have really clear goals and you know how you're going to leverage the asset of a piece of PR coverage then it can be helpful to you so the two goals I always recommend to Founders when thinking about using PR are either hiring or maybe improving the response rate for
your cold outbound those are the two that I think make the most sense because in both cases they have a different distribution mechanism right in hiring you're going to like include that in an email that you're sending to a candidate and so it's going to increase the likelihood that they take you seriously
and get excited about the company and maybe actually end up ultimately joining your team cold outbound you're using it as credibility to say like Hey we're a real company you can trust great uh both of those things are all emails that you are proactively sending you know exactly who they're going to and you know that
that asset is going to have hopefully the impact that you're looking for and you can kind of measure whether it makes a difference or not but just getting a piece of PR to get a piece of PR is like it'll help with your internal morale I'm not sure it's going to do much else for you uh so happily clear goals and have
realistic goals where you will be disappointed 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 up in lots of different places because audiences
respond to novelty gives them a reason to care about your company and so like yeah have your big annual launch or whatever but also have one two months from then another one and another one find ways to use that novelty to your advantage and to get into communities that you think are going to be good fits
for your company I love that advice any final thoughts before we get to our very exciting lightning round mostly just like all of this is easier if you talk to your customers more so spend like build a system for yourself that will allow you to have those touch points that's not just like making everyone
answer customer support tickets though I do think that is a great idea because it gives so much empathy and it's really helpful like you as a Founder if you're a founder or a product manager or whatever else should find a way to get that on your calendar like weekly or monthly go talk to people it makes it
better you will have a better mental model the other thing is like strongly consider investing in customer success if you are a B2B company early your table had it before sales which is a very unconventional approach but early is worth it it has huge dividends if you actually listen to them if you're not going to listen to them though don't
don't hire them because that's sad I have followed questions and on the customers piece say someone wants to invest in customer success is there a resource or person or anything that you could Point folks to to understand and think about how to do this well there's a lot for people within that profession
there's not as much for Founders out there right now unfortunately this is an area that I very eagerly am looking for more resources to share with people minimally I'll say if you care about this like send me a message I will I will give you some advice um all of our industry will be better if there are more people working on
customer success so like I will help you send me a note otherwise I'll try and dig out some other things and maybe you can share them but uh there's not a ton so people in customer success please share your learnings more with Founders all of us would like to see it yeah I've actually been looking for someone to
write a guest Post in the newsletter about just how to set up a customer success team and so for listening you could be that person uh yeah I I have um some people that I will not it put on the spot right now that I will send your way that I think amazing okay let's make this happen yeah and then I wanted to ask the question the first piece of
advice which is Founders talk to the customers more often is there like one tactical piece of advice you could recommend for how to do that yeah to like find a customer how to set it up consistently totally the simplest way to do this is to write a template email for yourself that you can send out very
easily that essentially says like hey thank you so much for using the product I would really love to hear about your experience so far and get your feedback do you have 10 minutes to talk on the phone um I know it's important that it's on the phone and not a survey because you get way more Instinct from unstructured
conversation than you're gonna get from like sending them three you know three things in a Google survey set it up come up with a hypothesis of the type of person that you want to talk to and then like run a query against your database find someone and send like three of those emails with you and it's not like
exciting but you can automate most of it and it will be helpful none of this stuff has to be complicated you just gotta have a system great advice with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got six questions for you I'm gonna go through them pretty quick whatever comes to mind let's see where it goes okay question number one
what are two or three books that you recommend most to other people okay I hate this question because I take pride in making highly targeted recommendations but I will do it anyway so I'm pretty sure you mostly talk to product and growth people right now obviously uh AI is a big topic of conversation so here are two books that
will enrich your mental model for artificial intelligence and encourage you to think about it from different perspectives the first one a little bit academic I highly recommend it though it's a book called Computing taste by Nick Siever he's a professor of anthropology and he did this study of
people and companies who build music recognitions algorithms and it's a really interesting uh Book for a bunch of reasons including that it's a sort of like academic take on both Tech culture and more specifically the unspoken and underlying assumptions that many workers who are building in this Faith have it
can be a little spicy and uncomfortable for a person in Tech to read but I think it is a fascinating perspective uh and very relevant to the stuff that's going on on Ari right now so go check it out Computing taste by Nick Siever the second is a fiction book but um the ancillary Justice series by Anne Leckie it's about a spaceship AI that ends up
separated from its ship and trapped in a body I'm gonna leave it at that worth reading for a different way of thinking about AI I think we need a Sol full episode on book recommendations these are amazing let's keep going so what's another podcast of yours that you love to listen to other than this podcast probably
either happiness lab or gastropod I love food and also psychology one of those two interesting okay we'll keep going favorite recent movie or TV show movie everything everywhere all at once uh and TV show there's a Korean drama called extraordinary attorney Wu that I really enjoyed favorite interview question that
you like to ask yeah okay so this one is related to customer success it's my favorite question of all people hate it sorry but 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 things up whatever but I basically like lay out for them a problem that I as the customer want to to solve and have them build it for me live this both is surprising for most people so you get to see how they respond to an unfamiliar
situation which every client will give you at some point and it shows how they learn things in a very concrete way which is really interesting so check it out it works really well for customer success I've heard that one before fascinating top five SAS products that you enjoy and airtable cannot be what okay uh then
I'll try and avoid any company that I have worked for I really like using figma it's nice when designers let me play with things I've been really enjoying working with webflow also means that I can do stuff on my own this is maybe spicy but I actually love Google Docs I'm not a notion stand sorry but
Google Docs is like my best friend yeah and then there is a personal CRM company that I invested in so sorry maybe this is not allowed but called clay and it is like the only way I've ever been able to keep track of my relationships in a real way please and then I don't know if I love it but I I use zoom so much that I feel like I must say
it because I spend so much of my time on it and it's categorically better than Google me final question favorite book course article any sort of resource and marketing yeah non-marketers can learn from okay it's a newsletter does that work absolutely amazing okay so there is a specialist VC firm called mkt1 it's
written by Emily Kramer and Kathleen ice stretch sorry if I pronounced your last name there on Kaylee Kathleen uh it's all about marketing they are marketing experts and operators who now invest but they make the best Frameworks that you can immediately apply and there's like templates and all sorts of like super
super tactical stuff which a lot of tactical marketing content is terrible because it's actually content marketing for some bad platform theirs is not it is genuinely good go check it out a huge fan Emily has been on the podcast and yeah and I look at that newsletter as the Lenny's newsletter of marketing and
it's exactly a description it's a huge fan great recommendation with that zoelle thank you so much for being here this was a lot of fun and we got through a lot of stuff which yeah uh makes you really happy two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out learn more and how can
listeners be useful to you I am on Twitter at zoelle I'm also on LinkedIn so while agner come find me there otherwise how can you be useful to me mostly like go for us and believe in customer success and talk to your users number one because I am an avid user of technology and I want it all to be better number two no that's all I got
just go do those things and I will be so happy also if you want to talk about customer success anytime hit me up in here I'm gonna add a couple more things which you mentioned to me Offline that you're hiring at block party you're hiring gross people PMS engineers and then you're false advising on the side
with marketing customer success anything else you want to add there yeah absolutely uh love advising early stage companies especially helpful for preseason seed usually anything plg positioning messaging figuring out your channels experimentation all that early fun stuff I love it happy to help anytime and we are hiring across all of
the teams but especially mine so if you would like to come and do all sorts of fun experimentation and also help people keep people online safe come look up block party I'd love to have you on my team block party.com or block partyapp.com okay so well thank you thank you thank you so much for listening if you
found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all best episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode [Music]