"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..."

"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 gu..."

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"so well welcome to the podcast 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 ho..."

"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 Cal..."

"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..."

"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..."

"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 wh..."

"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 ..."

"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 actual..."

"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 ..."

"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 ab..."

"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 d..."

"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 wo..."

"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 vaccine..."

"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..."

"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 underst..."

"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 s..."

"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 progr..."

"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 ..."

"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 an..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"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..."

"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..."

"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 pushi..."

"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 ..."

"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 th..."

"you're a hiring manager you can sign up and get access to hundreds of hand curated people who are open to New Opportunities thousands of people apply to join this Collective and I personally review an..."

"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 dee..."

"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 podcast..."

"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 wit..."

"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 t..."

"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 intere..."

"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 Champi..."

"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..."

"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 inte..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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 custome..."

"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 ..."

"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 gettin..."

"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 unofficia..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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 w..."

"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 ou..."

"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 ha..."

"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..."

"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..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"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 ar..."

"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 obviou..."

"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 cred..."

"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 c..."

"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 f..."

"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 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 ..."

"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 ei..."

"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 a..."