Lessons from Airtable's unconventional growth strategy

I literally had a running tally of how many people we'd gotten promoted for using the product, and I knew if we were getting those at the major accounts we were trying to win, something good was happening and we were going to be successful with really large deals.

There's not a better evangelist than a person whose career you have materially helped to improve based on matching the right person to the solution so that they can have more impact at their company.

And frankly, when you are small, you need everyone rooting for you that you can possibly get.

Just getting PR is not a good goal. Most of the time PR is not going to get you leads or users, it's just not. What it is good for is credibility.

We weren't initially looking for buyers, we were looking for champions, in part so that we could then go to IT 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.'

Customer success and marketing are basically the same thing. Both of them have to identify customer needs. They have to help the customers see your product as a solution to those needs. They need to remove friction from the process of getting value.

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 that this is going to fit my needs than something generic.'

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 company that they worked at, et cetera. And literally would sit there and had a little button in each of the records that would allow us to email them immediately if we had decided that they might be someone we want to talk to.

All of this is easier if you talk to your customers more. Build a system for yourself that will allow you to have those touchpoints.

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?'

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 make sure someone rereads your email so that it sounds good. Invest in having a decent photo or a decent illustration.