Punching Above Your Weight: Airtable's Early Marketing Playbook, From Billboards to Champions

Lenny Rachitsky first met Egner through his newsletter Slack community, where he cold-messaged her to get an Airtable discount for subscribers. She was Airtable's employee number 11, leading marketing and customer success, but he starts with a side project. VaccinateCA existed to help Californians find a COVID vaccine as quickly as possible, at a time when eligibility varied by state, county and even individual facility.

The organization began with a tweet from Patrick McKenzie: call pharmacies, ask who they can vaccinate and with what, and put the answer on a map so others do not have to repeat the call. It grew into a nonprofit run on Discord, Zoom and Airtable, with hundreds of volunteers calling sites, later nationally as Vaccinate The States. The team also scraped and validated official sources, building what Egner says was a more comprehensive location database than the federal government or most states had.

That data fed an API, was shared with Google, and powered the vaccine locations shown in Google Maps as well as maps on county websites. Egner joined to help with PR after a colleague from Airtable built the backend, and ended up quitting her job to work on it full-time, serving on the board and managing outreach. Volunteers ranged from retired teachers to 12-year-olds helping with code, including a man in Israel who spent dozens of hours calling despite a different time zone.

After about six months the team chose to shut it down, which she notes is uncommon. The existing systems had caught up, and they saw themselves as a stopgap that should free people's time once they stopped being additive. An archive remains, and researchers are studying its data on equity in vaccine distribution.

Egner's first lesson is the power of a simple idea. Everyone understood why VaccinateCA was useful and how they personally could help, and the message "pick up phone, help save lives" gave volunteers a sense of agency when everything felt out of control. She also argues tech should not hesitate to engage with such problems, as long as it works with experts and the people affected. Rachitsky adds that companies with an exciting mission find hiring easier.

Her second lesson is to repeat the same message relentlessly, even when you think everyone knows it. She says she repeated the same three talking points thousands of times, and so did every board member, because people fill the gaps with wild assumptions otherwise. Rachitsky jokes that a founder's real title is repeater in chief, and Egner agrees that leaders are never as listened to as they think.

The third lesson is the value of a laughably small MVP. The project began as a spreadsheet and phones, yet within months it had an API, custom front-end software and national coverage, and the early version taught the team what to build. Egner was wrong about the oversight and tooling she thought data quality would need, since something lighter let them move faster as rules kept changing. Her advice to listeners who think they must add more: they could probably prune.

Before tech, Egner worked in nonprofit, healthcare and big-box retail, having graduated into the recession. Because she was non-technical and had tried programming and hated it, she studied the tech industry like a network, mapping how influential people such as VCs and executives moved between companies and shaped investment, partnerships and received wisdom. She drew diagrams from people's blog posts, which she admits sounds a little insane but was effective.

Following the YCombinator ecosystem, she looked for a lesser-known YC-backed company that would struggle to hire, but still carried a pedigree. She cold-emailed its CEO while still in college and ignored his quick reply for two years while finishing her thesis. She later sent an apology email asking for a second chance, and he hired her as employee one at a developer-focused startup.

That startup was acquired by Box, where she launched developer success programs after the company had never had paying developers before. A candid blog post about being an early non-technical employee led PR to invite her to run social media editorial and internal comms instead of firing her, as she feared. After Box's IPO she saw Airtable's beta on Hacker News, became obsessed and found her way into employee 11.

After VaccinateCA she tried to find a company idea of her own but lacked enough conviction, and instead joined Block Party, one of the companies she had been advising, to run marketing and growth. Block Party is an online safety company whose first product offers anti-harassment and anti-spam tools for Twitter.

Egner says she chooses companies with an excellent product that people do not yet fully understand, where she can help a small team punch above its weight on brand. Airtable handled mission-critical workflows and sensitive data, and Block Party handles safety, so trust is essential in both. She argues founders underestimate how much each touchpoint, from word of mouth to ads, landing pages, signup flows and support, adds or removes trust.

In the early days that meant signaling that Airtable understood its customers and operated above its size. She jokes that she took customers to lunch when they visited San Francisco because Airtable had 15 people in a tiny office, while they were paying six figures. She recalls Slack assuming Airtable was about their size, when it was an order of magnitude smaller.

Her practical advice is unglamorous: make landing pages and emails feel polished, have someone reread them, and invest in a decent photo or illustration. Sample content matters too, so avoid "Jane Doe" twelve times and use jokes that an audience such as designers will recognize. These details show customers they were considered, build brand personality and win supporters, which small companies badly need.

To keep quality high, either the founder acts as the avatar of quality, or someone in marketing, product or customer success does, and interviews can screen for people who add 15 minutes without obsessing for a week. A simple checklist, such as having a second person read every email, makes it lightweight. She also says public communications should carry a point of view about a bigger movement the company belongs to.

Airtable's billboards, mocked on Twitter as unfocused, had a specific purpose: signaling legitimacy to large companies, especially in New York's fashion and media industries, whose staff would pass them on the way to work. When those employees asked IT for a six-figure budget, a familiar name would help. They bought remnant inventory, which Egner says can cost in the low thousands of dollars per billboard depending on the metro.

Egner says billboards were not Airtable's highest-ROI tactic. The more conventional one that worked well was unconventionally targeted Facebook ads, though she warns that era is over and it should not be expected to work for B2B now. Because Airtable can be used for anything, generic messaging like "build your own software" put people off, so the team targeted a psychographic: the tinkerer who likes new technology and putting together building blocks.

Since Facebook could not target a tinkerer mindset directly, they targeted clusters of interests, such as particular podcasts or personal-development content, then built lookalikes. She adds context: Airtable spread within professions, where people built a personal brand around their tools, and even more within companies, where it could go from 10 to 1,000 people in a year. No generic explanation worked, so the magic was in specificity.

A champion who used Airtable as a content calendar could help a friend with a UX research problem and look like a superhero internally, effectively doing the sales pitch for free. To find these people early, the team built a Slack integration listing new signups with title and company, and a button that emailed them in seconds to ask for feedback. This did not scale, but the conversations built a mental model of what champions look like and became the foundation of their customer success motion.

That model fed ad campaigns, templates and hooks aimed at specific use cases, such as a content calendar with a particular job title. The team stayed privacy-minded and could not see users' data, which was part of the reason to talk to them. Egner notes the champion was usually not the buyer, so the aim was to make one person successful so they would support everyone else.

Rachitsky compares this to product-led sales, only earlier. Egner agrees but says it also solved a product education problem. Airtable users had to learn both how to assemble the pieces and how to design a workflow, and a base that does not fit the organization will fail when it spreads to more people. She says many assume Airtable was purely product-led, missing a large early customer success component that came before sales.

The second tactic was spending a "hilarious" amount on really good swag, such as branded AirPods, for people who were already champions. Colleagues would ask about it and the champions would show it off and pitch the product. She says this was hard to measure but worth the couple hundred dollars, though she notes it would work less well with remote teams.

She also advises turning customer success insights into content: the team built generalized templates and blog posts from workflows they had helped build, so smaller companies could start from them. Her spicy view is that customer success and marketing are essentially the same function, since both identify needs, show the product as a solution, remove friction, encourage sharing and turn insights into resources, using different tactics.

An unofficial metric at Airtable was how many people the team had gotten promoted for using the product, tracked by customer success managers through their relationships. If they were seeing those promotions at the major accounts they wanted to win, she knew large deals would follow.

On what to avoid, Egner begins with the caveat that channel-market fit is real. She advises against flashy event marketing and sponsorships, which are usually a waste unless your industry truly gathers at a trade show. Her advice is to attend the event but not fund the sponsorship, because few people attend a branded session and a logo tells them nothing.

Her other spicy opinion is that creating your own software category, such as getting a new box into Gartner, is a huge and often wasteful lift, and buyers do not work in a niche with no competitors. What does work is elevating a profession, as Gainsight did with customer success and companies did by making DevOps a more attractive job. A job is an identity people will fight for, so you become part of that identity.

Rachitsky links this to making the customer the hero, and Egner says the best examples feel less self-serving and invest in community without immediate ROI. She cites Datadog and Notion, where people are invested in the templates they create. On templates, she says they help horizontal products narrow the surface area, but Airtable's templates were not a top-of-funnel engine because they were not optimized for search, unlike Zapier's programmatic SEO.

Egner says Airtable could have done more, but it had barely 50 people from 2015 until 2017 or 2018 and had to make hard prioritization choices. Templates worked for narrowing choices and expanding within companies, and an SEO play would need much more investment than just having people make templates.

On launches and PR, Egner says getting PR just to get PR is not a good goal, because most coverage will not bring in leads or users. Few readers click a link buried in the twelfth paragraph or remember to search for you. PR is good for credibility, and she recommends two uses: hiring, and improving the response rate of cold outbound, since in both you send the asset yourself and can measure the effect.

Launches need not rely on PR. She recommends a series of launches to stay top of mind, create momentum and reach different communities, because audiences respond to novelty. Have a big annual launch, but also another one two months later, and another after that.

Her closing advice is to talk to customers more, setting up a weekly or monthly routine, and to consider investing in customer success early if you are a B2B company. Airtable had it before sales, but she says not to hire it if you will not listen. The simplest tactic is a template email asking a targeted user for a 10-minute phone call, because unstructured conversation yields more than a survey; she suggests sending three a week.

In the lightning round, she recommends the book *Computing Taste* by Nick Seaver and Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice series for thinking about AI, and the MKT1 newsletter for practical marketing. Her favorite interview question for customer-facing roles is to have the candidate build a solution live using Zapier, which shows how they learn and handle unfamiliar problems.