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In the early days of a startup, resources are scarce, teams are small, and brand recognition is non-existent. Yet, some companies manage to project an image of maturity and reliability that far exceeds their actual scale. Airtable is a prime example of this phenomenon. Before it became the multi-billion dollar "spreadsheet on steroids" that powers operations for massive enterprises, it was a lean team of roughly 15 people trying to convince Fortune 500 companies to trust them with critical data.
Zoelle Egner was employee number 11 at Airtable, leading their early marketing and customer success efforts. Her approach wasn't about spending millions on traditional ads or building complex sales machinery immediately. Instead, she focused on "punching above their weight" through obsessive attention to detail, unconventional growth tactics, and a deep integration of customer success into the marketing funnel. Whether scaling Airtable or mobilizing hundreds of volunteers for VaccinateCA during the pandemic, Egner’s playbook relies on high-leverage, low-cost strategies that build genuine trust.
Key Takeaways
- Punch above your weight with polish: Small details, like industry-specific sample content and error-free copy, signal to enterprise buyers that you are a "safe" vendor, even if your team fits in a single room.
- Target psychographics over titles: For horizontal products, traditional B2B targeting fails. Look for behavioral traits—like "tinkerers"—rather than specific job titles.
- Customer Success is Marketing: These functions share the same goal of removing friction and demonstrating value. CS identifies the wins; marketing scales those insights into templates and content.
- Don't launch; create a heartbeat: A single "Big Bang" PR launch rarely drives leads. Instead, aim for a cadence of smaller launches to maintain novelty and momentum.
- Elevate professions, not software categories: People fight for their professional identity, not for software categories. Building community around a job role is more effective than trying to invent a new quadrant in a Gartner report.
The Art of Punching Above Your Weight
One of the hardest challenges for early-stage B2B startups is overcoming the "risk" objection. Large companies are often hesitant to adopt software from a startup that might not exist in a year. Egner’s strategy at Airtable was to manufacture the "inevitability" and sophistication of a much larger company.
Obsessive Attention to Detail
Speed is essential in startups, but it often comes at the cost of quality. Egner argues that slowing down just enough to polish your user touchpoints yields a massive ROI in brand trust. This goes beyond fixing typos. It involves tailoring the user experience to make the customer feel seen.
For Airtable, this meant curating sample content. Instead of populating a template with generic "Jane Doe" names, they used references specific to the target industry—like design jokes for a creative agency template. This signals that the product was built with *them* in mind.
It’s small stuff, but it tells that person like the people who worked on this were thinking about me as a customer... and that means that it is more likely this is going to fit my needs than something generic.
Strategic Signaling
Sometimes, looking big requires physical evidence. Airtable famously ran billboard campaigns in San Francisco and New York. While critics on Twitter mocked the ROI of billboards for a tech product, they missed the point. The goal wasn't direct response; it was legitimacy.
By placing billboards near the offices of major media and fashion companies, Airtable planted a seed. When an internal champion at a large enterprise requested a budget for Airtable, the decision-maker wasn't hearing about a random startup for the first time. They were approving a tool they had seen on their commute. It reduced the perceived risk of the purchase.
Growth Through Psychographics and "Tinkerers"
Horizontal products—tools that can be used for anything from cattle tracking to video production—face a unique marketing problem. If you are everything to everyone, you are nothing to no one. You cannot simply target "Project Managers" on LinkedIn because the use case varies too wildly.
Airtable’s breakthrough was targeting a psychographic profile rather than a demographic one. They hunted for "tinkerers."
Identifying the Champion
A tinkerer is someone who enjoys taking things apart and building workflows, regardless of their official job title. To find them, Airtable looked for proxies: people interested in productivity hacks, specific podcasts, or adjacent "Lego-block" style tools.
They also automated the discovery of internal champions. In the early days, Egner’s team built a Slack integration that piped in new sign-up data. If a user signed up with a specific title from a high-value company, a bot would flag them. The team would then manually email these users—not to sell them, but to ensure they were successful in building their first database. By over-investing in the success of one "tinkerer," they created an internal evangelist who would eventually spread the product to the rest of the org.
The Symbiosis of Customer Success and Marketing
A controversial but effective stance Egner holds is that Customer Success (CS) and Marketing are functionally the same discipline. Both exist to help customers solve problems and realize value; they simply use different mechanisms to achieve it.
From Insight to Scale
In a healthy organization, CS operates in the weeds, solving individual problems. Marketing’s job is to take the solutions CS discovers and scale them. At Airtable, if CS helped a video production team build a specific workflow, marketing would strip out the proprietary data, polish the structure, and release it as a public template.
This creates a flywheel:
- CS solves a specific, high-value problem for a user.
- Marketing turns that solution into a template or case study.
- New users discover the template (via SEO or word of mouth).
- The "blank page" anxiety is removed, leading to higher activation rates.
Elevating the Profession
Many founders obsess over "category creation"—the idea of defining a new market segment (e.g., "The Revenue Intelligence Platform"). Egner suggests this is often a waste of time. Buyers don't care about software categories; they care about their own careers.
A more effective strategy is elevating a profession. Gainsight did this brilliantly with "Customer Success," turning a job function into a movement. By making the *people* utilizing your software feel important, powerful, and part of a community, you build a brand that people want to identify with.
A job is an identity and people will fight for an identity. A category of software is like a line item on your budget; no one is excited about that.
The Truth About PR and Launches
Startups often view a PR launch as a silver bullet for user acquisition. The reality is usually disappointing. A TechCrunch article rarely converts directly into a significant number of paid users. The funnel from "reading an article" to "clicking a link in the 12th paragraph" to "signing up" is simply too leaky.
However, PR remains vital for two specific goals:
- Hiring: Top talent wants to work for companies that appear to have momentum.
- Cold Outbound: Linking to a reputable news story in a sales email validates the company’s existence and increases response rates.
The Pulse of Novelty
Rather than betting the company on a single "launch day," startups should view launching as a heartbeat. Audiences respond to novelty. By breaking up product updates into a series of smaller, consistent launches, a company can stay top-of-mind and maintain a narrative of constant innovation. This approach prevents the "post-launch slump" and keeps the community engaged over the long term.
Conclusion
Whether building a volunteer network to save lives or scaling a B2B SaaS unicorn, the fundamentals remain the same. Growth does not come from a single hack or a massive ad budget. It comes from talking to customers until you understand their psychographics better than they do, and then building systems that make them feel like superheroes.
The most effective tactic is often the unscalable one: the personal email, the manual onboarding call, or the hand-crafted template. By investing in these high-touch moments early on, startups can build the brand equity required to punch well above their weight.
