Zoelle Egner: preference

Transcript context

…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. 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 that 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 the personality of the company, and makes people want to root for you. And frankly, when you are small, you need everyone rooting 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 won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today my guest is Zoelle Egner. Zoelle 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, the most effective and impactful growth and marketing tactics throughout Airtable's 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 and 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'm really excited for you to learn from her. With that, I bring you Zoelle Egner after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by OneSchema, the embeddable CSV importer for SaaS. Customers always seem to want to give you their data in the messiest possible CSV file. And building a spreadsheet importer becomes a never ending sync for your engineering and support resources. You keep adding features to your spreadsheet importer, the customers keep running into issues. Six months later, you're fixing yet another date conversion edge case bug. Most tools aren't built for handling messy data, but OneSchema is. Companies like Scale AI and Pave are using OneSchema to make it fast and easy to launch delightful spreadsheet import experiences, from embeddable CSV import to importing CSVs from an SMTP folder on a recurring basis. Spreadsheet import is such an awful experience in so many products. Customers get frustrated by useless messages like, "Error on line 53." And never end up getting started with your product. OneSchema intelligently corrects messy data so that your customers don't have to spend hours in Excel just to get started with your product. For listeners of this podcast, OneSchema is offering a $1,000 discount. Learn more at oneschema.co/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Pando, 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 have the highest impact and growth in their careers. Pando is disrupting the old paradigm of performance management, including a continuous employee-centric approach, so employees stay engaged, see their progression in real time, and know exactly when and how they can level up.…

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