Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…tice was 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 came in that would allow us to email them immediately if we had decided that they might be someone we want to talk to. And we set up this whole automated system so that it would take two seconds to reach out to a ton of different people, being like, "Hey, we'd really love to get your feedback and help make sure you're as successful as possible on Airtable." 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 champions looked like in practice by finding the patterns across them. And building the foundation is what ultimately became our customer success motion very early. And then we were able to say, "Okay, we found five people who have a content calendar use case with this type of title. And now we'll be able to go run an ad campaign based on that. We can build a bunch of templates based on that. Here's all these different hooks we can use, because we know this is what a champion can look like," in a way that was not going to be obvious if we hadn't talked to a ton of people. So it seems really unobvious as an investment, per se, but tremendous number of human hours going into just having an efficient way to talk to as many people as possible to build those mental models. That's number one. That is fascinating. Essentially, you weren't 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 encourage and help support. " And then part of that is, "Get it spreading within a company once you figure out these folks within a company." It's such a cool idea to just have a feed of ... I imagine the squad had certain attributes of the person, like, "Here's the company they work. Here's how big it is." And then they talk about, there's a mention of what they're using it for. Is that part of this? Ideally. Though we were always very privacy minded, so we couldn't actually get much information about what they were doing in Airtable. We could never see their data, because that would be a tremendous failure of trust, to go back to what we were talking about before. So a lot of this, we would have guesses, and maybe we could see that they'd use certain templates but we didn't otherwise really know. And that was part of the reason why we wanted to talk to them in the first place. The second reason is that if we could talk to them early, we could help them build their first space, and from there, if they were successful, they would have the tools to go and help other people within their organization. So if we catch them at the beginning, make sure one person was successful by over investing in them, then they essentially became support for everybody else. 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 an interesting dynamic that many companies do not have. But for us, the person who is going to sit down with a glass of wine on a Friday and build an Airtable base was not the person who had the budget who was going to pay for this thing. And so 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." Not sure IT loved those conversations, but they were really effective for us and meant that it was very, very easy to sell.…

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