Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Exactly. And I think what's interesting here is it helped us bootstrap two things. One was, to your point, building out the personas, and champions, and so on. And ultimately there's more scalable ways to reach those people in the long run. But secondarily, it also helped us deal with a real product education problem that we had in the early days. Because it was really complicated. Airtable, unfortunately, has two education issues that it needs to solve. It's not just, "How do I put the Lego blocks together?" It is also, "How do I design a piece of software and a workflow?" And unfortunately if you're selling to content marketing manager or a UX researcher, there's no guarantee that they know how to make a workflow. Most software is opinionated, and it does that work for you, and you're like, "It either works for you or it doesn't." And maybe you're frustrated about what it forces you to do in order to work, but you can't really control it, which means when suddenly, you have the ability to create whatever workflow that you want, there's actually some education that needs to go into it in order to be able to make that successful. It's not enough to just make an Airtable base that's pretty or that functions. You can't get your team to use it effectively if it doesn't fit into the broader context of the organization. It's still going to fail. And so a lot of this was us figuring out, like, "Okay, how do we help these people not only use our product but build something that is going to be durable, so that we do see that growth, so they don't see it as a failure, so it doesn't fail at that second order moment when it starts to get spread out to more people?" It's a really good tactic for any SaaS product that just is hard to understand and needs, Airtable had both problems. Like, "I don't know what this is for and I don't know exactly how it's going to fit into my workflow. " Imagine most- But-…

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