Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner

Zoelle Egner: 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.

Zoelle Egner：有时会有一种建议或直觉，就像“超级、超级快地运送东西，然后把它们送到那里”。我并不是说不要快速行动。

Obviously you need to move fast in the early days, but make sure someone rereads your email so that it sounds good.

显然，您需要在早期快速行动，但要确保有人重读您的电子邮件，以便听起来不错。

Invest in having a decent photo or a decent illustration.

投资拥有一张像样的照片或像样的插图。

If you have sample content, this is actually a big one, sample content for your productivity app as an example.

如果您有示例内容，这实际上是一个很大的内容，以您的生产力应用程序为例。

Take the time to not have it be like Jane Doe 12 times in the name list.

花点时间不要让它像无名氏一样出现在名单中 12 次。

Have it be references to your industry so that people are like, "Oh, hey.

让它引用你的行业，这样人们就会说，“哦，嘿。

That's a joke about Steve Jobs.

这是关于史蒂夫·乔布斯的一个笑话。

I'm a designer.

我是一名设计师。

This person is thinking about me."

这个人正在想我。”

Zoelle Egner: 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.

Zoelle Egner：虽然是小事，但它告诉那个人，“从事这项工作的人将我视为客户，他们在构建它时考虑到了我，这意味着这比通用的东西更有可能满足我的需求。”这既建立了我们所讨论的品牌信任，也建立了公司的个性，让人们想要支持你。

And frankly, when you are small, you need everyone rooting for you that you can possibly get.

坦率地说，当你还小的时候，你需要每个人都尽可能地支持你。

Lenny: 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.

莱尼：欢迎来到莱尼的播客，我在其中采访了世界一流的产品领导者和增长专家，学习他们建立和扩展当今最成功公司的来之不易的经验。

Today my guest is Zoelle Egner.

今天我的嘉宾是佐尔·埃格纳。

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.

Zoelle 是 Airtable 最早的员工之一，她领导了他们的早期营销和客户成功团队，总体上只是帮助 Airtable 成长为今天的传奇业务。

She also spent time in Box.

她也在 Box 呆过一段时间。

She's advised dozens of startups on marketing and growth, and is now head of marketing and growth at a startup called Block Party.

她为数十家初创公司提供了营销和增长方面的咨询，现在是一家名为 Block Party 的初创公司的营销和增长主管。

Lenny: 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.

Lenny：在我们的谈话中，Zoelle 分享了作为一家初创公司如何超越自己、Airtable 历史上最有效、最有影响力的增长和营销策略，包括广告牌的使用、通常投资回报率很高的营销投资以及那些很少充分利用时间的投资、为什么公关和发布对初创公司实际上有用，以及它们何时没有用，等等。

It was so much fun chatting with Zoelle, and I'm really excited for you to learn from her.

与 Zoelle 聊天非常有趣，我很高兴您能向她学习。

With that, I bring you Zoelle Egner after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.

在我们出色的赞助商简短致辞后，我为您带来佐埃尔·埃格纳 (Zoelle Egner)。

Lenny: Today's episode is brought to you by OneSchema, the embeddable CSV importer for SaaS.

Lenny：今天的节目是由 OneSchema 为您带来的，OneSchema 是 SaaS 的嵌入式 CSV 导入器。

Customers always seem to want to give you their data in the messiest possible CSV file.

客户似乎总是希望在最混乱的 CSV 文件中向您提供他们的数据。

And building a spreadsheet importer becomes a never ending sync for your engineering and support resources.

构建电子表格导入器将成为您的工程和支持资源的永无休止的同步。

You keep adding features to your spreadsheet importer, the customers keep running into issues.

您不断向电子表格导入器添加功能，客户不断遇到问题。

Six months later, you're fixing yet another date conversion edge case bug.

六个月后，您正在修复另一个日期转换边缘情况错误。

Most tools aren't built for handling messy data, but OneSchema is.

大多数工具并不是为处理杂乱数据而构建的，但 OneSchema 却是。

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.

Scale AI 和 Pave 等公司正在使用 OneSchema 快速轻松地推出令人愉悦的电子表格导入体验，从嵌入式 CSV 导入到定期从 SMTP 文件夹导入 CSV。

Spreadsheet import is such an awful experience in so many products.

对于许多产品来说，电子表格导入是一种非常糟糕的体验。

Customers get frustrated by useless messages like, "Error on line 53." And never end up getting started with your product.

客户会对“第 53 行错误”等无用消息感到沮丧。并且永远不会开始使用你的产品。

OneSchema intelligently corrects messy data so that your customers don't have to spend hours in Excel just to get started with your product.

OneSchema 可以智能地纠正杂乱的数据，这样您的客户就不必在 Excel 上花费数小时来开始使用您的产品。

For listeners of this podcast, OneSchema is offering a $1,000 discount.

OneSchema 为该播客的听众提供 1,000 美元的折扣。

Learn more at oneschema.co/lenny.

如需了解更多信息，请访问 oneschema.co/lenny。

Lenny: This episode is brought to you by Pando, the always on employee performance platform.

Lenny：本集由始终在线的员工绩效平台 Pando 为您带来。

How much do you love the performance review process?

您有多喜欢绩效评估流程？

Yeah, it's time consuming, subjective, biased, and there's rarely any transparency.

是的，这很耗时、主观、有偏见，而且很少有透明度。

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.

随着分布式工作的迅速转变，创建您希望帮助员工在职业生涯中发挥最大影响力和成长的结构和透明度是一项艰巨的任务。

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.

Pando 正在颠覆绩效管理的旧模式，包括持续以员工为中心的方法，让员工保持敬业度，实时查看自己的进展，并准确知道何时以及如何升级。

With Pando, managers can leverage competency based frameworks to effectively coach and develop their teams and align on consistent growth standards resulting in higher quality feedback and higher performing teams.

借助 Pando，管理者可以利用基于能力的框架来有效地指导和发展他们的团队，并遵循一致的增长标准，从而获得更高质量的反馈和更高绩效的团队。

Visit pando.com/lenny for more info and get a special discount when you sign out and reference this podcast.

请访问 pando.com/lenny 了解更多信息，并在退出并引用此播客时获得特别折扣。

That's pando.com/lenny.

那是 pando.com/lenny。

Zoelle, welcome to the podcast.

佐尔，欢迎来到播客。

Lenny: It's very much my pleasure.

莱尼：我很高兴。

Something that is pretty cool is that we actually met in my newsletter Slack community.

非常酷的是我们实际上是在我的时事通讯 Slack 社区中认识的。

I actually looked this up of how we actually started chatting, and it was me cold DMing you to get a discount on Airtable for the newsletter subscribers.

我实际上查了一下我们是如何开始聊天的，我冷冷地发私信给你，让你为时事通讯订阅者获得 Airtable 折扣。

And you very happily got me that, hooked us up, and then you became a go-to Airtable person for advice on what Airtable did right and wrong over the years.

你很高兴地让我知道了，把我们联系起来，然后你就成为了 Airtable 的常客，就 Airtable 多年来做对和做错的事情征求建议。

And so thank you for being that person and also I'm really excited to have you on this podcast and to learn from you.

所以感谢你成为那个人，我也很高兴你能加入这个播客并向你学习。

Lenny: Awesome.

莱尼：太棒了。

You're probably best known for your time at Airtable, which, correct me if I'm wrong, you're employee number 11.

你最出名的可能是你在 Airtable 的经历，如果我错了，请纠正我，你是 Airtable 的 11 号员工。

Lenny: Okay, and at Airtable you led marketing, you led the customer success teams, so we're going to chat about all that stuff.

Lenny：好的，在 Airtable，你领导了营销，领导了客户成功团队，所以我们将讨论所有这些事情。

But before we get into that, I want to chat briefly about this other project that you worked on, that from the outside felt like a really fascinating thing, and a really impactful project, and a really cool team.

但在我们开始讨论之前，我想简单地谈谈你参与的另一个项目，从外部来看，这是一个非常迷人的事情，一个非常有影响力的项目，一个非常酷的团队。

And it's called Vaccinate California, I think, is that how you pronounce it?

我想，它的名字叫“加州疫苗接种”，你是这么发音的吗？

Lenny: VaccinateCA.

莱尼：疫苗接种CA。

Okay.

好的。

Could you just talk a little bit about what this was?

您能简单谈谈这是什么吗？

What were you trying to do?

你想做什么？

What was the impact you had?

你产生了什么影响？

How did it all go?

一切进展如何？

Zoelle Egner: Yeah, absolutely.

佐尔·埃格纳：是的，绝对是。

So VaccinateCA existed to help people in California find and get a COVID vaccine as quickly as possible, and that sounds really trivial right now, but you have to wind back to January of 2020, when vaccines were first coming out, and it was really hard.

因此，VaccinateCA 的存在是为了帮助加利福尼亚州的人们尽快找到并获得新冠疫苗，这在现在听起来确实微不足道，但你必须回到 2020 年 1 月，当时疫苗刚刚问世，这真的很难。

So just as a reminder, because most of us have blocked that from our memory.

所以只是作为一个提醒，因为我们大多数人都已经把它从我们的记忆中抹去了。

Zoelle Egner: The federal and state systems didn't really exist yet, and so everything was this horrible hodgepodge, where eligibility depended on not only what state you were in, it was down to the county, and even sometimes the individual facility.

Zoelle Egner：联邦和州系统还没有真正存在，所以一切都是可怕的大杂烩，资格不仅取决于你所在的州，还取决于县，有时甚至取决于个别设施。

You would be at a Walgreens, and talk to them, and they'd be like, "Oh, you have to be over 65, and also in one of these 12 categories of employment in order to get the vaccine." And then you'd go a mile away and they would tell you something totally different.

你会在沃尔格林 (Walgreens) 药店与他们交谈，他们会说，“哦，你必须年满 65 岁，并且必须从事这 12 类工作之一才能接种疫苗。”然后你走到一英里外，他们就会告诉你一些完全不同的事情。

So people would stand in line for hours.

所以人们会排队几个小时。

There were phones going off the hook, utterly madness, and really, really scary for a lot of people who were trying to figure out how to keep themselves safe.

电话突然没电，这真是太疯狂了，对于很多试图弄清楚如何保证自己安全的人来说，真的非常可怕。

Lenny: Yeah, I remember those days well.

莱尼：是的，我清楚地记得那些日子。

Zoelle Egner: Yeah.

佐尔·埃格纳：是的。

So this organization was founded essentially by a tweet by Patrick McKenzie, for those of you who are on Hacker News Patio11.

所以这个组织本质上是由帕特里克·麦肯齐 (Patrick McKenzie) 的一条推文创立的，对于那些在 Hacker News Patio11 上的人来说。

And he had basically this really simple premise, which is, "If you call a pharmacist, and you ask them who they can give a vaccine to, and what vaccine they have, and then you put that answer on a map, someone else doesn't have to make the same phone call.

他基本上有一个非常简单的前提，那就是，“如果你打电话给药剂师，问他们可以给谁注射疫苗，他们有什么疫苗，然后你把答案放在地图上，其他人就不必打同样的电话。

And that takes lots of pressure also as a healthcare system and also helps people to match supply and demand."

作为医疗保健系统，这也带来了很大的压力，同时也帮助人们匹配供需。”

Zoelle Egner: So surprisingly, somehow, that tweet, which is essentially like, "Call people, put in spreadsheet, put online," turned into an entire, full nonprofit that was mostly on Discord, Zoom, Airtable, and not only had this entire hundreds of volunteers who were making phone calls in the state of California and eventually, actually, nationally, we became Vaccinate The States eventually, we were also doing this thing called web banking.

Zoelle Egner：令人惊讶的是，不知何故，那条推文本质上是“打电话给人们，放入电子表格，放在网上”，变成了一个完整的、完整的非营利组织，主要在 Discord、Zoom、Airtable 上，不仅有数百名志愿者在加利福尼亚州打电话，最终，实际上，在全国范围内，我们最终成为了“疫苗接种国家”，我们还做了称为网络银行的事情。

So we would go and scrape all the official sources as they started coming out, and then validate them because they were not always correct.

因此，我们会在所有官方来源开始出现时去抓取它们，然后验证它们，因为它们并不总是正确的。

And eventually we had the most comprehensive database and map of locations in the entire country, including more comprehensive than the federal government and most of the states because they had really complicated limitations on what they could and couldn't publish based on some relationships they had.

最终，我们拥有了整个国家最全面的数据库和位置地图，包括比联邦政府和大多数州更全面的数据库和地图，因为他们根据他们拥有的某些关系，对可以发布和不能发布的内容进行了非常复杂的限制。

We didn't have those limitations.

我们没有这些限制。

Zoelle Egner: So it meant that we became this clearing house, essentially, for this information and we built an API.

Zoelle Egner：所以这意味着我们本质上成为了这个信息交换所，并且我们构建了一个 API。

We were working directly with Google.

我们直接与谷歌合作。

And if you ever looked up vaccine locations on Google Maps, that was us feeding that to them, which was really cool.

如果你在谷歌地图上查找疫苗地点，那就是我们向他们提供的信息，这真的很酷。

And we also made maps you could see on county websites, so it would help you understand what was available in your area.

我们还制作了您可以在县网站上看到的地图，因此它将帮助您了解您所在地区可用的内容。

One of the coolest things that I've ever worked on.

这是我做过的最酷的事情之一。

Lenny: Okay, exactly.

莱尼：好的，完全正确。

That's exactly I imagined how epic this was.

这正是我想象中的史诗般的场面。

Just to make sure people understand what you're describing, basically you had hundreds of people sitting there on phones calling vaccine locations, getting the specifics of who is able to get a vaccine there, and then just giving people a pointer of where they can get a vaccine.

为了确保人们理解你所描述的内容，基本上有数百人坐在那里打电话给疫苗接种地点，了解谁能够在那里获得疫苗的具体信息，然后只是向人们提供他们可以在哪里获得疫苗的指示。

Zoelle Egner: Exactly.

佐尔·埃格纳：没错。

So I came in initially, a colleague of mine at Airtable had been helping out with the building out of the backend.

所以我最初进来时，我在 Airtable 的一位同事一直在帮助构建后端。

And they started getting media attention.

他们开始引起媒体的关注。

And they thought, "Oh, well this will help more people understand that this resource is available." So I got brought in to do some PR help, basically help them figure out how to get the word out, and then ended up actually quitting my job at Airtable to work on it full-time.

他们想，“哦，这将帮助更多的人了解这个资源是可用的。”所以我被请来做一些公关帮助，基本上是帮助他们弄清楚如何宣传，然后最终辞掉了在 Airtable 的工作，全职从事这方面的工作。

Zoelle Egner: Yeah, I was on the board and also managing all outreach and other stuff.

Zoelle Egner：是的，我是董事会成员，还负责管理所有外展和其他事务。

So we did lots of really cool education, helping people understand their eligibility at all.

因此，我们做了很多非常酷的教育，帮助人们了解他们的资格。

Built a bunch of fun tools for that as well, but it was a pretty incredible six months, where we filled a really critical gap in the infrastructure of the country.

为此还构建了一堆有趣的工具，但这是令人难以置信的六个月，我们填补了该国基础设施中的一个非常关键的空白。

Lenny: It's wild that was the best solution, is just call people and create your own.

莱尼：这真是太疯狂了，这是最好的解决方案，就是打电话给人们并创建自己的解决方案。

Lenny: I imagine there was, at Airtable, were you using to store the data?

Lenny：我想你们在 Airtable 上是用来存储数据的吗？

Zoelle Egner: We built an entire insane database, and then eventually custom software on top of that, to make the people who are making the phone calls more easily get the information in.

Zoelle Egner：我们建立了一个完整的疯狂数据库，然后最终在此基础上定制软件，以使打电话的人更容易获取信息。

It was a whole thing.

这是一整件事。

Very cool to see, though, not just tech people get involved.

不过，很高兴看到不仅仅是技术人员参与其中。

We had, in our volunteer base, people from absolutely every walk of life, not just in California, globally.

我们的志愿者基地里有来自各行各业的人，不仅仅是加州，还有全球各地的人。

I remember there was a volunteer who said that he decided to join, he was based in Israel, and he had had no trouble getting the vaccine whatsoever, but seen something on Twitter about it, and just decided he wanted to make sure that people were able to get the vaccine as easily as he did.

我记得有一位志愿者说他决定加入，他住在以色列，他在获得疫苗方面没有任何困难，但在推特上看到了一些相关内容，然后他决定要确保人们能够像他一样轻松地获得疫苗。

And he spent dozens of hours calling folks, even though he was in a totally different time zone.

尽管他身处完全不同的时区，但他还是花了几十个小时给人们打电话。

But really lovely to see all these different people, retired teachers.

但很高兴看到所有这些不同的人，退休教师。

I think we had a bunch of 12 year olds who were helping out on the code, of all things, all who just really wanted to make sure that they could keep their community safe.

我认为我们有一群 12 岁的孩子在帮助编写代码，最重要的是，他们只是真的想确保他们能够保证社区的安全。

Lenny: What happened with this organization?

莱尼：这个组织怎么了？

It's a nonprofit that now continues to run or what's happening?

这是一个非营利组织，现在仍在继续运营，或者发生了什么？

Zoelle Egner: No, we did something which is not common.

Zoelle Egner：不，我们做了一些不常见的事情。

We actually decided to shut it down after six months.

事实上，我们决定在六个月后关闭它。

Partially, that's because the existing system finally caught up.

部分原因是现有系统终于赶上了。

And frankly we didn't want to be in a place where we were pulling away resources that could be put towards other things that are going to be more impactful.

坦率地说，我们不想把资源抽走，而这些资源本来可以用于其他更有影响力的事情。

We always saw ourselves as a stop gap, and once we got to the place where we felt like we weren't really being additive, we wanted to get people's time back, so they could work on other things.

我们总是将自己视为权宜之计，一旦我们觉得自己并没有真正发挥作用，我们就希望夺回人们的时间，以便他们可以从事其他事情。

So it doesn't exist anymore.

所以它已经不存在了。

I think you can still go check out the archive.

我想你还是可以去看看存档。

We found some researchers who are doing interesting research on it, because there's very fascinating data in there about the equitability of some of the distribution of the vaccine based on where it was available, but the organization is gone.

我们发现一些研究人员正在对此进行有趣的研究，因为那里有非常有趣的数据，说明根据疫苗的供应地点，疫苗的某些分配的公平性，但该组织已经消失了。

We had that beautiful moment in time and have all moved on.

我们度过了那个美好的时刻，然后一切都继续前进。

Hoping we don't have to get the band back together, because hopefully it's not necessary anymore.

希望我们不必让乐队重新组合在一起，因为希望不再有必要了。

Lenny: Oh, man.

莱尼：哦，伙计。

I'm watching The Last of Us right now about this-

我现在正在看《最后生还者》，就是关于这个的——

Lenny: ...

莱尼：……

mushroom based disease, and that scares me now.

基于蘑菇的疾病，现在让我感到害怕。

Lenny: Anyway, on this podcast I try to get to things people learn from these experiences, and so I have to ask what you learn about forming something like this, just ad hoc, pulling a bunch of people together, and having them focus, and get things done, or just scaling it, or even shutting down.

莱尼：无论如何，在这个播客中，我试图了解人们从这些经历中学到的东西，所以我不得不问你学到了什么，关于形成这样的东西，只是临时的，把一群人聚集在一起，让他们集中注意力，把事情做好，或者只是扩大规模，甚至关闭。

I guess what have you taken away from that experience that you maybe will bring to either future one-off things like this or even just your work in general?

我想你从这段经历中得到了什么，你可能会为未来这样的一次性事情，甚至只是你的一般工作带来什么？

Zoelle Egner: Yeah, I'd say probably three things.

Zoelle Egner：是的，我可能会说三件事。

One, the incredible power of a simple idea to bring people together.

第一，一个简单的想法能够将人们聚集在一起的不可思议的力量。

One of the reasons why VaccinateCA was so powerful and got so many people to help is everybody immediately understood why it would be useful and how they specifically could be making a difference.

VaccinateCA 如此强大并得到如此多的人帮助的原因之一是每个人都立即明白它为什么有用以及他们具体如何能够发挥作用。

And combining those two things was an incredible way to bring a lot of people on board very quickly, because from a messaging perspective, messaging, something very important to me as a marketer, it was so concise.

将这两件事结合起来是一种令人难以置信的方式，可以很快让很多人加入进来，因为从消息传递的角度来看，消息传递对我作为营销人员来说非常重要，它非常简洁。

Like, "Pick up phone, help save lives." Really straightforward.

比如，“拿起电话，帮助拯救生命。”真的很简单。

People really, really got that.

人们真的真的明白了。

It allowed them to feel like they had agency in a time when everything felt really, really out of control.

这让他们感觉自己在一切都非常非常失控的时代拥有了代理权。

I think there's a lot of opportunities we have to activate our communities and give people that sense of control that are both going to be helpful more broadly for society, but also just for those individuals as well to make them feel a little bit more safe, a little bit more like they can actually have a difference in things.

我认为我们有很多机会来激活我们的社区并赋予人们一种控制感，这不仅对社会有更广泛的帮助，而且也只是对那些个人来说，让他们感到更安全，让他们感觉自己实际上可以在事情上有所作为。

Zoelle Egner: I think in tech we often don't jump into these problems.

Zoelle Egner：我认为在科技领域我们通常不会陷入这些问题。

This was not sophisticated technology.

这并不是什么复杂的技术。

It was phones, Discord, and Airtable mostly being used like a spreadsheet.

主要是像电子表格一样使用手机、Discord 和 Airtable。

It wasn't anything wild.

这不是什么疯狂的事情。

Even that very simple infrastructure was enough to make a huge difference.

即使是非常简单的基础设施也足以产生巨大的影响。

And we have some evidence that we saved a lot of lives as a result of it, which is pretty special.

我们有一些证据表明我们因此拯救了很多生命，这是非常特别的。

I think part of it is also just saying, "We don't have to be hesitant to jump into these problems.

我认为其中一部分也只是说：“我们不必犹豫地解决这些问题。

It's important to engage with experts in the field, is not to say that tech solutionism is always the answer." And again, this is not super sophisticated technology, but because we were able to go in and talk to the people who are actually affected, get into the system that already existed, and make something really simple, really fast, it actually did have a huge difference and that's really exciting.

与该领域的专家接触很重要，但这并不是说技术解决方案总是答案。”再说一次，这不是超级复杂的技术，但因为我们能够深入到那些真正受到影响的人，进入已经存在的系统，并让一些东西变得非常简单、非常快，所以它实际上确实产生了巨大的差异，这真的很令人兴奋。

Lenny: Just to double-click on that one, actually reminds me, some founders of companies I've invested in, I often hear how much easier it is for companies that have a mission that people are excited about for them to hire versus companies that don't.

莱尼：双击那个，实际上提醒了我，我投资过的一些公司的创始人，我经常听到那些有人们对他们感到兴奋的使命的公司比没有使命的公司更容易招聘。

And so it's a really good reminder of just the power of having a mission and a vision that is really compelling to people versus some B2B software that people aren't excited about, even though there's a great reason to have great B2B software.

因此，这确实很好地提醒了人们，与一些人们不感兴趣的 B2B 软件相比，拥有真正吸引人们的使命和愿景的力量是强大的，尽管拥有出色的 B2B 软件有充分的理由。

Love B2Bs.

喜欢 B2B。

Zoelle Egner: There are.

佐尔·埃格纳：有。

I love great B2B software.

我喜欢优秀的 B2B 软件。

I've spent most of my career on it.

我职业生涯的大部分时间都花在了上面。

But I agree with you.

但我同意你的观点。

I think if you have an authentic mission and people aren't just like, "Oh, sure, okay.

我认为，如果你有一个真正的使命，人们不会只是说，“哦，当然，好吧。

You're connecting the world." But really it's some telephony startup.

你正在连接世界。”但实际上这是一些电话初创公司。

Like, "Okay."

就像，“好吧”。

Zoelle Egner: If people feel like it's genuinely authentic to what you're building, it can be incredibly meaningful.

Zoelle Egner：如果人们觉得你正在构建的东西是真实的，那么它就会非常有意义。

Lenny: Yeah.

莱尼：是的。

I just remember a founder who, he is a second company, because the first company did not have an amazing mission.

我只记得一位创始人，他是第二家公司，因为第一家公司没有惊人的使命。

The second one did.

第二个做到了。

And like, "Wow.

就像，“哇。

So much easier to hire for this new startup."

这家新初创公司的招聘变得更加容易。”

Zoelle Egner: Number two and three, I'll try and be more brief.

Zoelle Egner：第二和第三点，我会尽量说得更简短。

Zoelle Egner: Number two, I would say just the importance of relentlessly repeating the exact same stuff over and over again, even if you feel like everyone definitely knows.

佐尔·埃格纳（Zoelle Egner）：第二，我想说的是一遍又一遍地不断重复完全相同的事情的重要性，即使你觉得每个人都肯定知道。

This is something that I've seen play out in every single leadership role that I've had, but it was never more acute than here, particularly because we had this broad coalition of hundreds of people with very different backgrounds.

这是我在我担任过的每一个领导角色中看到的，但它从未像现在这样尖锐，特别是因为我们有数百个背景截然不同的人组成的广泛联盟。

Some people coming to the meeting, some people not, whatever else.

有些人来参加会议，有些人不来，等等。

I think I repeated the same three talking points about why what we were doing mattered 5,000 times.

我想我重复了 5000 遍关于为什么我们所做的事情如此重要的相同三个谈话要点。

Cannot overemphasize how many times I said the same stuff, and so did every other member of the board.

同样的事情我说过多少遍都不为过，董事会的其他成员也是如此。

It really is important and people will fill in the blanks with totally wild things if you don't continuously have that discipline of repeating yourself.

这确实很重要，如果你不不断地重复自己的纪律，人们就会用完全疯狂的东西来填补空白。

You just have to get used to saying the same stuff.

你只需要习惯说同样的话。

And if you do it correctly, it's super motivating.

如果你做得正确，那会非常有动力。

Even if you're sitting there being like, oh my gosh, "I have to say it again." it's worth it.

即使你坐在那里，天哪，“我必须再说一遍。”这是值得的。

Lenny: This reminds me, I don't know where I saw this, it's just in my head right now, that the CEO and founder's job, their actual title is repeater in chief.

莱尼：这让我想起，我不知道我在哪里看到的，现在就在我的脑海里，首席执行官和创始人的职位，他们的实际头衔是“repeater in Chief”。

Zoelle Egner: I've worked with some leaders who never wanted to.

Zoelle Egner：我曾与一些从来不想这样做的领导者一起工作过。

They're like, "No, this is going to be boring for people." And you just have to be like, "Honestly, most people are never listening as much as you think that they are."

他们会说，“不，这对人们来说会很无聊。”你只需说：“老实说，大多数人从来没有像你想象的那样倾听。”

Zoelle Egner: "We wish that they would.

佐尔·埃格纳：“我们希望他们会这么做。

But you have to say it 12 different ways in writing, and out loud, and all this other stuff.

但你必须以 12 种不同的方式以书面形式、大声说出这些内容。

You're never as important as you think you are, unfortunately, when it comes to that."

不幸的是，在这方面，你从来没有你想象的那么重要。”

Lenny: Oh, these are great lessons.

莱尼：哦，这些都是很棒的教训。

Okay.

好的。

What else do you tell?

你还说什么？

Zoelle Egner: I think my last learning was really about the power of having a laughably small MVP for something.

Zoelle Egner：我认为我最后学到的实际上是关于拥有一个可笑的小 MVP 的力量。

By the end of this, we were covering the entire United States.

到最后，我们已经覆盖了整个美国。

We had an API, we had custom software on the front end, this whole behemoth of stuff that we got to in four months or something.

我们有一个 API，我们在前端有定制软件，这整个庞然大物是我们在四个月左右的时间内完成的。

In the beginning it was truly, basically, a spreadsheet, and phones, and that was it.

一开始，它基本上只是一个电子表格和手机，仅此而已。

Even that, for the first few weeks while we were getting the rest of the infrastructure really going, not only had tremendous impact at one of the most important parts in the pandemic, but also gave us so much information about we actually needed to build that was going to be helpful.

即便如此，在最初几周，当我们让其余基础设施真正投入运行时，不仅对大流行中最重要的部分之一产生了巨大影响，而且还为我们提供了很多关于我们实际需要建设的信息，这将是有帮助的。

And I remember having all of these assumptions about what was going to be necessary to manage this coalition of people to make sure that we had really good data quality.

我记得对管理这个人员联盟所需的所有这些假设进行了所有这些假设，以确保我们拥有真正良好的数据质量。

Zoelle Egner: Because one of the most important things you can do if you're trying to be a trusted source of truth is actually have the correct information.

Zoelle Egner：因为如果您想成为值得信赖的事实来源，您可以做的最重要的事情之一就是实际上拥有正确的信息。

Sounds trivial, it's not at all at that scale.

听起来微不足道，但根本没有达到那个规模。

And I was totally wrong about all my assumptions.

我的所有假设都是完全错误的。

I thought we were going to have to have totally different types of oversight.

我认为我们必须进行完全不同类型的监督。

I thought we were going to have totally different tooling.

我以为我们会拥有完全不同的工具。

And it turned out we could do something way lighter weight that would allow us to move much faster as the regulatory landscape kept changing, as all the rule making at individual places kept changing.

事实证明，我们可以做一些更轻量级的事情，这将使我们能够在监管环境不断变化的情况下更快地行动，因为各个地方的所有规则制定都在不断变化。

And that agility, that willingness to do just the smallest possible thing is obviously a little bit of a trope in the industry.

这种敏捷性，那种愿意做尽可能最小的事情的意愿显然是业内的一个比喻。

Zoelle Egner: People talk about it a lot, but it's never been driven home to me so much, because we're talking about something that had incredibly high stakes as people's health, and we're still able to do it in that context.

佐尔·埃格纳：人们谈论了很多，但我从来没有这么深刻地理解过，因为我们谈论的是与人们的健康息息相关的事情，而且我们仍然能够在这种背景下做到这一点。

So if we could do it there, you can imagine that the applications of that in other industries are just tremendous.

因此，如果我们能在那里做到这一点，你可以想象它在其他行业的应用是巨大的。

So yeah, if you're listening to this, and you were thinking maybe you needed to add more stuff, I bet you could prune.

所以是的，如果你正在听这个，并且你在想也许你需要添加更多的东西，我打赌你可以修剪。

Lenny: And it's nice to have the forcing function where the world is changing so quickly and the team's probably small, where you are forced to build small.

Lenny：在世界变化如此之快、团队可能很小、你被迫构建小型产品的情况下，拥有强制功能真是太好了。

Which I think is why this reminder is so important.

我认为这就是为什么这个提醒如此重要。

Oftentimes you have more resources, and you end up building more just because you can.

通常，您拥有更多资源，并且您最终会因为可以而建造更多资源。

And yeah, what you're saying is oftentimes, "It'll shoot you in the foot."

是的，你经常说的是，“它会搬起石头砸你的脚。”

Lenny: Amazing.

莱尼：太棒了。

I didn't expect to get into this much detail with VaccinateCA and so I'm glad we did.

我没想到会与 VaccinateCA 讨论这么多细节，所以我很高兴我们做到了。

Let's zoom out a little bit, and just fill in some gaps on your background, briefly.

让我们缩小一点，简单地填充背景上的一些空白。

Can you just highlight some of the other wonderful things you've done in career?

您能强调一下您在职业生涯中所做的其他一些精彩的事情吗？

Airtable, we talked about, VaccinateCA, just broadly, what else have you been up to?

Airtable，我们谈到了 VaccinateCA，概括地说，您还做了什么？

Zoelle Egner: Yeah, absolutely.

佐尔·埃格纳：是的，绝对是。

Okay, so I'll try and be brief.

好的，我会尽量简短。

I worked in tech for more than a decade, mostly marketing and customer success, a little bit of ops.

我在科技行业工作了十多年，主要从事营销和客户成功工作，还有一点运营方面的工作。

Before I got into tech, I was a little bit of a dilettante, so some non-profit, healthcare, dying big box retail, because I graduated right into the recession and I was certain no one would hire me.

在我进入科技行业之前，我对一些非营利性、医疗保健、垂死的大型零售业有点业余，因为我刚毕业就进入了经济衰退，我确信没有人会雇用我。

Turns out that was actually wrong.

事实证明这实际上是错误的。

But on the plus side, now I know what dysfunction looks like at great scale, which is actually quite an education and very useful.

但从好的方面来说，现在我知道大规模的功能障碍是什么样的，这实际上是一种教育，而且非常有用。

But I always knew I wanted to get into tech, partially because I'm from the Bay area, and partially because I had been obsessively power mapping the industry, and looking at its flocking patterns, and who had what types of influence, because I'm a nerd.

但我一直都知道我想进入科技行业，部分是因为我来自湾区，部分是因为我一直痴迷于绘制这个行业的权力图，观察它的聚集模式，以及谁有什么类型的影响力，因为我是一个书呆子。

And I really wanted to see if I could get in, in the first place.

首先，我真的很想看看我是否能进去。

Because-

因为——

Lenny: Wait, can you talk about this, which, what is it you did?

莱尼：等等，你能谈谈这个，你做了什么吗？

What did you call, a flocking pattern?

你叫什么，植绒图案？

Zoelle Egner: Sure.

佐尔·埃格纳：当然。

You can imagine in any community, there are nodes of influence, people who know a lot of folks, they have money, whatever it might be.

你可以想象在任何社区中，都有影响力的节点，有认识很多人的人，他们有钱，无论是什么。

And they're able to direct how that community or that ecosystem evolves.

他们能够指导社区或生态系统如何发展。

In the tech industry, typically VCs will often play a role in this, but so will certain types of executives.

在科技行业，风险投资通常会在其中发挥作用，但某些类型的高管也会发挥作用。

And you can follow how they move between different companies, and who they worked with, and then see that influences who gets investment in the future.

您可以跟踪他们如何在不同公司之间流动以及他们与谁合作，然后看看这会影响谁在未来获得投资。

It influences the different partnerships that evolve.

它影响着不断发展的不同伙伴关系。

It influences the assumed wisdom in various different careers.

它影响着各种不同职业中的假定智慧。

And because I'm a big old nerd, I was literally drawing diagrams based on-

因为我是一个老书呆子，所以我实际上是根据-

Zoelle Egner: ...

佐尔·埃格纳：...

reading people's blog posts of who was influential in what way?

阅读人们的博客文章，了解谁以何种方式具有影响力？

Because I was non-technical.

因为我是非技术人员。

I tried programming, and I hated it, frankly.

我尝试过编程，坦白说，我讨厌它。

And so I was like, "Okay, it's 2010, it's 2011.

所以我想，“好吧，现在是 2010 年，现在是 2011 年。

There's not clear ways to get into the industry as a non-technical person.

作为非技术人员，没有明确的方法进入该行业。

I need to figure out how to do this with people.

我需要弄清楚如何与人相处。

Because otherwise I'm not sure why someone would take a chance on me with what I have done historically.

因为否则我不确定为什么有人会用我历史上所做的事情来冒险。

And that sounds a little insane, but it's very effective.

这听起来有点疯狂，但却非常有效。

And I ended up getting my start in tech basically by identifying a company where I thought I had a unique set of connections or understanding of the space that they were working in, where I thought I could maybe email the CEO and be helpful.

我最终在科技领域起步，基本上是通过确定一家公司，我认为我对他们所工作的领域有一套独特的联系或了解，我认为我可以给首席执行官发电子邮件并提供帮助。

Lenny: And did this connect to that diagram you drew?

莱尼：这和你画的图表有联系吗？

Did this help you point in that direction?

这有帮助你指出那个方向吗？

Zoelle Egner: Yeah, absolutely.

佐尔·埃格纳：是的，绝对是。

So I was closely tracking YCombinator and that whole ecosystem.

所以我正在密切跟踪 YCombinator 和整个生态系统。

So I knew I wanted to find a smaller company, where they maybe were having more difficulty hiring, because they were less well known or a little bit less, I don't know, sexy.

所以我知道我想找到一家较小的公司，他们可能在招聘方面遇到更多困难，因为他们不太出名，或者我不知道，不太性感。

But while they were still connected into that broader group, because it has with a pedigree that people would take you seriously if you had worked at a YC backed startup.

不过，尽管他们仍然与这个更广泛的群体有联系，但因为它有血统，如果你曾在 YC 支持的初创公司工作过，人们会认真对待你。

Zoelle Egner: Anyway, I got really pointy hat strategic about this, but it was effective.

Zoelle Egner：无论如何，我对此有非常尖锐的策略，但它很有效。

Lenny: ...

莱尼：……

have this diagram, by the way?

顺便问一下，有这张图吗？

It'd be so funny to look at it right now.

现在看它会很有趣。

Zoelle Egner: No, I don't think I have it anymore.

佐尔·埃格纳：不，我想我不再拥有它了。

I might be able to dig it up, but alas, I think it may have been lost in one of my many moves since then.

我也许能把它挖出来，但可惜的是，我想它可能在我的许多举动之一中丢失了。

Lenny: Okay.

莱尼：好的。

I imagine that was true.

我想那是真的。

Okay, so I think I cut you off.

好吧，我想我已经打断你了。

You were talking about some of the things you've done in your career.

您正在谈论您在职业生涯中所做的一些事情。

Zoelle Egner: Yeah, ended up using my studies of the space to get into a role as employee one at a developer focus YC backed startup.

Zoelle Egner：是的，最终利用我对这个领域的研究，在 YC 支持的一家专注于开发人员的初创公司中担任一号员工。

And the funny story on that is that I got that role by cold emailing the CEO while I was still in college.

有趣的是，当我还在上大学时，我就通过给首席执行官发冷冰冰的电子邮件而获得了这个职位。

And then he actually followed up with me almost immediately, because I'd offered to introduce him to some professors, which was useful for the type of business.

然后他几乎立即就跟我联系了，因为我主动提出把他介绍给一些教授，这对这种类型的业务很有用。

And then I ignored him for two years because I got busy with my thesis, and got other jobs, and whatever, came back to it and wrote this ridiculous apology email, being like, "I promise I respond to emails faster.

然后我忽略了他两年，因为我忙于我的论文，并找到了其他工作，等等，回来写了这封可笑的道歉电子邮件，就像，“我保证我会更快地回复电子邮件。

I see that you're hiring.

我看到你正在招聘。

Would you give me a second chance?

你能给我第二次机会吗？

Please, can I come work for you?

请问，我可以来为您工作吗？

I have no experience that's useful, but I work really hard." And I figured he would either laugh me off of the internet or give me a job, and very fortunately for me, he gave me a job.

我没有有用的经验，但我工作真的很努力。”我想他要么会在网上嘲笑我，要么会给我一份工作，对我来说非常幸运的是，他给了我一份工作。

So thanks, Ryan.

所以谢谢，瑞安。

Appreciate that.

很欣赏这一点。

That was how I got into tech.

这就是我进入科技行业的方式。

Zoelle Egner: Yes, we appreciate it.

佐尔·埃格纳：是的，我们很感激。

So that startup got acquired by Box.

所以这家初创公司被 Box 收购了。

And when I went over to Box, they had never had paying developers before.

当我转到 Box 时，他们以前从未向开发人员付费过。

So we were bringing over seven figure contracts.

所以我们带来了超过七位数的合同。

So I started developer success programs there.

所以我在那里启动了开发者成功计划。

And then in a totally wild shift, I ended up moving over to run their social media editorial and internal comms, which doesn't sound related to developer success, but I had always been a writer, and I wrote this blog post about what it was like to be an early stage non-technical employee.

然后，在一次完全疯狂的转变中，我最终转而负责他们的社交媒体编辑和内部通讯，这听起来与开发人员的成功无关，但我一直是一名作家，我写了这篇博客文章，讲述了作为一名早期非技术员工的感受。

There was a little spicy, talking about some of the challenges, and I didn't tell anyone I was going to do it.

谈论一些挑战有点辛辣，我没有告诉任何人我要这么做。

And I got this email from PR being like, "We need to have a meeting." And I was like, "Oh, they're going to fire me.

我收到了公关部发来的电子邮件，内容是“我们需要开个会”。我当时想，“哦，他们要解雇我了。

I went too far." I thought I was being circumspect, that I went too far.

我走得太远了。”我以为我很谨慎，我走得太远了。

And in the meeting they were like, "Hey, we really think you should apply for this job.

在会议上，他们说：“嘿，我们真的认为你应该申请这份工作。

We would love to have you run social media." Which is not the outcome I expected.

我们很乐意让您运营社交媒体。”这不是我预期的结果。

Lenny: That's a cool learning, there.

莱尼：这是一个很酷的学习。

Just like, "Do stuff." You know?

就像“做事”一样。你知道吗？

"Don't be afraid."

“别害怕。”

Zoelle Egner: Yeah, it was definitely not the expected outcome, but one that was very exciting.

Zoelle Egner：是的，这绝对不是预期的结果，但非常令人兴奋。

So got to go run those programs for a couple years through the IPO, which is a whole education in and of itself, to see how comms changes when you become a public company.

因此，我们必须通过 IPO 来运行这些项目几年，这本身就是一次完整的教育，看看当你成为一家上市公司时，通讯会发生怎样的变化。

And then I was on Hacker News obsessively at the time, and I saw the beta for Airtable come out.

然后我当时痴迷于 Hacker News，看到了 Airtable 的测试版。

Immediately signed up, and became obsessed with the product, and evangelizing it to everybody that I knew and ultimately ended up figuring out a way to finagle my way into that role as employee 11 there.

我立刻就报名了，并对这个产品着迷，并向我认识的每个人宣传它，最终找到了一种方法，让我成为那里的 11 号员工。

Zoelle Egner: And it sounds like we're going to talk about Airtable more, so I won't belabor that, but marketing and customer success stuff, ended up leaving for VaccinateCA, and then the last little bit here is just when that ended, I really thought I wanted to start my own company.

Zoelle Egner：听起来我们要更多地谈论 Airtable，所以我不会多说，但是营销和客户成功的事情最终离开了 VaccinateCA，最后一点就是当这一切结束时，我真的想创办自己的公司。

So I gave myself a certain window in which to try out different ideas, and at the same time was advising and consulting.

所以我给了自己一个尝试不同想法的窗口，同时也提供建议和咨询。

Ultimately didn't end up finding anything that I felt so much conviction that it was worth blowing up absolutely everything else about my life in order to go heads down on a company.

最终我并没有找到任何让我深信不疑的东西，以至于值得我放弃生活中的其他一切，只为一头扎进一家公司。

So eventually decided to go in-house with one of the companies I've been advising, Block Party, and now I run marketing and growth there.

因此，最终决定与我一直建议的公司之一 Block Party 合作，现在我在那里负责营销和增长。

Lenny: Can you just explain Block Party briefly?

莱尼：你能简单解释一下街区派对吗？

-

-

Zoelle Egner: Absolutely.

佐尔·埃格纳：当然。

We're an online safety company.

我们是一家在线安全公司。

We help users have more control over their digital experience.

我们帮助用户更好地控制他们的数字体验。

And our first product is anti-harassment and anti-spam tools for Twitter.

我们的第一个产品是 Twitter 的反骚扰和反垃圾邮件工具。

Lenny: So you've worked at Box, Airtable, now Block Party.

Lenny：所以你曾在 Box、Airtable 工作过，现在又在 Block Party 工作过。

You've advised a lot of companies around marketing product growth.

您为许多公司提供了有关营销产品增长的建议。

I'm curious if there's a thread that has maintained through all of those experiences in terms of what works well for marketing, and growth, and things you've learned that just consistently-

我很好奇是否有一条线索贯穿了所有这些经历，在哪些方面对营销和增长有效，以及你所学到的始终如一的事情上——

Zoelle Egner: A few pieces that go into how I choose companies that create that thread.

Zoelle Egner：有几篇文章涉及我如何选择创建该主题的公司。

And part of this is about me wanting to match what I think I'm really good at with what will have the greatest leverage for a company that I work at.

其中一部分是因为我希望将我认为自己真正擅长的事情与对我工作的公司具有最大影响力的事情相匹配。

I've mentioned I'm a writer, really care about telling stories, and helping people to understand new or novel things.

我提到过我是一名作家，非常关心讲故事并帮助人们理解新的或新颖的事物。

I also really care about product quality.

我也非常关心产品质量。

I'm a little bit of a product snob.

我有点对产品势利。

And one of my strengths is enthusiasm.

我的优势之一就是热情。

So if I can't genuinely go to a customer and tell them, "This product is going to solve a real problem for you and it's going to be amazing." I can't do my job.

因此，如果我不能真诚地去找客户并告诉他们，“这个产品将为您解决一个真正的问题，这将是令人惊奇的。”我无法完成我的工作。

So all of the companies that I've chosen to go to have had this foundation of an incredible product experience that maybe people didn't fully understand, and where I could come in and help connect the dots between that amazing product that's going to be really, really helpful and the opportunities for a much wider range of people to benefit from that.

因此，我选择去的所有公司都拥有令人难以置信的产品体验基础，而人们可能并不完全理解这种体验，而我可以介入并帮助连接那些真正非常有帮助的令人惊叹的产品和让更广泛的人从中受益的机会。

Zoelle Egner: So in practice, what that means is I often end up working at companies that are in a position to really punch above their weight from a brand perspective.

Zoelle Egner：所以在实践中，这意味着我经常在那些能够从品牌角度真正发挥作用的公司工作。

They're typically much lower headcount than you would ever expect.

他们的人数通常比您预期的要少得多。

They're typically way earlier stage than you would expect, but I've been able to put together a brand or an experience that allows people to invest themselves into the company with a high level of trust, I guess.

它们通常比你预期的要早得多，但我想，我已经能够整合一个品牌或一种体验，让人们以高度信任的方式将自己投入到公司中。

Zoelle Egner: I'll be more specific because that's really ambiguous.

Zoelle Egner：我会更具体，因为这确实很模糊。

Airtable, it manages mission critical workflows, highly sensitive data.

Airtable，它管理关键任务工作流程和高度敏感的数据。

It's super important.

这非常重要。

You only use tools you can trust for that type of thing.

您只使用您可以信任的工具来完成此类事情。

The same thing is true at Block Party, online safety.

Block Party 的在线安全也是如此。

You have to trust the company that you're entrusting your safety to.

您必须信任您将安全托付给的公司。

And in my experience, people, and especially founders really underestimate how much every single touchpoint a customer has from word of mouth or the ad that brings them in the door, landing pages, signup flows, customer service experiences.

根据我的经验，人们，尤其是创始人，真的低估了客户从口碑或广告、登陆页面、注册流程、客户服务体验中获得的每个接触点的数量。

Every single one of those moments is building a brand that is adding or removing trust.

每一个时刻都在打造一个增加或消除信任的品牌。

Zoelle Egner: So for me in the early days, that means thinking about like, "What are the signals that I can provide to future customers that say, 'We understand you specifically, and our solution is designed for a person like you.' And two, that will say, 'Hey, we're actually operating on a much higher level than you might expect for a company of our size or our stage.

Zoelle Egner：所以对我来说，在早期，这意味着要思考，“我可以向未来的客户提供哪些信号，表明‘我们特别了解您，我们的解决方案是为像您这样的人设计的。’”第二，这会说，‘嘿，我们的运营水平实际上比你对我们这种规模或阶段的公司的预期要高得多。

We take this really seriously.

我们非常认真地对待这个问题。

We have all the things in place to take care of you.

我们已准备好一切来照顾您。

So you shouldn't be afraid to spend six figures or put your safety in our hands because we've got your back.

因此，您不必害怕花费六位数或将您的安全交给我们，因为我们会为您提供支持。

We're doing this the right way.'" Has tremendous dividends when you're in a business that is often driven by word of mouth.

我们正在以正确的方式做这件事。’”当您从事的业务通常由口碑驱动时，就会获得巨大的红利。

Because if you take care of people and you follow up that brand experience with a product experience that is really powerful and actually does the things that says it's going to do, then your word of mouth can become a huge driver of growth for the company.

因为如果你关心人们，并通过真正强大的产品体验来跟进品牌体验，并且真正做到所说的事情，那么你的口碑可以成为公司增长的巨大推动力。

Zoelle Egner: Of course, the outcome of this in practice is really funny.

Zoelle Egner：当然，实践中的结果真的很有趣。

So I remember really distinctly having to invite customers to go out to lunch with us when they would come to San Francisco back in the Airtable days, because we had 15 people in a teeny tiny office.

所以我清楚地记得，在 Airtable 时代，当顾客来旧金山时，我们必须邀请他们出去和我们一起吃午餐，因为我们在一个很小的办公室里有 15 个人。

It's not that I wanted to mislead anyone, but I didn't need to reinforce the fact that they were spending six figures with us when we had 15 people.

我并不是想误导任何人，但我不需要强调这样一个事实：当我们有 15 个人时，他们在我们这里花了六位数。

If they had gone to look on LinkedIn, they could have figured that out, but we didn't need to remind them that we were so small, and they were running some of their most important processes with our product.

如果他们去 LinkedIn 上查看，他们可能已经弄清楚了，但我们不需要提醒他们我们是如此之小，而且他们正在使用我们的产品运行一些最重要的流程。

I think I was on the phone with Slack at one point.

我想我曾经在和 Slack 通电话。

And they were like, "Oh, well you guys are probably about the same size company as we are, right?" And I was like, "Not quite.

他们说，“哦，好吧，你们公司的规模可能和我们差不多，对吧？”我当时想，“不完全是。

A little smaller, just an entire order of magnitude, no big deal, it's totally fine.

小一点，就整个数量级，没什么大不了的，完全没问题。

We're all smooth.

我们都很顺利。

We'll take care of you.

我们会照顾你的。

It's going to great." But it-

会很棒的。”但是它——

Zoelle Egner: ...

佐尔·埃格纳：...

really makes a difference, all of those little things.

所有这些小事情真的很重要。

Lenny: That reminds me, I heard stories of very early Airbnb days where they had to take meetings in a bathroom, or in the hallway, and they did interviews, I think in the hallway because there was no space.

莱尼：这让我想起了，我听说过 Airbnb 早期的故事，他们必须在浴室或走廊里开会，他们进行采访，我想是在走廊里，因为没有空间。

Zoelle Egner: We did a lot of calling from the hallway at Airtable, also from this weird internal patio you could only get to through climbing through a window.

Zoelle Egner：我们在 Airtable 的走廊上打了很多电话，也从这个奇怪的内部庭院打了很多电话，你只能通过窗户爬进去。

The window kept breaking.

窗户不断破裂。

And so I, at one point, remember someone getting stuck outside trying to interview someone with the windows closed.

因此，我记得有一次，有人被困在外面，试图采访关着窗户的人。

Utter, utter ridiculous nonsense.

完全是荒谬的废话。

But you know, that's all the fun things that happened in the early days before you become bigger.

但你知道，这都是在你变大之前发生的所有有趣的事情。

Lenny: Yeah, I love those early day stories.

莱尼：是的，我喜欢那些早期的故事。

Lenny: I really love the concept of punching above your weight as a startup.

莱尼：我真的很喜欢作为一家初创公司，超越自己的能力的概念。

What else did you do at Air Table or other places that help you do that?

您在 Air Table 或其他帮助您实现这一目标的地方还做了什么？

One is just don't let them see how small you are, necessarily.

一是一定不要让他们看到你有多渺小。

Are there any other technical things you recall that like, "Oh, here's things that really worked really well for punching above our weight as a small company at that point."

您是否还记得任何其他技术方面的事情，比如“哦，这些东西对于当时我们作为一家小公司的实力来说确实非常有效。”

Zoelle Egner: A couple of these things are very unsexy, but very useful.

Zoelle Egner：其中有一些东西非常不性感，但非常有用。

One, make sure that your landing pages, and your emails, and other things have a level of polish that makes them feel a little bit more done.

第一，确保你的登陆页面、电子邮件和其他东西都经过一定程度的修饰，让它们感觉已经完成了一些。

I think 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.

我认为有时会有一种建议或直觉，就像“超级、超级快地运送东西，然后把它们送到那里”。我并不是说不要快速行动。

Obviously you need to move fast in the early days, but make sure someone rereads your email so that it sounds good.

显然，您需要在早期快速行动，但要确保有人重读您的电子邮件，以便听起来不错。

Invest in having a decent photo or a decent illustration.

投资拥有一张像样的照片或像样的插图。

If you have sample content, this is actually a big one, sample content for your productivity app as an example.

如果您有示例内容，这实际上是一个很大的内容，以您的生产力应用程序为例。

Take the time to not have it be like Jane Doe 12 times in the name list.

花点时间不要让它像无名氏一样出现在名单中 12 次。

Have it be references to your industry so that people are like, "Oh, hey.

让它引用你的行业，这样人们就会说，“哦，嘿。

That's a joke about Steve Jobs.

这是关于史蒂夫·乔布斯的一个笑话。

I'm a designer.

我是一名设计师。

This person is thinking about me."

这个人正在想我。”

Zoelle Egner: 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.

Zoelle Egner：虽然是小事，但它告诉那个人，“从事这项工作的人将我视为客户，他们在构建它时考虑到了我，这意味着这比通用的东西更有可能满足我的需求。”这既建立了我们所讨论的品牌信任，也建立了公司的个性，让人们想要支持你。

And frankly, when you are small, you need everyone rooting for you that you can possibly get.

坦率地说，当你还小的时候，你需要每个人都尽可能地支持你。

Zoelle Egner: So those little bits of polish that don't take a ton of time are absolutely worth it.

Zoelle Egner：所以那些不需要花费大量时间的小细节绝对是值得的。

The last thing I would say is making sure that in your public communications launches, if you ever talk to press, which some companies can and some companies can't, having more of a point of view than just about your product, you can try and say, like, "We are part of something bigger.

我要说的最后一件事是，确保在您的公共传播发布中，如果您与媒体交谈（有些公司可以，有些公司不能），除了谈论您的产品之外，您还可以尝试说，“我们是更大事业的一部分。

Here's the broader circle or movement that we are a part of." It makes it feel more inevitable and more like you're not just self servingly talking about your tiny corner of the world, but that it's actually part of this much bigger trend.

这是我们所参与的更广泛的圈子或运动。”这让人感觉更加不可避免，更像是你不仅仅是在自私地谈论世界上的一个小角落，而且它实际上是这个更大趋势的一部分。

It will be more compelling and it feels like you're operating at a different level of sophistication that can be really helpful.

它将更加引人注目，并且感觉您正在以不同的复杂程度进行操作，这确实很有帮助。

Lenny: I love that.

莱尼：我喜欢这个。

On the first point, basically, it's attention to detail and obsession with quality is what I'm hearing.

关于第一点，基本上，我听到的是对细节的关注和对质量的痴迷。

Lenny: Just to make it clear, this isn't just a tiny team just pushing the stuff out.

Lenny：澄清一下，这不仅仅是一个小团队只是在推出产品。

I imagine most founders would be like, "Yes, I would love, we are going to focus on quality.

我想大多数创始人都会说，“是的，我很乐意，我们将专注于质量。

We'll make sure everything looks great." In reality it always is this trade off against other things they could be doing.

我们将确保一切看起来都很棒。”实际上，这总是与他们可以做的其他事情进行权衡。

Lenny: What do you think folks can do to help keep that level of quality high?

莱尼：您认为人们可以做些什么来帮助保持高质量水平？

Is it just one person being obsessed and just reviewing everything like a founder?

难道只是一个人痴迷并像创始人一样回顾一切？

Is having someone like you that's just very detail oriented, just review everything?

是否有像你这样非常注重细节、只审查一切的人？

How do you actually execute that when you have 1,000 things to do?

当你有 1,000 件事要做时，你如何实际执行它？

Zoelle Egner: 100%.

佐尔·埃格纳：100%。

I'd say there's one of two approaches and you articulated them here.

我想说有两种方法之一，您在这里阐明了它们。

One is you can have the founder that is the avatar of quality, who is just relentlessly being like, "Hey, we're going to do the 15 minute check.

一是你可以让创始人成为质量的化身，他会不停地说，“嘿，我们要做 15 分钟的检查。

Yes, we're going through it.

是的，我们正在经历它。

Yes, I'm going to send you a copy of this email, and someone else going to click every link in it, and make sure they're not broken." Or, you can have someone else be the avatar of that who is in the company.

是的，我将向您发送这封电子邮件的副本，其他人将点击其中的每个链接，并确保它们没有损坏。”或者，您可以让其他人成为公司中的头像。

I would say in many of the companies I have worked at, that has been me, because I've been the marketing human who cares.

我想说，在我工作过的许多公司中，我就是这样，因为我一直是关心的营销人员。

But it doesn't have to be a marketing person, it can be someone on product.

但不一定是营销人员，也可以是产品人员。

It can be, honestly, even someone on customer success if you're willing to let them provide their feedback on the way that you're showing up in the world, which you should because they have fantastic insight.

老实说，如果您愿意让他们就您在世界上的表现方式提供反馈，甚至可以是客户成功方面的人，您应该这样做，因为他们具有出色的洞察力。

There just needs to be someone.

只需要有人。

Zoelle Egner: And I think building that into how you interview can be very helpful, as well.

Zoelle Egner：我认为将其纳入面试方式也非常有帮助。

So finding people who understand those trade-offs and that balance, and who are willing to put in the extra 15 minutes, but aren't going to spend an extra week trying to obsessively QA everything.

因此，要找到了解这些权衡和平衡的人，并且愿意额外投入 15 分钟，但不会花额外一周的时间试图对所有事情进行强制质量检查。

You don't want to go that far.

你不想走那么远。

Just who has that bent towards detail can be very helpful.

谁对细节有兴趣就会非常有帮助。

Also, just make yourself a checklist.

另外，给自己列一个清单。

It doesn't have to be complicated.

它不必很复杂。

"Every time we put out a blog post, these are the three things we're going to do.

“每次我们发布博客文章时，这就是我们要做的三件事。

Every time we send out an email, it needs to be seen by at least one other person." None of this is rocket science.

每次我们发出一封电子邮件，都需要至少被另一个人看到。”这一切都不是火箭科学。

You just need to make a little process for yourself, and then it can be very fast and lightweight, but the dividends are worth it, I think.

你只需要为自己做一个小流程，然后它就可以非常快且轻量级，但我认为带来的红利是值得的。

Lenny: I like how simple this is, just to look like a bigger company, is just pay attention and focus on the little things.

莱尼：我喜欢这种简单的感觉，只是为了看起来像一家更大的公司，只是关注并专注于小事情。

It's not a big, whole thing.

这不是一个大的、完整的事情。

Zoelle Egner: There are some bigger things you can do if you really need to.

Zoelle Egner：如果你真的需要的话，你可以做一些更大的事情。

My favorite silly example of this is Airtable, back in the day, got roasted on Twitter for having billboards that were not super specific about a specific problem or whatever.

我最喜欢的愚蠢的例子是 Airtable，当时它在 Twitter 上被嘲笑，因为它的广告牌对某个特定问题或其他问题不是非常具体。

They were just billboards that we had out.

它们只是我们张贴的广告牌。

And everyone was like, "This makes no sense.

每个人都说：“这毫无意义。

Why are you doing this?

你为什么要这样做？

We don't understand." They were actually super effective for us because we had a different goal than everyone thought that we did.

我们不明白。”他们实际上对我们非常有效，因为我们的目标与每个人想象的不同。

Zoelle Egner: For us, it was all about signaling to some very large companies that we were a legitimate and large enough company that they could trust, and we had geographical concentration in specific areas, because we were in the fashion industry, the media industry in New York, we knew exactly where all of their offices were and we knew if they saw our billboards, walking to work, and then got the request to IT for the budget in order to pay six figures for Airtable, they were more likely to be like, "Oh, it's not just some weird startup we never heard of." Like, "Oh, I've seen that billboard, they must be legitimate." And that sounds really silly, but it wasn't actually that expensive.

Zoelle Egner：对我们来说，这一切都是为了向一些非常大的公司发出信号，表明我们是一家合法且足够大的公司，他们可以信任，而且我们在特定领域有地理集中，因为我们处于纽约的时尚行业、媒体行业，我们确切地知道他们所有的办公室在哪里，我们知道他们是否看到我们的广告牌，步行去上班，然后向 IT 提出预算请求，以便为 Airtable 支付六位数的费用，他们更有可能会说，“哦，这不仅仅是一些我们从未听说过的奇怪的初创公司。”就像，“哦，我看过那个广告牌，它们一定是合法的。”这听起来真的很傻，但实际上并没有那么贵。

Zoelle Egner: We got mostly remnant inventory, which is at the end of a particular buying cycle.

Zoelle Egner：我们大部分都是剩余库存，这是在特定购买周期结束时的库存。

Sometimes they haven't fully sold everything, and you can get the slightly less good ones that are still maybe where you want them for really cheap.

有时他们还没有完全卖掉所有东西，你可以以非常便宜的价格买到稍微不太好的东西，但它们可能仍然是你想要的。

And everyone thinks that you only buy billboards if you're huge.

每个人都认为只有规模很大才买广告牌。

So that small signaling thing was a way for us to make sure that we remove some of the risk of not being able to close deals because we were so small.

因此，这个小小的信号是我们确保消除由于我们规模太小而无法完成交易的一些风险的一种方式。

So you can get creative about it.

所以你可以发挥创意。

Most of the time you're not going to do that.

大多数时候你不会这样做。

Most of the time it's like, "Reread your emails." But you could also push it even further if you need to.

大多数时候，它就像是“重读你的电子邮件”。但如果需要的话，您也可以进一步推动它。

Lenny: What is that full rough cost of billboards like?

莱尼：广告牌的大致成本是多少？

Because I think people think about billboards and it's hard to even know what they cost.

因为我认为人们想到广告牌时甚至很难知道它们的成本是多少。

What's a number?

数字是什么？

Zoelle Egner: It really, really depends, so I'm hesitant to give you a number because which metro you're in, it ranges vastly.

Zoelle Egner：这真的非常取决于，所以我很犹豫是否给你一个数字，因为你所在的地铁，它的范围很大。

I would say you can expect that some of that inventory is in the low thousands of dollars, which is way lower than you might expect.

我想说的是，您可以预期其中一些库存的价格仅为数千美元，这比您的预期要低得多。

Zoelle Egner: Yeah.

佐尔·埃格纳：是的。

So you don't need to get a million.

所以你不需要得到一百万。

And I'm not suggesting you go get one on 101.

我也不建议你去 101 打电话。

Good luck to you on that.

祝你好运。

That's expensive.

那很贵。

But you can get one in a reasonable neighborhood in New York for way less money than you might expect, if you're willing to do remnant.

但如果你愿意做剩余的事情，你可以在纽约的一个合理的社区以比你想象的要少的钱买到一个。

Lenny: Are you hiring?

莱尼：你们在招人吗？

Or on the flip side, are you looking for a new opportunity?

或者另一方面，您正在寻找新的机会吗？

Well, either way, check out lennysjobs.com/talent.

好吧，无论哪种方式，请查看 lennysjobs.com/talent。

If you're a hiring manager, you can sign up and get access to hundreds of hand curated people who are open to new opportunities.

如果您是招聘经理，您可以注册并接触数百名对新机会持开放态度的精心挑选的人员。

Thousands of people apply to join this collective, and I personally review and accept just about 10% of them.

成千上万的人申请加入这个集体，而我个人审核并接受的人大约只有10%。

You won't find a better place to hire product managers and growth leaders.

您找不到比这更好的地方来雇用产品经理和增长领导者了。

Join almost 100 other companies who are actively hiring through this collective.

加入近 100 家其他通过这个集体积极招聘的公司的行列。

Lenny: And if you're looking around for a newer opportunity actively or passively join the collective, it's free.

莱尼：如果你正在寻找新的机会，主动或被动地加入这个集体，它是免费的。

You can be anonymous and you can even hide yourself from specific companies.

您可以匿名，甚至可以向特定公司隐藏自己。

You can also leave any time and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from.

您也可以随时离开，并且您只会收到您想要的公司的消息。

Check out lennysjobs.com/talent.

请访问 lennysjobs.com/talent。

Lenny: Following this thread a bit, my next question is, and this may be the answer, is when you think about Airtable's growth strategy, growth tactics over time, what would you say are one, or two, or three of the most impactful marketing or growth tactics that work best over time?

Lenny：继续这个话题，我的下一个问题是，这可能就是答案，当你考虑 Airtable 的增长战略、长期增长策略时，你认为随着时间的推移，最有影响力的营销或增长策略中的一个、两个或三个是什么？

And maybe billboards are one of them.

也许广告牌就是其中之一。

Zoelle Egner: I wouldn't say they were the highest ROI, but they're certainly one of the more interesting things that we did.

Zoelle Egner：我不会说它们是最高的投资回报率，但它们肯定是我们所做的更有趣的事情之一。

They were useful, don't get me wrong.

它们很有用，别误会我的意思。

But I think maybe some other ones are more interesting.

但我认为也许其他一些更有趣。

The boring answer that I will caveat this with is that one of the pieces of our acquisition playbook, it was very standard, that did work quite well, was some unconventionally targeted Facebook ads.

我要警告的一个无聊的答案是，我们的收购策略之一是一些非传统的定向 Facebook 广告，它非常标准，而且效果很好。

That era is over.

那个时代已经结束了。

So don't expect that that is going to work for your B2B business now because that that's totally changed.

因此，不要指望这现在适用于您的 B2B 业务，因为情况已经完全改变了。

Lenny: And when you say unconventional, what do you mean?

莱尼：当你说非常规时，你是什么意思？

Zoelle Egner: We spent a lot of time thinking about a psychographic profile for our users.

Zoelle Egner：我们花了很多时间思考用户的心理概况。

So the challenge of Airtable is that you can use it for anything.

因此，Airtable 的挑战在于您可以将其用于任何用途。

It can be used in every department within an organization.

它可用于组织内的每个部门。

It can be used for personal stuff, you name it, it has a use, because you're functionally building your own software and you can build software for anything.

它可以用于个人的东西，你能想到的，它都有用途，因为你在功能上构建你自己的软件，并且你可以为任何东西构建软件。

Unfortunately, if you go out to the market with a message of, like, "Build your own software." The vast majority of people are like, "I want to do that.

不幸的是，如果你带着“构建你自己的软件”之类的信息进入市场。绝大多数人都会说：“我想这么做。

That sounds hard.

听起来很难。

That sounds stupid.

这听起来很愚蠢。

No."

不。”

Zoelle Egner: And so we couldn't really use super generic messaging, but to go really specific into verticals, which we did end up ultimately doing, didn't give us the broad coverage to go find new opportunities.

Zoelle Egner：因此，我们无法真正使用超级通用的消息传递，而是要真正具体地进入垂直领域（我们最终确实做到了），但并没有为我们提供广泛的覆盖范围来寻找新的机会。

You go really deep into one particular vertical or two particular verticals at a time with a small team, but then we weren't surfacing new opportunities that might be even more important.

你和一个小团队一次真正深入到一个特定的垂直领域或两个特定的垂直领域，但随后我们并没有发现可能更重要的新机会。

So we tried to balance that vertical specific work that we did with also trying to find this type of person who we had discovered was going to be the best champion for us.

因此，我们试图平衡我们所做的垂直具体工作，同时也试图找到我们发现的这种类型的人，他们将成为我们最好的冠军。

Zoelle Egner: And this is a tinkerer persona, someone who likes new technology, they like putting together the Lego building blocks of things, and you couldn't really find Tinkerer's Magazine.

Zoelle Egner：这是一个修补匠的角色，喜欢新技术的人，他们喜欢将乐高积木拼凑在一起，但你找不到修补匠的杂志。

There's not like a place those people hang out.

这里不像是人们闲逛的地方。

They don't just have one title.

他们不只有一个头衔。

It's a psychographic profile as a type of person that could have many, many different roles.

这是一种心理特征，可以扮演多种不同角色的人。

And so instead-

所以相反-

Lenny: And Facebook doesn't let you do that anymore, right?

莱尼：Facebook 不再允许你这样做了，对吧？

Zoelle Egner: No. You can't target based on-

Zoelle Egner：不。你不能根据-

Zoelle Egner: ...

佐尔·埃格纳：...

like, "They have a tinkerer mentality," unfortunately.

不幸的是，就像“他们有修补匠的心态”。

Zoelle Egner: Yeah.

佐尔·埃格纳：是的。

But what you can do is you can say, "That type of person often likes these types of media.

但你能做的是你可以说：“这类人通常喜欢这些类型的媒体。

We've heard that they often are really into these podcasts, so they're really into reading about this type of personal development." And often that is associated with people who have these broad set of roles but have this typical mentality.

我们听说他们经常非常喜欢这些播客，因此他们非常喜欢阅读有关此类个人发展的内容。”这通常与具有广泛角色但具有这种典型心态的人有关。

So we would find clusters of interests that people might have, that often were shared by those people, and do targeting around that.

因此，我们会找到人们可能拥有的、通常由这些人共享的兴趣群，并围绕这些兴趣群进行定位。

And then when that worked, they'll look alike based on it.

当这种方法奏效时，它们就会看起来很相似。

Lenny: Did not expect Facebook ads as one of these answers.

Lenny：没想到 Facebook 广告会成为这些答案之一。

So that's interesting.

这很有趣。

Zoelle Egner: No, and it's not a good idea anymore.

Zoelle Egner：不，这不再是一个好主意。

Don't do it now.

现在不要这样做。

Zoelle Egner: Back in the day, it was great.

佐尔·埃格纳（Zoelle Egner）：回到过去，那真是太棒了。

Now I would not recommend.

现在我不会推荐。

But I have some unconventional ones that I can suggest that are-

但我有一些非常规的建议，它们是——

Zoelle Egner: ...

佐尔·埃格纳：...

not Facebook.

不是脸书。

There's a few different things, but I want to give some context first for people who are not as familiar with Airtable's business, because I do think these are really helpful pieces of context.

有一些不同的事情，但我想首先为那些不太熟悉 Airtable 业务的人提供一些背景信息，因为我确实认为这些都是非常有用的背景信息。

The first is because of the types of industries that we are often very successful in, had a very similar network effect that we would see, where basically it was within specific professions, we would see people who, in order to distinguish themselves in that job market, would build a brand around the tools that they used, essentially.

首先是因为我们通常非常成功的行业类型，具有我们所看到的非常相似的网络效应，基本上是在特定的职业中，我们会看到人们为了在就业市场上脱颖而出，基本上会围绕他们使用的工具建立一个品牌。

We found different ways to accelerate their process of identifying those roles, where it was really, really helpful to build a brand for yourself so that you could hop around to different jobs more quickly, accelerate your process, et cetera, and thus bring along a tool with you and evangelize for it a lot.

我们找到了不同的方法来加速他们识别这些角色的过程，为自己建立一个品牌真的非常有帮助，这样你就可以更快地跳到不同的工作，加速你的流程等等，从而随身携带一个工具并为其进行大量宣传。

So that's one set of things we were trying to achieve.

这就是我们试图实现的一系列目标。

Zoelle Egner: The second set of things we were trying to achieve that's also useful context here, is although industry virality was really important for us, even more important was inside of company virality, that was the real superpower of Airtable.

Zoelle Egner：我们试图实现的第二件事也是有用的背景，虽然行业病毒式传播对我们来说非常重要，但更重要的是公司内部的病毒式传播，这才是 Airtable 真正的超能力。

We'd go from 10 people to 1,000 people a year.

我们每年从 10 人增加到 1,000 人。

And so we were always looking for ways to make that happen within companies in more and more efficient ways.

因此，我们一直在寻找方法，以越来越有效的方式在公司内部实现这一目标。

Zoelle Egner: And then the third piece here is no one had a good generic explanation of Airtable that worked for everybody.

Zoelle Egner：第三个问题是，没有人能够对 Airtable 做出适合所有人的通用解释。

This is perhaps partially my fault as marketing, but it's also the fault of the fact that the market was not ready for the good, generic explanation to mean anything, like I mentioned before, people just did not care about the generic explanation.

这也许部分是我作为营销的错，但也是因为市场还没有准备好接受良好的、通用的解释来表示任何事情，就像我之前提到的，人们只是不关心通用的解释。

And the magic of Airtable was always seen in its specificity.

Airtable 的魔力始终体现在它的特殊性上。

Zoelle Egner: So we knew if we can get to the right people and we can connect the dots to them to the correct use case, so they want to go and evangelize to improve their careers, they will do that both externally and within their companies, and more importantly within the companies, they'll be able to go to their friends and say, "Hey, I'm using Airtable as a content calendar, but you have a UX research problem.

Zoelle Egner：所以我们知道，如果我们能够找到合适的人，并且我们可以将他们与正确的用例联系起来，那么他们想要去传播福音以改善他们的职业生涯，他们会在外部和公司内部这样做，更重要的是在公司内部，他们将能够去找他们的朋友说，“嘿，我正在使用 Airtable 作为内容日历，但你有用户体验研究问题。

And I understand Airtable enough that I can help you build a system.

而且我对 Airtable 有足够的了解，可以帮助您构建一个系统。

And now I'm a superhero internally because I helped you build this whole new thing.

现在我在内心是一个超级英雄，因为我帮助你们建立了这个全新的事物。

Look at me, I'm amazing." And they suddenly have fully done a sales pitch for Airtable without us having to do any work or understand their use case, which is great and very necessary when you are as horizontal as we are.

看看我，我很了不起。”他们突然完全完成了 Airtable 的销售宣传，而我们无需做任何工作或了解他们的用例，当您像我们一样水平时，这非常好而且非常必要。

So we had to figure out essentially, "How do we catalyze that word of mouth and build champions at scale?"

因此，我们必须从本质上弄清楚，“我们如何催化口碑并大规模打造冠军？”

Zoelle Egner: All of that is to say the two interesting things that we did were all around that.

Zoelle Egner：所有这一切都是为了说明我们所做的两件有趣的事情都是围绕这一点。

In the very early days, what that meant in practice 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.

在很早的时候，这实际上意味着我们进行了 Slack 集成，我们提取了所有注册 Airtable 的人的大量信息，包括他们的头衔、他们工作的公司等等。

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.

实际上，我们会坐在那里，在收到的每条记录中都有一个小按钮，如果我们确定他们可能是我们想要交谈的人，那么我们可以立即向他们发送电子邮件。

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."

我们建立了整个自动化系统，这样只需两秒钟就能联系到大量不同的人，就像，“嘿，我们真的很想得到您的反馈，并帮助确保您在 Airtable 上尽可能取得成功。”

Zoelle Egner: This is not scalable in the long term because there's a whole bunch of sending emails and doing meetings.

Zoelle Egner：从长远来看，这是不可扩展的，因为需要发送大量电子邮件和召开会议。

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.

但这意味着我们能够通过寻找这些冠军的模式来开始为这些冠军在实践中的样子建立我们的心智模型。

And building the foundation is what ultimately became our customer success motion very early.

建立基础是我们很早就最终成为客户成功的动力。

And then we were able to say, "Okay, we found five people who have a content calendar use case with this type of title.

然后我们可以说：“好吧，我们发现有五个人拥有此类标题的内容日历用例。

And now we'll be able to go run an ad campaign based on that.

现在我们将能够基于此开展广告活动。

We can build a bunch of templates based on that.

我们可以基于此构建一堆模板。

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.

这是我们可以使用的所有这些不同的钩子，因为我们知道这就是冠军的样子，”如果我们没有与很多人交谈，这种方式就不会很明显。

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.

因此，它本身作为一项投资似乎并不明显，但需要花费大量的人力来找到一种有效的方式与尽可能多的人交谈来建立这些心理模型。

That's number one.

这是第一。

Lenny: That is fascinating.

莱尼：这很有趣。

Essentially, you weren't even sure who would be excited about Airtable.

本质上，您甚至不确定谁会对 Airtable 感到兴奋。

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 ...

其中一部分就像是“找出我们认为是鼓励和帮助支持的正确目标的人物角色和人群。”其中一部分是，“一旦你弄清楚公司内的这些人，就让它在公司内传播。”这是一个很酷的主意，只需要...

I imagine the squad had certain attributes of the person, like, "Here's the company they work.

我想这支球队有这个人的某些特质，比如，“这是他们工作的公司。

Here's how big it is." And then they talk about, there's a mention of what they're using it for.

这是它有多大。”然后他们谈论，提到他们用它来做什么。

Is that part of this?

这是其中的一部分吗？

Zoelle Egner: Ideally.

佐尔·埃格纳：理想情况下。

Though we were always very privacy minded, so we couldn't actually get much information about what they were doing in Airtable.

尽管我们总是非常注重隐私，所以我们实际上无法获得有关他们在 Airtable 中所做的事情的太多信息。

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.

我们永远无法看到他们的数据，因为如果回到我们之前谈论的内容，这将是一个巨大的信任失败。

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.

所以很多时候，我们都会有猜测，也许我们可以看到他们会使用某些模板，但我们并不真正知道。

And that was part of the reason why we wanted to talk to them in the first place.

这就是我们首先想与他们交谈的部分原因。

Zoelle Egner: 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.

Zoelle Egner：第二个原因是，如果我们能够尽早与他们交谈，我们就可以帮助他们建立他们的第一个空间，从那里开始，如果他们成功了，他们将拥有工具来帮助组织内的其他人。

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.

因此，如果我们从一开始就抓住它们，确保一个人通过过度投资而获得成功，那么他们基本上就会成为其他人的支持。

I should also clarify, these were not necessarily people who were going to be the buyers.

我还应该澄清，这些人不一定是买家。

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.

对于 Airtable 来说，这里的买家和冠军看起来非常非常不同，这是许多公司所不具备的一种非常有趣的动态。

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.

但对我们来说，周五坐下来喝一杯酒并建造 Airtable 基地的人并不是有预算的人。

Zoelle Egner: 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.

Zoelle Egner：所以我们最初并不是在寻找买家，而是在寻找冠军，部分原因是这样我们就可以在六个月后去找 IT 部门，说：“看，有 500 人在使用这个产品，这对他们来说非常有用。

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.

现在是你付钱的时候了。”不确定 IT 是否喜欢这些对话，但它们对我们来说确实有效，并且意味着它非常非常容易销售。

Lenny: Fascinating.

莱尼：令人着迷。

It makes me think a lot about the product led sales movement and how this is essentially that, but even earlier, because it's people just signed up and they're just helping them be successful, versus like, "This company's got 14 people using it.

这让我对产品主导的销售运动以及其本质如何进行了很多思考，但甚至更早，因为人们刚刚注册，他们只是帮助他们取得成功，而不是像“这家公司有 14 个人在使用它。

You should go try to sell them on an enterprise contract." Essentially this was a tool to help you figure out how to, basically scaling customer success and helping you prioritize who to go after, and being very hands-on with the strongest potential future big buyers.

你应该尝试以企业合同的形式出售它们。”从本质上讲，这是一个工具，可以帮助您弄清楚如何做到这一点，从根本上扩大客户成功并帮助您确定优先考虑的目标，并与最强大的潜在未来大买家进行密切接触。

Zoelle Egner: Exactly.

佐尔·埃格纳：没错。

And I think what's interesting here is it helped us bootstrap two things.

我认为有趣的是它帮助我们引导了两件事。

One was, to your point, building out the personas, and champions, and so on.

就您而言，其中之一是构建人物角色和冠军等等。

And ultimately there's more scalable ways to reach those people in the long run.

从长远来看，最终会有更可扩展的方式来接触这些人。

But secondarily, it also helped us deal with a real product education problem that we had in the early days.

但其次，它也帮助我们解决了早期遇到的实际产品教育问题。

Because it was really complicated.

因为它真的很复杂。

Airtable, unfortunately, has two education issues that it needs to solve.

不幸的是，Airtable 有两个教育问题需要解决。

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?"

这不仅仅是“我如何将乐高积木组装在一起？”它还是“我如何设计一个软件和工作流程？”

Zoelle Egner: 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.

Zoelle Egner：不幸的是，如果您要向内容营销经理或用户体验研究员销售产品，则无法保证他们知道如何制定工作流程。

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.

大多数软件都是固执己见的，它确实适合你，但你会想，“它要么适合你，要么不适合你。”也许你对它迫使你为了工作而做的事情感到沮丧，但你无法真正控制它，这意味着突然之间，你有能力创建你想要的任何工作流程，实际上需要一些教育才能成功。

Zoelle Egner: It's not enough to just make an Airtable base that's pretty or that functions.

Zoelle Egner：仅仅制作一个漂亮或实用的 Airtable 底座是不够的。

You can't get your team to use it effectively if it doesn't fit into the broader context of the organization.

如果它不适合更广泛的组织环境，您就无法让您的团队有效地使用它。

It's still going to fail.

它仍然会失败。

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?"

所以很多事情都是我们在想，“好吧，我们如何帮助这些人不仅使用我们的产品，而且构建耐用的东西，这样我们就能看到这种增长，这样他们就不会认为它是失败的，这样当它开始传播给更多人时，它就不会在第二个时刻失败？”

Lenny: It's a really good tactic for any SaaS product that just is hard to understand and needs, Airtable had both problems.

Lenny：对于任何难以理解和需要的 SaaS 产品来说，这确实是一个很好的策略，Airtable 就遇到了这两个问题。

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-

就像，“我不知道这是做什么的，也不知道它如何适合我的工作流程。”最想象的是——

Lenny: ...

莱尼：……

companies still have to deal with both those problems.

公司仍然必须处理这两个问题。

Zoelle Egner: No, hopefully not.

佐尔·埃格纳：不，希望不是。

Hopefully not.

但愿不会。

Zoelle Egner: But once you actually get in with folks, it's very difficult to remove it.

Zoelle Egner：但是一旦你真正和人们打成一片，就很难摆脱它。

So suddenly your retention rates are incredible, your word of mouth is incredible, if you're willing to do that initial work.

因此，如果您愿意做最初的工作，您的保留率会突然变得令人难以置信，您的口碑也会令人难以置信。

A lot of people think that Airtable was a pure product led growth company, and missed that huge customer success component that was always very, very important in the early days.

很多人认为 Airtable 是一家纯粹以产品为主导的成长型公司，而忽略了巨大的客户成功因素，而这在早期始终非常非常重要。

And that helped us ultimately move more towards that PLG motion for a while, but was essential to getting it set up in the first place.

这帮助我们最终在一段时间内朝着 PLG 动议取得了更多进展，但对于首先建立它至关重要。

Zoelle Egner: The other one that we did related to this champions at scale was we spent a hilarious amount of money on really fancy swag.

Zoelle Egner：我们与这个冠军大规模相关的另一件事是我们花了一大笔钱买了真正精美的赃物。

I know this sounds silly, but branded AirPods level of fancy swag.

我知道这听起来很傻，但它确实是 AirPods 级别的精美赠品。

Admittedly more people were in the office back then.

诚然，当时办公室里的人更多。

Now they are more remote and this would not work as well.

现在他们更偏远了，这也行不通了。

But back in the day, if you gave people something really good, not a pen or a sticker, really good, they would show it off to absolutely everyone that they talked to, because they were so excited they got branded AirPods.

但在过去，如果你给人们一些非常好的东西，而不是一支笔或一张贴纸，非常好的东西，他们绝对会向所有与他们交谈过的人展示它，因为他们非常兴奋，因为他们得到了 AirPods 的品牌。

People would ask about it, walking by their desks.

人们走过他们的办公桌时会询问这个问题。

It sounds so like trivial.

听起来好像很微不足道。

But for that couple hundred bucks that we spent knowing like, "Hey, this person's already a champion and if someone asks them, they're going to give a really good pitch." Totally worth it.

但我们花了几百美元才知道，“嘿，这个人已经是冠军了，如果有人问他们，他们会给出一个非常好的推销。”完全值得。

Sometimes better to not skimp on swag.

有时最好不要吝惜赃物。

Hard to measure, very effective.

很难衡量，但非常有效。

Lenny: That's a great tip.

莱尼：这是一个很好的建议。

And it connects to the general idea of find your champions and just do a lot to make sure they're successful, excited, want to evangelize, and an AirPod here and there feel like a really good ROI investment.

它与找到你的支持者并做很多事情来确保他们成功、兴奋、想要传播福音的总体理念有关，而随处可见的 AirPod 感觉像是一项非常好的投资回报率投资。

Lenny: Anything else along those lines?

莱尼：还有其他类似的事情吗？

Zoelle Egner: I think those are the big ones that I would highlight.

Zoelle Egner：我认为这些是我要强调的重点。

The only other small note I would make from a process perspective is if you are going to overinvest in customer success, which I recommend, make sure that you have also set up a process to take the insights that your customer success people are coming up with and turn them into as much content as you can.

从流程角度来看，我要说的唯一一点是，如果您要过度投资于客户成功，我建议您确保还建立了一个流程来获取客户成功人员提出的见解，并将其转化为尽可能多的内容。

Because that's where you're going to find scale in the long run.

因为从长远来看，这才是你能够扩大规模的地方。

So for us, what that meant was we would talk to a bunch of customers and then customer success would have helped them build bases, and then we would create templates.

所以对我们来说，这意味着我们会与一群客户交谈，然后客户的成功将帮助他们建立基础，然后我们将创建模板。

So were not exact copies, because we're not trying to steal their intellectual property.

因此，我们并不是复制品，因为我们并不想窃取他们的知识产权。

We would say, "What is the fundamental workflow here, that other companies might have?

我们会说，“其他公司可能有的基本工作流程是什么？

How do we make a template that is useful from this?" And some blog posts that explain it, whatever else, that we can then put out into the market.

我们如何制作一个有用的模板？”还有一些解释它的博客文章，无论其他什么，我们都可以将其投入市场。

Zoelle Egner: And the next time a smaller company that's not a Fortune 500 wants this sort of thing, someone can just email them that template and we don't have to go through this whole build process, they have something to start with.

Zoelle Egner：下次当一家非财富 500 强的小公司想要这种东西时，有人可以通过电子邮件将模板发送给他们，我们不必经历整个构建过程，他们有一些东西可以开始。

If you can find those insights and put them genuinely into use as a little conveyor belt, it will be much easier to scale.

如果你能找到这些见解并真正将它们用作一条小传送带，那么扩展就会容易得多。

It will be much easier to come up with genuinely compelling content because it's coming from your customers, so they already care about it.

拿出真正引人注目的内容会更容易，因为它来自您的客户，所以他们已经关心它。

You have strong signal that's going to be valuable if you already built it for them.

如果您已经为他们构建了强大的信号，那么该信号将非常有价值。

Use that to your advantage, make that into a little machine.

利用它来发挥你的优势，把它变成一台小机器。

And it makes all of the go-to market that you need to do later easier.

它使您以后需要做的所有进入市场的工作变得更加容易。

Lenny: I know that you have the strong opinion that customer success and marketing are basically the same thing and should be maybe one team.

莱尼：我知道您强烈认为客户成功和营销基本上是同一件事，也许应该是一个团队。

Can you speak to that?

你能谈谈吗？

Zoelle Egner: Yeah.

佐尔·埃格纳：是的。

This is my spicy opinion, but both of them have to do the same things.

这是我的辛辣观点，但他们都必须做同样的事情。

They have to identify customer needs.

他们必须确定客户的需求。

They have to help the customers see your product as a solution to those needs.

他们必须帮助客户将您的产品视为满足这些需求的解决方案。

They need to remove friction from the process of getting value.

他们需要消除获取价值过程中的摩擦。

They are hopefully both encouraging those customers to share with other people, and both of them should be engaged in translating insights from those individuals into resources that can help everybody.

希望他们都鼓励这些客户与其他人分享，并且他们都应该致力于将这些个人的见解转化为可以帮助每个人的资源。

Zoelle Egner: They use different tactics.

Zoelle Egner：他们使用不同的策略。

Marketing is going to use more scalable tactics.

营销将使用更具可扩展性的策略。

Customer success is going to be in the weeds, really talking to individual people, but all of the things they care about are actually the same thing.

客户的成功将在杂草中，真正与个人交谈，但他们关心的所有事情实际上都是同一件事。

They just use different ways to do it.

他们只是使用不同的方式来做到这一点。

And if you, as a marketer, are not pretty confident in being able to say, like, "What I'm doing is getting the right people to get genuine value from this product," so much so that they want to tell other people about it because it's going to make them look good, then maybe figure out if there's ways to bring more of that to your process, because it will make what you are doing more effective.

作为一名营销人员，如果你不太有信心能够说“我正在做的事情是让合适的人从这个产品中获得真正的价值”，以至于他们想告诉其他人，因为这会让他们看起来不错，那么也许可以弄清楚是否有办法将更多的东西带入你的流程中，因为这会让你正在做的事情变得更有效。

Zoelle Egner: And frankly, there's not a better evangelist than a person whose career you have materially helped to improve based on matching the right person to the solution so that they can have more impact at their company.

Zoelle Egner：坦率地说，没有比一个人更好的布道者了，你通过将合适的人与解决方案相匹配，使他们能够对公司产生更大的影响，从而实质性地帮助改善了他的职业生涯。

So much said, one of my unofficial metrics for both marketing and customer success at Airtable, unofficial, was how many people we'd gotten promoted for using the product.

说了这么多，我在 Airtable 的营销和客户成功的非官方指标之一（非官方）是，有多少人因使用该产品而获得晋升。

I had a running tally of those people, and I knew if we were getting those at the major accounts we were trying to win, something good was happening and we were going to be successful with really large deals.

我对这些人进行了统计，我知道如果我们在我们想要赢得的主要客户中获得了这些人，那么好事就会发生，我们将会在真正的大笔交易中取得成功。

Lenny: So curious how you tracked that.

莱尼：很好奇你是如何追踪的。

I guess you just check in with them occasionally?

我猜你只是偶尔去看看他们？

Zoelle Egner: No, I had my CSMs literally, they had really strong relationships.

Zoelle Egner：不，我确实有 CSM，他们之间的关系非常牢固。

We were actually tracking it.

我们实际上正在追踪它。

It was a little embarrassing, but it worked really well.

虽然有点尴尬，但效果确实很好。

Lenny: I love it, with the great KPI.

Lenny：我喜欢它，它有很棒的 KPI。

It's like dating apps and how many people get married, I guess.

我猜这就像约会应用程序和有多少人结婚一样。

Lenny: Zooming out a little bit, you advise a lot of companies on marketing, customer success, growth, and things like that.

莱尼：稍微缩小一点，你为很多公司提供了营销、客户成功、增长等方面的建议。

Maybe there's a two part question, and see where you want to take it.

也许有一个由两部分组成的问题，看看你想把它带到哪里。

Lenny: One is just what are activities that marketing, and growth, and customer success teams often do that are impactful and consistently impactful, things that you think startups should invest in that maybe they aren't, or they already aren't and they should definitely keep doing this.

莱尼：其中之一就是营销、增长和客户成功团队经常做的有影响力和持续影响力的活动，你认为初创公司应该投资的事情，也许他们没有，或者他们已经没有，他们绝对应该继续这样做。

And on the flip side, things that don't work, things that maybe they should avoid.

另一方面，那些不起作用的事情，也许他们应该避免的事情。

So maybe let's start there and there's going to be a followup.

所以也许我们就从这里开始，然后会有后续行动。

Zoelle Egner: Cool.

佐尔·埃格纳：酷。

Okay.

好的。

I'm going to start with things to avoid, because I try and not to make too many blanket statements on this, but I have a couple that I am willing to make.

我将从要避免的事情开始，因为我尽量不对此做出太多笼统的陈述，但我愿意做一些事情。

So this is all with the caveat that channel market fit is really real, and sometimes these things might work for you.

因此，需要注意的是，渠道市场契合度确实存在，有时这些东西可能对您有用。

Don't discount just because I say that they don't work for me.

不要仅仅因为我说它们不适合我就打折。

There are certain types of flashy event marketing and sponsorships that you will get relentlessly invited to do, that will seem like they're going to be really great for signaling purposes, or for leads, or whatever.

您将被无情地邀请进行某些类型的华而不实的活动营销和赞助，这似乎对于发出信号或潜在客户或其他目的非常有用。

Zoelle Egner: And they're almost always a waste of your time, unless you are in an industry where you desperately need to get to a trade show, because that's where everyone hangs out.

Zoelle Egner：它们几乎总是浪费你的时间，除非你所在的行业迫切需要参加贸易展览，因为那是每个人都闲逛的地方。

At that point, yeah, of course you're going to have to go do that.

到那时，是的，你当然必须这么做。

But if you're in more standard B2B SaaS, or that's not really a thing, there are better ways to get in front of those people than having your logo out there.

但是，如果您使用的是更标准的 B2B SaaS，或者这并不是什么真正的事情，那么有比在外面展示您的徽标更好的方法来吸引这些人。

That doesn't tell them anything.

这并没有告诉他们任何事情。

Maybe you get a branded session at the conference or whatever, but who's going to go to that branded session?

也许您会在会议或其他什么场合参加品牌会议，但谁会参加该品牌会议？

Probably not that many people.

可能没有那么多人。

And then you will have spent so much money and gotten nothing for it.

然后你就花了那么多钱却一无所获。

Go to the event, do not fund your money on the sponsorship.

去参加活动，不要把钱花在赞助上。

It's stupid.

这很愚蠢。

And then the second one, which is definitely a very spicy opinion, but I'm going to go there.

然后是第二个，这绝对是一个非常辛辣的观点，但我要去那里。

Zoelle Egner: A lot of people think that the epitome of product marketing is creating your own category.

Zoelle Egner：很多人认为产品营销的缩影就是创建自己的品类。

And while I agree that it is useful to have strong differentiators, because it is, I think creating a category, getting a new thing in Gartner or whatever, is often a waste of your time.

虽然我同意拥有强大的差异化优势是有用的，但我认为创建一个类别、在 Gartner 或其他什么地方获得新事物通常是浪费时间。

It is a huge lift, absolutely enormous, particularly in B2B SaaS, and I'm not always sure that it's helpful to have your super teeny tiny, little niche over here where you're like, "Oh, we have no competitors." That's not actually how buyers work.

这是一个巨大的提升，绝对是巨大的，特别是在 B2B SaaS 领域，而且我并不总是确定在这里拥有一个超级微小的利基市场是否有帮助，你会说，“哦，我们没有竞争对手。”这实际上并不是买家的工作方式。

It's not really worth it.

这真的不值得。

Zoelle Egner: That said, there are things you can do that feel like category creation that are actually effective, and that I do think make more sense.

Zoelle Egner：也就是说，有些事情你可以做，就像创建类别一样，实际上是有效的，而且我确实认为更有意义。

And specifically if you can elevate a profession instead of a category, that can make way more sense.

特别是如果你能提升一个职业而不是一个类别，那就更有意义了。

So the great example of this is that Gainsight creating customer success or many companies altogether carving out DevOps, or rebranding DevOps, to be a thing that was suddenly a sexy job to have.

因此，一个很好的例子是 Gainsight 创造了客户成功，或者许多公司完全开拓了 DevOps，或者重塑了 DevOps，让其突然成为一项性感的工作。

Zoelle Egner: And I think that's valuable because a job is an identity and people will fight for an identity.

Zoelle Egner：我认为这很有价值，因为工作是一种身份，人们会为身份而奋斗。

A category of software is a line item on your budget.

软件类别是您预算中的一个项目。

No one is excited about that.

没有人对此感到兴奋。

But people are very excited about their job being meaningful, and their job being important, and being taken seriously.

但人们对自己的工作有意义、重要、受到认真对待感到非常兴奋。

And so if you could hold up either an existing or a brand new job and say, "This is really important for much broader business metrics, whatever else.

因此，如果你可以保留现有的工作或全新的工作并说：“无论其他什么，这对于更广泛的业务指标确实非常重要。

We're going to create community for those people to come together and it's all about the job," and not about you.

我们将为这些人创建一个聚集在一起的社区，这一切都与工作有关，”而不是与你有关。

That can be very powerful and they'll take them with you.

这可能非常强大，他们会随身携带。

You become part of the identity of that career.

你成为该职业身份的一部分。

Amazing.

惊人的。

Do that, for sure.

一定要这样做。

But like the Gartner Square, there's some opportunities for that where it makes sense.

但就像 Gartner Square 一样，在有意义的地方也有一些机会。

A lot of the times it doesn't.

很多时候并非如此。

Don't do that.

不要那样做。

Lenny: Amazing.

莱尼：太棒了。

I love that.

我喜欢那个。

Is there more you wanted to add, there?

您还有更多想要补充的吗？

Zoelle Egner: I think that's enough on not to do.

Zoelle Egner：我认为不这样做就足够了。

Lenny: What this reminds me of broadly is just, "Stay focused on the customer and their problems.

莱尼：这让我想起的是，“专注于客户和他们的问题。

Don't obsess with who you are, who are you selling to and how will you make their life better." Reminds me of this old idea from Kathy Sierra.

不要沉迷于你是谁，你要卖给谁，以及你将如何让他们的生活变得更好。”让我想起了凯西·塞拉（Kathy Sierra）的这个老想法。

Does that ring a bell?

这是否敲响了警钟？

Lenny: ...

莱尼：……

you make your customer a superhero, you want them to feel like a superhero.

你让你的顾客成为超级英雄，你希望他们感觉自己像个超级英雄。

And if they-

如果他们——

Lenny: ...

莱尼：……

feel like a superhero.

感觉自己像个超级英雄。

And yeah, that sounds like that's essentially what you did with Airtable, a lot of these companies you worked with.

是的，听起来这基本上就是您在 Airtable 以及您合作过的许多公司中所做的事情。

Zoelle Egner: That that is always the goal.

Zoelle Egner：这始终是我们的目标。

Like, "How can you make them the hero of the story and not you?

就像，“你怎么能让他们成为故事的英雄而不是你呢？

Because no one cares about your company, what they care about is themselves, frankly."

因为没有人关心你的公司，坦率地说，他们关心的是他们自己。”

Lenny: Are there any products or companies you think of off the top of your head that are really good at this, that are just like they nailed this?

Lenny：有没有你突然想到的真正擅长这方面的产品或公司，就像他们做到了这一点？

Zoelle Egner: Yeah, that's a good question.

佐尔·埃格纳：是的，这是一个很好的问题。

Certainly the two that I mentioned, that helped rebrand some of the professions, so like the Gainsights of the world.

当然，我提到的两个专业帮助重塑了一些职业的品牌，就像世界上的 Gainsights 一样。

I'm blanking a little bit on the ones that have done this for DevOps really effectively, but there's certainly some that have.

我对那些真正有效地为 DevOps 做到这一点的人略为空白，但肯定有一些人做到了。

Zoelle Egner: Yeah, Datadog has done a pretty good job of that.

Zoelle Egner：是的，Datadog 在这方面做得非常好。

I think where I get excited is when the companies do this in a way that feels less self-serving, or less obviously self-serving.

我认为，当公司以一种不那么自私或不那么明显自私的方式这样做时，我会感到兴奋。

And that means that sometimes you have to be willing to invest in things that will not have super obviously immediate ROI for you, but they will for the community, and for building the community.

这意味着有时你必须愿意投资那些不会为你带来非常明显的直接投资回报的事情，但它们会为社区和建设社区带来回报。

Oh, actually one really good example, I think Notion has actually done a pretty good job of this.

哦，实际上是一个非常好的例子，我认为 Notion 实际上在这方面做得非常好。

People are really, really invested in the templates that they create, because it feels like you're not pushing Notion, you're pushing the beautiful creation that you have to solve a problem.

人们真的非常投入于他们创建的模板，因为感觉你不是在推动概念，而是在推动必须解决问题的美丽创作。

I think they've done a really nice job on that process, and several of their competitors, I think have done a pretty decent job as well, but they certainly come to mind.

我认为他们在这个过程中做得非常好，我认为他们的几个竞争对手也做得相当不错，但他们肯定会浮现在脑海中。

Lenny: Thinking of templates, I know Airtable, known for templates, and you've mentioned this being a big part of the success, and I imagine a lot of companies now are just creating templates left, because they imagine that's the core, what helped a lot of these companies, Notion being an example.

Lenny：说到模板，我知道 Airtable，以模板而闻名，你提到这是成功的重要组成部分，我想很多公司现在只是创建剩下的模板，因为他们认为这是核心，帮助了很多这些公司，Notion 就是一个例子。

What is your take on the power and importance of templates for software?

您对软件模板的力量和重要性有何看法？

Zoelle Egner: I think they can be tremendously helpful if you are horizontal because they help to narrow the surface area for a user, so they understand how to connect the dots between their problem and your product.

Zoelle Egner：我认为如果你是水平的，它们会非常有帮助，因为它们有助于缩小用户的表面积，因此他们了解如何将他们的问题和你的产品之间的点联系起来。

And if it is not obvious to someone how they can solve a specific problem, they're going to be like, "Oh, hey, that seems really cool.

如果某人不清楚如何解决特定问题，他们会说，“哦，嘿，这看起来真的很酷。

When I think of something I'll definitely come back." And then you have lost them.

当我想到什么事情的时候，我一定会回来的。”然后你就失去了它们。

And so if you can be like, "Here are three templates that a person you might be excited about." That can be really helpful.

因此，如果您可以说，“这是您可能会感兴趣的三个模板。”这真的很有帮助。

Where people sometimes get confused about templates, or have the wrong expectations about templates, is when they think that templates are going to be an acquisition mechanism, and they don't build in the foundation that is necessary for that to be true.

人们有时会对模板感到困惑，或者对模板抱有错误的期望，因为他们认为模板将成为一种获取机制，但他们没有构建实现这一点所必需的基础。

So a lot of people think that templates were what drove Airtable's top of funnel.

所以很多人认为模板是推动 Airtable 进入漏斗顶部的原因。

That is not the case.

事实并非如此。

Zoelle Egner: I was having a conversation with someone who worked a lot on SEO at Airtable in the much later days, and laughing over the fact that people thought that was a big source of traffic, because it was not.

Zoelle Egner：我与一位后来在 Airtable 从事 SEO 工作的人进行了交谈，并嘲笑人们认为这是流量的一大来源，因为事实并非如此。

We did not optimize them for that.

我们没有为此优化它们。

Good luck finding them in search most of the time.

祝你好运，大部分时间都能在搜索中找到它们。

Not at all useful.

一点用处都没有。

Where they were helpful, narrowing that surface area, helping with matching patterns, helping people understand how the product worked, super helpful.

他们有帮助的地方，缩小表面积，帮助匹配模式，帮助人们了解产品是如何工作的，超级有帮助。

Expansion within companies, tremendously useful.

公司内部的扩张，非常有用。

Zoelle Egner: But they were not a top of funnel mechanism for us, because we didn't put the work in to do that.

Zoelle Egner：但对于我们来说，它们不是漏斗机制的顶部，因为我们没有投入工作来做到这一点。

We did not have an SEO engine.

我们没有 SEO 引擎。

We weren't Zapier.

我们不是扎皮尔。

Zapier has done a great job with that.

扎皮尔在这方面做得很好。

They get a ton of traffic because they built it as a programmatic SEO play, but you have to be clear about what your goals are and what problem they're solving, because otherwise it is very easy to be like, "I'll just build a bunch of templates, and then all of the leads will appear," And that's not going to happen unless you invest in a lot more than at least Airtable did.

他们获得了大量的流量，因为他们将其构建为程序化的 SEO 游戏，但你必须清楚你的目标是什么以及他们正在解决什么问题，因为否则很容易会这样，“我将构建一堆模板，然后所有的潜在客户都会出现”，除非你的投资至少比 Airtable 多得多，否则这种情况不会发生。

So it can be useful to build them, know what you're doing it for, and how you're going to measure it, or otherwise you'll waste your time.

因此，构建它们会很有用，知道你这样做的目的以及如何衡量它，否则你会浪费时间。

Lenny: Do you think Airtable could have taken advantage of that top of funnel approach if they invested from an SEO perspective or do you think it wasn't an opportunity that worked?

Lenny：您认为，如果 Airtable 从 SEO 角度进行投资，他们是否可以利用漏斗顶部的方法，或者您认为这不是一个有效的机会？

Zoelle Egner: I think it could have been.

佐尔·埃格纳：我认为本来可以。

We would've needed to hire more humans.

我们需要雇用更多的人。

Airtable was an incredibly lean team for a very, very long time.

在很长一段时间里，Airtable 都是一支极其精简的团队。

From 2015, when I joined, until 2017 or 2018, we had barely 50 people.

从我2015年加入，到2017年或2018年，我们只有不到50人。

It was small for many, many years and so we had to make really difficult choices about what to prioritize and what not to prioritize.

很多很多年以来，它一直很小，所以我们必须做出非常困难的选择，决定优先考虑什么，不优先考虑什么。

Should we have hired more people and done more things?

我们是否应该雇用更多的人并做更多的事情？

I would argue in retrospect, absolutely, yes, there were opportunities that were left on the table, but in early days you leave good opportunities because you have to focus on other things.

回想起来，我会说，绝对是的，确实有一些机会留在桌面上，但在早期，你会留下很好的机会，因为你必须专注于其他事情。

Lenny: Got it.

莱尼：明白了。

And so a takeaway here is templates could be really useful for customer success versus SEO top of funnel.

因此，这里的要点是，与漏斗顶部的 SEO 相比，模板对于客户成功确实非常有用。

Right?

正确的？

That's-

那是——

Lenny: ...

莱尼：……

where they became powerful.

他们在那里变得强大。

Zoelle Egner: Still maybe helpful.

Zoelle Egner：也许还是有帮助的。

Maybe for you, it makes sense to do the SEO play, just know that that is not a small play.

也许对你来说，做SEO是有意义的，只是知道这不是一个小游戏。

It is an investment.

这是一项投资。

It is not and not just like, "Have some people make some templates." You got to do way more than just that.

它不是也不仅仅是“让一些人制作一些模板”。你要做的远不止这些。

It's not going to be sufficient.

这还不够。

Lenny: Final potential question, depending on where this goes, and I'm curious how spicy this answer gets, and-

莱尼：最后一个潜在的问题，取决于事情的发展方向，我很好奇这个答案有多辣，而且——

Lenny: It's around launches and PR.

Lenny：这是关于发布和公关的。

You work with a lot of startups, I imagine founders are always trying to plan a launch, get PR.

你与很多初创公司合作，我想创始人总是试图计划发布，获得公关。

I'm curious your take on the value of investing a bunch of resources in a big launch, the value of just getting PR as an early stage startup.

我很好奇你对在一次大型发布中投入大量资源的价值以及作为早期初创公司获得公关的价值有何看法。

Zoelle Egner: Yeah, just getting PR is not a good goal.

Zoelle Egner：是的，仅仅获得公关并不是一个好的目标。

I know that's been well stated in the market, but just to reiterate it, most of the time PR is not going to get you leads or users, it's just not.

我知道这在市场上已经得到了很好的阐述，但重申一下，大多数时候公关不会为你带来潜在客户或用户，事实并非如此。

And you have to think about when you are creating a launch or doing a piece of PR, what are the breadcrumbs that bring someone back to something that can actually convert?

当你创建一个发布或做一个公关时，你必须考虑一下，哪些面包屑可以让人们回到可以真正转化的东西？

If you have your big tech crunch piece and it's super exciting, it says all these great things about you, and it maybe links to you once, somewhere in the 12th paragraph or whatever, how many people are actually going to click on that link?

如果你有一篇重要的科技文章，而且非常令人兴奋，它讲述了关于你的所有这些伟大的事情，并且它可能链接到你一次，在第 12 段或其他地方，有多少人实际上会点击该链接？

Not that many people.

没有那么多人。

How many people are going to read that and remember to go Google it?

有多少人会读到这篇文章并记得去谷歌上搜索它？

Not as many as you want.

没有你想要的那么多。

Okay?

好的？

There's going to be so much coming out of the funnel, it is not a useful acquisition mechanism.

从漏斗中流出的东西太多了，这不是一个有用的获取机制。

Zoelle Egner: What it is good for is credibility.

Zoelle Egner：它的好处是可信度。

And that's where, if you have really clear goals, and you know how you are ready to leverage the asset of a piece of PR coverage, then it can be helpful to you.

这就是说，如果您有非常明确的目标，并且您知道如何准备好利用公关报道的资产，那么它会对您有所帮助。

So the two goals I always recommend to founders when thinking about using PR, are either hiring or maybe improving the response rate for your cold outbound.

因此，在考虑使用公关时，我总是向创始人推荐的两个目标是招聘或提高冷出站的响应率。

Those are the two that I think make the most sense, because in both cases they have a different distribution mechanism.

我认为这两个是最有意义的，因为在这两种情况下它们都有不同的分配机制。

In hiring, you're going to include that in an email that you're sending to a candidate.

在招聘时，您需要将其包含在发送给候选人的电子邮件中。

And so it's going to increase the likelihood that they take you seriously, and get excited about the company, and maybe actually end up ultimately joining your team.

因此，这会增加他们认真对待你、对公司感到兴奋的可能性，甚至可能最终加入你的团队。

Zoelle Egner: Cold outbound, you're using it as credibility to say, "Hey, we're a real company you can trust." Great.

Zoelle Egner：冷出境，你用它作为可信度说，“嘿，我们是一家真正值得你信任的公司。”伟大的。

Both of those things are all emails that you are proactively sending.

这两件事都是您主动发送的电子邮件。

You know exactly who they're going to, and you know that asset is going to have, hopefully, the impact that you're looking for, and you can measure whether it makes a difference or not.

您确切地知道他们将针对谁，并且您知道该资产有望产生您正在寻找的影响，并且您可以衡量它是否会产生影响。

But just getting a piece of PR, to get a piece of PR is like it'll help with your internal morale, but I'm not sure it's going to do much help for you.

但是仅仅获得一份公关，获得一份公关就好像它会帮助你提高内部士气，但我不确定它会对你有多大帮助。

So have really clear goals and have realistic goals, or you will be disappointed.

所以要有真正明确的目标并且有现实的目标，否则你会失望的。

Zoelle Egner: Launches however, do not need to just be about PR.

Zoelle Egner：然而，发布并不只是为了公关。

In fact, in many cases PR is a distraction, and instead you can have not just one big launch but a series of launches that allow you to stay top of mind, to create momentum with your users, and to show up in lots of different places because audiences respond to novelty, it gives them a reason to care about your company.

事实上，在很多情况下，公关会分散注意力，相反，你不仅可以进行一次大型发布，还可以进行一系列发布，让你保持领先地位，为用户创造动力，并出现在许多不同的地方，因为受众对新奇事物有反应，这让他们有理由关心你的公司。

And so have your big, annual launch or whatever, but also have one two months from then, and another one, and another one.

每年一次的大型发布会或其他活动也是如此，但两个月后也会有一次，另一次，再一次。

Find ways to use that novelty to your advantage and to get into communities that you think are going to be good fits for your company.

想办法利用这种新颖性来发挥自己的优势，并进入您认为适合您公司的社区。

Lenny: I love that advice.

莱尼：我喜欢这个建议。

Any final thoughts before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

在我们开始激动人心的闪电回合之前，还有什么最后的想法吗？

Zoelle Egner: Mostly just all of this is easier if you talk to your customers more.

Zoelle Egner：大多数情况下，如果您与客户进行更多交谈，所有这些都会变得更容易。

Build a system for yourself that will allow you to have those touchpoints.

为自己构建一个系统，让您拥有这些接触点。

That's not just making everyone answer customer support tickets, though I do think that is a great idea, because it gives so much empathy and it's really helpful.

这不仅仅是让每个人都回答客户支持请求，尽管我确实认为这是一个好主意，因为它给予了如此多的同理心，而且确实很有帮助。

You as a founder, if you're a founder, or a product manager, or whatever else, should find a way to get that on your calendar weekly or monthly.

作为创始人，如果你是创始人、产品经理或其他什么人，应该找到一种方法将其每周或每月记在你的日历上。

Go talk to people, it makes it better.

去和人交谈，这会让事情变得更好。

You will have a better mental model.

你将会有一个更好的心智模型。

The other thing is strongly consider investing in customer success if you are a B2B company, early.

另一件事是，如果您是一家 B2B 公司，请尽早考虑投资于客户成功。

Airtable had it before sales, which is a very unconventional approach, but early is worth it.

Airtable 在销售之前就已经有了它，这是一种非常非常规的做法，但尽早是值得的。

It has huge dividends if you actually listen to them.

如果你真正倾听他们的意见，它会带来巨大的好处。

If you're not going to listen to them, though, don't hire them, because that's sad.

不过，如果你不打算听他们的，就不要雇用他们，因为那很可悲。

Lenny: I have followup questions on the customer success piece, say someone wants to invest in customer success, is there a resource, or person, or anything that you could point folks to, to understand and think about how to do this well?

莱尼：我对客户成功部分有一些后续问题，比如说有人想投资于客户成功，是否有资源、人或任何东西可以让人们了解并思考如何做好这件事？

Zoelle Egner: There's a lot for people within that profession.

Zoelle Egner：对于这个行业的人来说，有很多事情要做。

There's not as much for founders out there right now, unfortunately.

不幸的是，现在对于创始人来说并没有那么多。

This is an area that I very eagerly am looking for more resources to share with people.

这是我非常渴望寻找更多资源与人们分享的一个领域。

Minimally.

至少。

I'll say, if you care about this, send me a message.

我会说，如果你关心这个，请给我留言。

I will give you some advice.

我会给你一些建议。

All of our industry will be better if there are more people working on customer success.

如果有更多的人致力于客户成功，我们整个行业将会变得更好。

So I will help you.

所以我会帮助你。

Send me a note.

给我发一张便条。

Otherwise, I'll try and dig out some other things and maybe you can share them, but there's not a ton.

否则，我会尝试挖掘其他一些东西，也许你可以分享它们，但数量不多。

So people in customer success, please share your learnings more with founders.

所以，从事客户成功的人们，请多与创始人分享你的经验。

All of us-

我们所有人——

Lenny: Yeah, I've actually been looking for someone to write a guest post in the newsletter, about just how to set up a customer success team.

莱尼：是的，实际上我一直在找人在时事通讯中写一篇客座文章，介绍如何建立客户成功团队。

And so if you're listening, you think you could be that person.

所以如果你在听，你就会认为你可能就是那个人。

Let me-

让我-

Zoelle Egner: Yeah, I have some people that I will not put on the spot right now, that I will send your way that I think-

佐尔·埃格纳（Zoelle Egner）：是的，我现在不会把一些人放在现场，我会派给你，我想-

Lenny: Amazing.

莱尼：太棒了。

.

。

Let's make this happen.

让我们实现这一点。

Lenny: And then I wanted to ask you a question on the first piece of advice, which is, "Founders talk to the customers more often." Is there one tactical piece of advice you could recommend for how to do that?

莱尼：然后我想问你一个关于第一条建议的问题，即“创始人更频繁地与客户交谈”。对于如何做到这一点，您有什么可以推荐的战术建议吗？

Lenny: How to find a customer, how to set it up consistently?

莱尼：如何找到客户，如何始终如一地进行设置？

Zoelle Egner: Totally.

佐尔·埃格纳：完全可以。

The simplest way to do this is to write a template email for yourself that you can send out very easily, that essentially says like, "Hey, thank you so much for using the product.

最简单的方法是为自己编写一封模板电子邮件，您可以轻松发送该电子邮件，其实质上是这样说的：“嘿，非常感谢您使用该产品。

I would really love to hear about your experience so far and get your feedback.

我真的很想听听您迄今为止的经历并得到您的反馈。

Do you have 10 minutes to talk on the phone?" I know it is important that it's on the phone and not a survey because you get way more instinct from unstructured conversation than you're going to get from sending them three things in a Google survey.

你有10分钟的时间通电话吗？”我知道通过电话而不是调查很重要，因为你从非结构化对话中获得的直觉比在谷歌调查中向他们发送三件事所获得的直觉要多得多。

Zoelle Egner: Set it up, come up with a hypothesis of the type of person that you want to talk to and then run a query against your database, find someone and send three of those emails a week.

Zoelle Egner：进行设置，假设您想与之交谈的人类型，然后对您的数据库进行查询，找到某人并每周发送三封此类电子邮件。

And it's not exciting, but you can automate most of it and it will be helpful.

这并不令人兴奋，但你可以将大部分工作自动化，这会很有帮助。

None of this stuff has to be complicated.

这些东西都不必太复杂。

You just got to have a system.

你只需要有一个系统。

Lenny: Great advice.

莱尼：很好的建议。

With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.

至此，我们进入了非常激动人心的闪电回合。

Lenny: I've got six questions for you.

莱尼：我有六个问题要问你。

I'm going to go through them pretty quick.

我将很快地浏览它们。

Whatever comes to mind, let's see where it goes.

无论想到什么，让我们看看它会去哪里。

Lenny: Question number one.

莱尼：第一个问题。

What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people?

您最向其他人推荐的两三本书是什么？

Zoelle Egner: Okay, I hate this question because I take pride in making highly targeted recommendations, but I will do it anyway.

Zoelle Egner：好吧，我讨厌这个问题，因为我为提出高度针对性的建议而感到自豪，但无论如何我都会这样做。

I'm pretty sure you mostly talk to product and growth people.

我很确定您主要与产品和增长人员交谈。

Right now, obviously, AI is a big topic of conversation, so here are two books that will enrich your mental model for artificial intelligence and encourage you to think about it from different perspectives.

显然，现在人工智能是一个热门话题，所以这里有两本书将丰富你对人工智能的思维模型，并鼓励你从不同的角度思考它。

The first one, a little bit academic, highly recommend it, though.

第一个有点学术性，不过强烈推荐它。

It's a book called Computing Taste by Nick Seaver.

这是尼克·西弗（Nick Seaver）写的一本名为《计算品味》（Computing Taste）的书。

Zoelle Egner: He's a professor of anthropology and he did this study of people and companies who build music recognition algorithms.

Zoelle Egner：他是一位人类学教授，他对构建音乐识别算法的人和公司进行了这项研究。

And it's a really interesting book for a bunch of reasons, including that it's a academic take on both tech culture, and more specifically, the unspoken and underlying assumptions that many workers who are building in this space have.

这是一本非常有趣的书，原因有很多，包括它是对科技文化的学术看法，更具体地说，是许多在这个领域进行建设的工人所拥有的不言而喻的潜在假设。

It can be a little spicy and uncomfortable for a person in tech to read, but I think it is a fascinating perspective and very relevant to the stuff that's going on in AI right now.

对于科技行业的人来说，读起来可能有点辛辣和不舒服，但我认为这是一个令人着迷的观点，并且与人工智能领域目前正在发生的事情非常相关。

So go check it out.

所以去看看吧。

Computing Taste by Nick Seaver.

尼克·西弗的《计算品味》。

Zoelle Egner: The second is a fiction book, but the Ancillary Justice series by Anne Leckie, about a spaceship AI that ends up separated from its ship and trapped in a body.

佐尔·埃格纳（Zoelle Egner）：第二本是一本小说，是安妮·莱基（Anne Leckie）的《辅助正义》系列，讲述了一艘人工智能太空飞船最终与飞船分离并被困在身体里的故事。

I'm going to leave it at that.

我就这样吧。

Worth reading for a different way of thinking about AI.

值得一读，了解人工智能的不同思考方式。

Lenny: I think we need a Zoelle full episode on book recommendations.

莱尼：我认为我们需要佐尔关于书籍推荐的完整剧集。

These are amazing.

这些太棒了。

Let's keep going.

我们继续吧。

Lenny: What other podcast of yours that you love to listen to other than this podcast?

Lenny：除了这个播客之外，您还喜欢听哪些播客？

Zoelle Egner: Probably either Happiness Lab or Gastropod.

Zoelle Egner：可能是幸福实验室或腹足动物。

I love food and also psychology, one of those two.

我喜欢食物，也喜欢心理学，两者之一。

Lenny: Interesting.

莱尼：有趣。

Okay, we'll keep going.

好的，我们会继续。

Favorite recent movie or TV show?

最近最喜欢的电影或电视节目？

Zoelle Egner: Movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once.

佐尔·埃格纳：电影，一切都同时发生。

And TV show, there's a Korean drama called Extraordinary Attorney Woo.

还有电视剧，有一部韩剧叫《非常吴律师》。

That, I really enjoyed.

那个，我真的很享受。

Lenny: Favorite interview question that you like to ask?

Lenny：你最喜欢问的面试问题是？

Zoelle Egner: Yeah.

佐尔·埃格纳：是的。

Okay, so this one is related to customer success.

好的，这与客户的成功有关。

It's my favorite question of all.

这是我最喜欢的问题。

People hate it, sorry.

人们讨厌它，抱歉。

But I like to ask anyone who's going to be in a customer facing role, who needs to be able to keep their cool, and also learn stuff on the fly, and respond to customers, to solve an unfamiliar problem using Zapier.

但我想问问那些将要担任面向客户角色的人，他们需要能够保持冷静，并且能够快速学习知识，并对客户做出回应，以使用 Zapier 解决不熟悉的问题。

And they can use the internet to look things up, whatever, but I basically lay out for them a problem that I, as the customer want to solve, and have them build it for me live.

他们可以使用互联网来查找东西，无论如何，但我基本上为他们提出了一个我作为客户想要解决的问题，并让他们为我现场构建它。

This both is surprising for most people, so you get to see how they respond to an unfamiliar situation, which every client will give you at some point, and it shows how they learn things in a very concrete way, which is really interesting.

这对于大多数人来说都是令人惊讶的，所以你可以看到他们如何应对不熟悉的情况，每个客户都会在某个时候给你这样的情况，它展示了他们如何以非常具体的方式学习东西，这真的很有趣。

So check it out.

所以检查一下。

It works really well for customer success.

它对于客户的成功非常有效。

Lenny: I've not heard that one before.

莱尼：我以前没听说过这个。

Fascinating.

迷人。

Top five SaaS products that you enjoy and an Airtable cannot be one?

您最喜欢的五种 SaaS 产品中，Airtable 不可能是其中之一吗？

Zoelle Egner: Ugh.

佐尔·埃格纳：呃。

Okay, then I'll try and avoid any company that I have worked for.

好吧，那我会尽量避开任何我曾经工作过的公司。

I really like using Figma.

我真的很喜欢使用Figma。

It's nice when designers let me play with things.

设计师让我玩弄东西真是太好了。

I've been really enjoying working with Webflow, also means that I can do stuff on my own.

我非常喜欢使用 Webflow，这也意味着我可以自己做事情。

This is maybe spicy, but I actually love Google Docs.

这可能有点辣，但我实际上很喜欢 Google 文档。

I'm not a Notion's fan stand, sorry.

抱歉，我不是 Notion 的粉丝。

Zoelle Egner: Yeah.

佐尔·埃格纳：是的。

And then there is a personal CRM company that I invested in, so sorry, maybe this is not allowed, but called Clay, and it is the only way I've ever been able to keep track of my-

然后我投资了一家个人 CRM 公司，很抱歉，也许这是不允许的，但是叫做 Clay，这是我能够跟踪我的-

Zoelle Egner: ...

佐尔·埃格纳：...

relationships in a real way.

以真实的方式建立关系。

Zoelle Egner: They're the best.

佐尔·埃格纳：他们是最好的。

And then I don't know if I love it, but I use Zoom so much that I feel like I must say it, because I spend so much of my time on it and it's categorically better than Google Meet.

然后我不知道我是否喜欢它，但我经常使用 Zoom，所以我觉得我必须这么说，因为我花了很多时间在它上面，而且它绝对比 Google Meet 更好。

Lenny: Final question, favorite book, course, article, any resource on marketing that non marketers can learn from?

莱尼：最后一个问题，最喜欢的书，课程，文章，非营销人员可以学习的任何营销资源吗？

Zoelle Egner: Okay, it's a newsletter.

Zoelle Egner：好的，这是一份时事通讯。

Does that work?

那有用吗？

Zoelle Egner: Amazing.

佐尔·埃格纳：太棒了。

Okay, so there is a specialist VC firm called MKT1.

好的，有一家专业风险投资公司，名为 MKT1。

It's run by Emily Kramer and Kathleen Estreich, sorry if I pronounced your last name, there, wrong, Kathleen.

它由艾米丽·克莱默（Emily Kramer）和凯瑟琳·埃斯特雷奇（Kathleen Estreich）经营，抱歉，如果我念出了你的姓氏，那，错了，凯瑟琳。

It's all about marketing.

这都是关于营销的。

They are marketing experts and operators who now invest, but they make the best frameworks that you can immediately apply.

他们是现在投资的营销专家和运营商，但他们制定了您可以立即应用的最佳框架。

And there's templates and all sorts of super, super tactical stuff, which a lot of tactical marketing content is terrible because it's actually content marketing for some bad platform.

还有模板和各种超级、超级战术性的东西，其中很多战术营销内容很糟糕，因为它实际上是一些糟糕平台的内容营销。

Theirs is not.

他们的不是。

It is genuinely good.

这真的很好。

Go check it out.

去看看吧。

Lenny: A huge fan.

莱尼：一个超级粉丝。

Emily has been on the podcast.

艾米丽一直在播客上。

Lenny: Yeah.

莱尼：是的。

And I look at that newsletter as the Lenny's newsletter of marketing, and it's exactly how you described.

我将该通讯视为莱尼的营销通讯，这正是您所描述的。

Lenny: Huge fan.

莱尼：超级粉丝。

Great recommendation.

很棒的推荐。

With that, Zoelle, thank you so much for being here.

佐尔，非常感谢您来到这里。

This was a lot of fun.

这很有趣。

And we got through a lot of stuff, which makes me really happy.

我们经历了很多事情，这让我非常高兴。

Two final questions, where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, learn more, and how can listeners be useful to you?

最后两个问题，如果人们想要联系、了解更多信息，可以在哪里找到您，以及听众如何对您有用？

Zoelle Egner: I am on Twitter @Zoelle.

Zoelle Egner：我在 Twitter 上@Zoelle。

I'm also on LinkedIn, so I live there, come find me there.

我也在 LinkedIn，所以我住在那里，来那里找到我。

Otherwise, how can you be useful to me?

不然你怎么对我有用？

Mostly like go forth and believe in customer success, and talk to your users, number one, because I am an avid user of technology, and I want it all to be better.

大多数情况下，我喜欢继续前进，相信客户的成功，并与您的用户交谈，第一，因为我是技术的狂热用户，我希望一切都变得更好。

Number two, no, that's all I got.

第二，不，这就是我所得到的。

Just go do those things and I will be so happy.

只要去做这些事情，我就会很高兴。

Also, if you want to talk about customer success, anytime, hit me up.

另外，如果您想谈论客户成功，请随时联系我。

I'm here.

我在这儿。

Lenny: I'm going to add a couple more things, which you mentioned to me offline, that you're hiring at Block Party.

莱尼：我要补充几件事，您在线下向我提到过，您正在 Block Party 招聘。

Lenny: You're hiring growth people, PMs, engineers, and then you're also advising on the side with marketing customer success.

Lenny：你正在招聘增长人员、产品经理、工程师，然后你还为营销客户的成功提供建议。

Anything else you want to add, there?

还有什么要补充的吗？

Zoelle Egner: Yeah, absolutely.

佐尔·埃格纳：是的，绝对是。

Love advising early stage companies.

喜欢为早期公司提供建议。

I'm especially helpful for pre seed and seed, usually, anything PLG, positioning, messaging, figuring out your channels, experimentation, all that early, fun stuff.

我对预种子和种子特别有帮助，通常是任何 PLG、定位、消息传递、弄清楚你的渠道、实验，以及所有早期的、有趣的东西。

I love it.

我喜欢它。

Happy to help anytime.

很高兴随时提供帮助。

And we are hiring across all of the teams, but especially mine.

我们正在所有团队中进行招聘，尤其是我的团队。

So if you would like to come and do all sorts of fun experimentation, and also help keep people online safe, come look up, Block Party.

因此，如果您想来进行各种有趣的实验，并帮助确保人们的上网安全，请来看看 Block Party。

I'd love to have you on my team.

我很想让你加入我的团队。

Lenny: Blockparty.com, or where do folks-

Lenny：Blockparty.com，或者人们在哪里-

Lenny: You didn't.

莱尼：你没有。

Zoelle, thank you.

佐尔，谢谢你。

Very good.

非常好。

Lenny: Thank you so much for listening.

莱尼：非常感谢您的聆听。

If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

如果您发现这很有价值，您可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或您最喜欢的播客应用程序上订阅该节目。

Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

另外，请考虑给我们评分或留下评论，因为这确实有助于其他听众找到播客。

You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com.

您可以在 lennyspodcast.com 上找到所有过去的剧集或了解有关该节目的更多信息。

See you in the next episode.

下一集见。