Join us in the 9th episode of the Generation Builders podcast as we dive into the world of software with our special guest, Zoelle. Discover Zoelle's inspiring journey from her initial resistance to the term 'no code' to becoming an expert in growth and marketing. With her experience at Airtable and her involvement with Vaccinate CA, Zoelle shares valuable insights on the power of control and ease of use in software.

Zoelle is one of the top experts when it comes to growth! She is most known for her time at Airtable as employee #11, helping build and scale marketing and customer success efforts.

Outside of her professional roles, she's also passionate about tech for social good, which led her to co-found Vaccinate CA during the height of the pandemic.

Nowadays, you'll find her at the helm of growth and marketing at Block Party, a tool aimed at making our digital spaces safer. When she's not doing that, she's likely advising or investing in the next big thing in tech.

We dive into the following topics:

Marketing deep-dive at Airtable

I know you started your career outside the tech but were really eager and very savvy to try and figure out a way to get into tech. What was the motivation behind and why that passion?
Why did you decide to join Airtable at such an early stage?
What was the hardest part about the 0 to 1 phase of Airtable GTM?
How did you balance the work between strategy and execution?
What were the key drivers of the organic growth of users in Airtable? Was it mostly consumer-driven, then expanded into business customers early on?

Horizontal GTM

What do you think about go-to-market motion for horizontal, built-yourself-type products? How did you leverage who to reach out to, and how to position such products to reach the right users?
What channels worked best and why?
How big a role did use cases/templates play in the growth?
You also run some quite unconventional experiments at Airtable, like billboards. Why did you decide to do that, and what hypotheses do you have in mind?
How are you thinking of PR? For a typical software company, PR is usually not the biggest and non-scalable channel, what’s your take on how best to leverage PR for an early-stage startup?

Customer Success

One of the biggest challenges of “build yourself” type products is the learning curve + helping users understand what they can build with the tool, and how they can build it to stick with the building process along the way. How did you help them through that, and what key things did you discover along the way?
When to start hiring for customer success, and who is the right candidate, what type of skillsets and mindset should they bring on board?

Community

How did do you build Airtable’s passionate community early on? And what role education fits within that?

Vaccinate CA Project

After Airtable, you started/helped a very impactful project - VaccinateCA (California) that helped as many people as possible get vaccinated. How did you join that and what was the motivation?
And one of the most incredible parts of this story is how quickly you managed to build the infrastructure, a platform for people to interact and manage the whole workflow, without any code! That's very fascinating and shows the potential and the impact that no-code platforms can and are having to help solve real-world critical problems.

The Future of no-code - what’s next?

How are work and tools changing in modern organizations? What’s the next phase of tools and products that’ll empower the ind

Less Complexity and Better Experiences: Empowering With No Code | Zoelle Egner (Head of Marketing & Growth at Block Party)

Generation Builders