My chat with Lauryn Isford, Head of Growth at Airtable

Brewing coffee & growth

October 01, 2022

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I’m kicking off the new month with my conversation with Lauryn, who leads growth at Airtable. The first thing I told her when we connected was I didn’t want to talk about Airtable, one of the hottest late-stage private companies sitting at the intersection of hot ideas like no code, productivity tools, product-led growth, and community. There’s enough you can find online about Airtable.

I first came across Lauryn on Twitter when she announced she was joining Airtable. I read an insightful interview with Lauryn on how she thinks about free trials versus freemium models. I was reminded of that when I spoke to Alexa, the founder of Pocus, a few weeks ago. I later decided to reach out to Lauryn to see if I could get her perspective on product-led growth, among other things.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about :

  • Her love for coffee

  • Reflections on her time working at Philz and Blue Bottle

  • What she learned about India during her time at Facebook

  • Responding to live chats on Dropbox’s website

  • Difference between product-led sales and product-led growth

  • Waves of adoption of product-led growth thinking

  • Happy accidents versus intentional growth practice

  • The tension between growth leaders and other functional leaders

  • Most common question she gets from founders

  • Transferable habits & instincts from consumer social to SaaS

  • Role of luck and grit

Sar: You worked at Philz during college and later at Blue Bottle after a year at Dropbox. I grew up in a tea culture, but I have now become a big coffee person. You are a big coffee fanatic. How did you get into coffee?

Lauryn: Yes, I am! My story about coffee begins back in high school. I used to drive myself an hour each way to school. My parents would give me exactly one cup of coffee every morning to keep me safe on the road. Not many kids – at least when I was growing up – drank black coffee in high school. So I started learning about coffee and became fascinated by it at a young age. Why did people love it, and how did Starbucks become so popular? As part of my high school graduation requirements, we wrote a thesis called a ‘term paper’ diving deep into a topic of our choice, and I chose coffee. I wrote about Fair Trade certification and the pros and cons of purchasing fair trade, including some lesser-known truths at the time about the challenging conditions of coffee farming and production. That’s where the coffee obsession started for me.

Sar: Can you talk about that thesis and if you have changed your perspective looking back?

Lauryn: The rough concept of Fair Trade is that coffee producers are paid above market – a fair trade price – in exchange for meeting certain production standards. The goal of the concept is great, and it’s made a major difference in raising awareness about coffee farming and labor conditions. However, it has challenges - sometimes, the extra proceeds of selling fair trade coffee go to the retailer rather than the farmer, and it can be more profitable even for farmers to circumvent fair trade and sell directly.

A lot of my current knowledge about the coffee industry is really from my time at Blue Bottle. Although I worked on e-commerce growth for Blue Bottle’s DTC business, I was lucky enough to get to know our procurement and green coffee buying teams. In spending time at the warehouse in Jack London Square in Oakland, I understood the choices we made as a company to invest fairly in coffee farmers and businesses. As a result, a few things are really important to me: I can learn about where a bean came from, that a coffee roaster maintains longer-term relationships with individual coffee farmers, and that I can drink Ethiopian coffee whenever possible. It’s my favorite.

Sar: I love Ethiopian coffee too! What about working at Phil's as a barista has stuck with you all these years?

Lauryn: I worked as a barista at Philz right after I finished my undergraduate degree. Of all the jobs I’ve ever worked, this chapter of serving coffee to customers had a unique impact on my life. I learned how to manage all sorts of unfriendly or unexpected customers, adjusted to waking up at 4:30 am to open the store – which included picking the day’s playlist – and had some interesting experiences listening to others’ conversations while making their coffee on the other side of the counter. Since then, I’ve always tipped at coffee shops because I know how much tips mean to the team behind the counter.

Sar: I’m guilty of justifying not tipping at coffee shops by often wondering how difficult it can be just to use a fancy machine to make an overly priced cup of coffee! The barista in you would disagree with me! And I think people (including myself) underestimate how grueling a job can be! How did you end up at Blue Bottle?

Lauryn: The team at Philz introduced me to Blue Bottle when they were searching for someone to work on growth for DTC/ecommerce. I enjoyed the ‘growth’ thing I had learned about when working at Dropbox because it was a unique combination of analytics and product. I could solve puzzles daily that directly impacted company outcomes and get paid for it! That said, cloud storage wasn’t a particular passion of mine, so I decided to jump back into the coffee industry. Nestle acquired Blue Bottle shortly after, and many of the great product and engineering folks I worked with went to other great companies like StitchFix.

Sar: Did Blue Bottle have subscriptions when you were there?

Lauryn: Yes, we did. The subscription business was really what we were focused on. Thanks to our brewing guides about making great coffee at home with tools like Aeropress, we had pretty good SEO. We also knew that our cafe-going customer base was distinct from folks who preferred to brew at home and that there was an opportunity to capture more of that market. Subscription coffee is tricky, but Blue Bottle lovers are passionate about quality and fresh beans.

Sar: Talk about your time at Dropbox.

Lauryn: I was in Dropbox’s Rotation Program. One of my first rotations in the program was on the inbound sales team, responding to chats on dropbox.com. Managing sales chat at 6 am was yet another meaningful lesson in my career - grit, negotiation, and handling any conversation that came your way. Dropbox was masterful at hiring and training new grad talent and exposing them to different roles at the company while honing their skills and interests.

Sar: I have spoken to quite a few people with similar career trajectories. Lots of people have high-profile jobs at hot companies. You are one of the few who keep coming back to this idea of inculcating a service mindset and grinding it out in seemingly mundane jobs. When we first spoke (and it’s also evident in your answers here), it sounded like your most impactful experiences haven’t had much to do with tech jobs.

Lauryn: I wouldn’t say it’s tech or non-tech. To be clear, I have been very lucky - I went to Stanford, interned at great companies, and was embedded around age 19 in the world of tech startups. However, I learned in my early career that getting the keys to a great opportunity is one thing. But nobody is going to give you the hustle and drive you need to earn your spot in the building. And ultimately, you can never think of yourself as ‘above’ any scrappy task if you want your company to win.

Sar: Yep, I agree. So with the benefit of hindsight, that everything you learned at Facebook and Dropbox, if I were to wave a magic wand and make you the head of growth at the Blue Bottle, what would you do?

Lauryn: In hindsight, I was not ambitious enough in my growth work at Blue Bottle. There are two kinds of growth work for a tech or tech-enabled business. First, expanding into and capturing adjacent markets or market share. Second, there’s ‘juicing your lemons’ – extracting maximum value and business from your existing product and customer base. In my work at Blue Bottle, I was too focused on the second.

As an example, one area that I believe I could’ve been more thoughtful about early on is selling cold brew. We were focused on refining our whole bean DTC subscription business to drive incremental revenue. But we had some nascent products like cold brew sitting right in front of us! If I could go back and do it again, I would focus more on exploring and expanding into adjacent markets - selling new coffee SKUs or products online, selling coffee over new channels, or supporting retail expansion. What might the growth analyst be able to figure out regarding how to effectively expand a retail footprint based on the trends we saw with online purchasing? I’m sure there’s lots of insight to unearth there.

Sar: That’s a fascinating perspective. I imagined you would say something about doubling down on digital products, which would mean both the mobile app and the subscriptions. But you went the other way.

Lauryn: In a vacuum, doubling down on digital would be the intellectually correct response because it would be more efficient growth. In this specific case, however, it was a matter of doing the math on where I think we were under-leveraged relative to the products and channels available.

Sar: You have always worked in subscription businesses. You boomeranged into the coffee business after a stint at Dropbox. Does that mean you will be at another coffee chain after Airtable?! How did you end up at Airtable after working at Blue Bottle? Do you like the transition phases of learning and unlearning instincts or habits that help you excel in two different industries?

Lauryn: Coffee was a big part of my early career, but it’s been just a hobby for quite some time now. I’m not sure when it’ll come back. I dream of opening a restaurant later in my life, and I’m sure it’ll be stocked with the best coffee I can get my hands on.

I ended up at Airtable as an outcome of my time at Meta. I went to Meta to learn how to build a growth organization from the absolute best growth experts in the industry. And then, I found a company, a founding team, and a product at Airtable that I was deeply excited about supporting. Building Airtable’s growth org alongside my leadership team has been a privilege, with more to come! We want our work to be nothing short of legendary.

Sar: You did an insightful interview with Openview Partners on your practice of product-led growth. You talked about how free trials are optimized for revenue growth while freemium offerings are optimized for user growth. And then you have come up with this notion of reverse trials where users can use a paid offering on a free trial basis and have to pay up to keep that paid offering or downgrade to a free version. It gives the best of both worlds and enables companies to stay in touch with the users who are not ready to pay for the product. I recently spoke with Alexa at Pocus, and we discussed the differences between product-led growth and product-led sales. I would love to hear your take on that. In our world, we love coming up with new labels for old ideas. So how much of that is happening, and what's meaningfully different?

Lauryn: Yes, that’s a good question. I see product-led sales as a new category within product-led growth. It specifically refers to bridging the conversation gap between users and sales and leveraging data intelligently. Product-led sales facilitate smarter user identification, nurturing, and handoff of leads generated by a product-led growth company.

Sar: And the personas are different, right? Product-led sales as a software category is about salespeople. As a product-led growth practitioner, you don’t sit in sales.

Lauryn: Correct. One of the most important concepts in a product-led growth engine is the value of free use – getting people to use and adore your product in their early days is more important than having them pay you. As a result, it’s typical to offer something for free, often a free tier or plan, to capture as many happy users as possible and win their hearts before their wallets. Down the road, of course, a product-led business ultimately needs to tier or prioritize its user base and facilitate the right introductions to sales. That’s where products like Pocus are making companies smarter and sales teams more efficient.

Sar: You worked on products meant for India at Facebook. What did you learn about India? What was eye-opening?

Lauryn: I did! I worked on user growth for the Facebook App in international markets, including India, when Jio took off. I learned a ton about India’s competitive telecom dynamics during that time. I watched from afar as the Jio phone launched and saw how quickly Jio captured a market by offering super-low-cost devices.

Many people in our industry underestimate how different other markets look around the world. It only became viscerally clear to me when I visited rural neighborhoods of India, experiencing how peer-to-peer communication, mobile payments, and micro-lending differed from what I experienced here. And that’s just India - I also learned in this chapter of my work that Facebook Messenger is a pervasive tool for business, shopping, and communication in the Philippines. And that the cost of mobile data in Brazil factors into peoples’ budgets differently because there’s a great wifi infrastructure on public transit.

In my time at Meta, I was a small part of the team that built the Facebook app retrofitted for the Jio Phone. This was a particularly cool experience because most Facebook users had touch screens, so the app was built primarily for touch screen devices, but the Jio Phone used a standard 9-number button pad. One learning area from that project was the importance of supporting every user in your base, not just the majority case. For example, the default sign-up process for Facebook asks for your email addresses. This is an excruciating task on the phone with a 9-number pad (the buttons break easily). We rebuilt the sign-up flow to use the phone numbers. From the perspective of someone in California, that might not have felt like a big deal. But for someone holding a Jio Phone in India, it was the difference in giving them the experience they needed to connect.

Sar: The ideas and practices we develop in the tech world take time to propagate elsewhere. Most of the rest of the world tends to be late adopters of things startup folks obsess over regarding building and growing. Where do you think we are on the journey of spreading the principles of product-led growth thinking?

Lauryn: I think we're at the very beginning. The first wave of ‘growth thinking’ was growth marketing, an offshoot of performance marketing. Then, startups started to dabble in what you might call ‘growth hacking’ with loads of referral programs, email campaigns, and notifications to boost metrics. Growth hacking didn’t endure, but the best of growth marketing did. Reforge brought that practice of growth marketing to center-stage in the startup community by codifying and preaching about the frameworks you might apply to your own business. It took about a decade for some foundational growth marketing playbooks to take a common hold in American tech companies.

Now, we’re in the third wave, where technology companies broadly recognize that products themselves can be fully powered by growth flywheels – in other words, a product-led growth engine. And some companies - like Airtable! - have even built teams to architect, build, and refine that engine to generate greater returns. Product-led growth will only be ‘mainstream’ when every business creating a product-led growth engine is capitalizing on that motion and staffing a team to support it. I am optimistic that this will happen within the next couple of years.

Of course, sometimes companies get lucky and stumble into great natural product-led growth without an intentional investment. It may be an effective wedge for strong SEO or a robust community that powers traffic to their site. But that’s different than an intentional practice of cultivating the same engine.

Sar: There's a lot of survivorship bias in startup literature of what works. Are you saying that there are a lot of happy accidents that have now been spun as intentional product-led growth stories?

Lauryn: Yes, exactly. Especially in the strong market conditions of 2021 and years prior, we were all wearing rose-colored glasses to some degree. It was easy to look at natural or coincidental success and believe it was because your company was just really good at product-led growth. In a down-market, growth teams are facing the new challenge of figuring that out – surgically diagnosing headwinds in business metrics and figuring out the root cause. It’s more important than ever to be objective and leverage data.

Sar: What are some unanswered or challenging questions you are grappling with in this world of product-led growth?

Lauryn: The most common question I hear when I work with startups is when to build a growth team and who to hire. This is different for every company - fundamentally, the first question is ‘what am I trying to grow and with what functional skillset?’, which can be hard to answer before you’ve even launched a beta. Product-led growth can be an efficient and effective approach for customer adoption of some products. And importantly, how you use that engine (generating leads vs. free signups vs. virality vs. something else) can vary greatly from one company to the next. Often I see companies cluster around two ideal types of first growth hire: the data-driven top-of-funnel growth marketer or the business-minded PM who can create early product flywheels.

I also see the broader PLG community grappling with how much to invest in growth. Some growth teams are large - Meta’s Growth Org is a perfect example of this. Other companies are, in my view, severely under-invested in growth across marketing and product. It’s important that someone at the company, who isn’t on the exec/founding team, is watching key business metrics like a hawk. They need resources to address and achieve change. It’s unclear where the ‘typical investment in a growth team’ will pan out for tech companies over time. But today, I think it’s too low.

Sar: What habits or instincts you picked up during your time at a generational social media company like Facebook don’t port over well into the SaaS world and Airtable?

Lauryn: Well, first, let me answer what has translated well. First, you have to fight your tunnel vision to unlock new growth. If you’ve been working on the same product for more than a year, it’s critical to take a step back and check your blind spots. What assumptions are you making about your customer, your product offerings, and how much business you can generate from an individual user or lead? Without that check in place, you’ll optimize local maxima and have less impact on your work. Second, most companies don’t sweat the details enough. There’s a difference between ‘we built a checkout flow’ and ‘we consistently staff people to augment and reoptimize our checkout flow as our user base changes.’ The compounding impact of this detail orientation on business outcomes down the road is hard to quantify today, so it’s often overlooked.

What hasn’t translated - user intent is very different in SaaS than in consumer products. On a social app, you can make a button bigger or add a GIF and see percentage point gains in conversion. In SaaS, people generally need to get their work done. If they’re already using your tool, the color of a button or the elegance of the UI will probably not dissuade them from sharing a report with their boss. In SaaS, we must dig deeper with customers to understand their intent and build bigger, bolder changes to respond to their needs. This is a harder (albeit in many ways more exciting) game.

Sar: What are some common points of tension between people in your roles and functional leaders across sales, product, and marketing?

Lauryn: The tension I hear about most for PLG companies is ‘who owns revenue numbers’ - especially the divide between self-serve and sales-generated revenue in a SaaS company. I see it generally works well when self-serve revenue numbers are owned by a product growth leader reporting to the CPO. They should have a finance counterpart who works with them on forecasting and ensures accountability. They should have a close relationship with the CRO, who owns sales-led revenue. That gives a balance of business ownership and accountability.

In product-led growth companies, there can be hard trade-offs between self-serve and sales-led revenue. Cannibalization is natural as accounts move to more expensive plans over time. Ultimately, what matters most is that everyone focuses on making the company successful and maximizing revenue over long time horizons.

Sar: I want to end our conversation with a personal question. You have brought up the role of luck multiple times. In our world of tech, where exponentiality in the career trajectories of people who get interviewed is extremely common, people often get on their high horse. What’s your perspective on luck?

Lauryn: I appreciate you asking that. I’d tell mentees of mine to stop saying they were so lucky because they earned their spot. Full stop. Not enough women get to own their success in this industry. I still think I’ve been lucky, but I’m making the most of the cards I’ve been dealt. Hopefully, setting a good example of what women are capable of in tech. More to come :)

Other functional leaders I have spoken to in the past (most of them have different titles / jobs now but the tiles below reflect the roles they had when we spoke) :

Expect to see a lot more chats this month! I’m ramping up the cadence. If you have feedback or suggestions for who I should talk to, please reply to this email or DM me on Twitter.