On the record: Launching Airtable's customer stories

Airtable is a relational database that transforms data into beautiful, actionable interfaces for any task or workflow. I was the first hire at Airtable back in 2015 when the three founders had just raised their seed round. I created all of Airtable's early content, from templates to instructional guides to onboarding flow. I left the team to pursue a Masters degree at NYU and continued to work on a freelance basis. In 2018, I began writing their first customer stories.

Airtable is easy and powerful enough for non-technical users to create software tailored to their specific needs. The challenge was to identify Airtable customers that showcased the tool's flexibility and power, and to tell their stories in an engaging manner. The goal was to find an angle that could turn these stories into general interest pieces, written in a journalistic style to encourage social sharing and brand discovery.

I wrote dozens of case studies, working from transcripts of interviews conducted by the sales and marketing team, as well as from interviews I conducted myself. I selected compelling pull quotes and crafted blog copy, which I then handed off to the marketing team. As well as publishing these stories to the blog, this content was repurposed for further use.

One story was so compelling that the PR team secured its placement in a trade magazine before it appeared on the blog, ensuring exposure to a broader, relevant audience:

Additionally, the sales team successfully repurposed pull quotes from my case studies to enhance their outreach efforts.