How Airtable closed the enterprise gap

Hey, I’m Isaac 👋 I founded Pistachio, a growth agency working with B2B brands like Atono and Clay to build trust, relationships and loyalty with their current and future customers.

If you want to chat about your own growth strategy, book a free call with me here.

Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.

In 2017, Airtable was doing $4.5 million in ARR with a product people loved.

They also couldn't break into enterprise customers.

Big companies don't sign major software deals with companies they've never heard of. In 2017, nobody at the companies Airtable was targeting had heard of them.

Enterprise buyers don't evaluate products first and form impressions second. The impression comes first. If that impression doesn't clear a certain threshold, the evaluation never even happens.

The question running in the background, almost always subconsciously, is whether they've heard of you. Whether you look like a company worth their time. Whether you're the kind of vendor they could justify to the rest of their organisation.

If the answer feels uncertain, the conversation doesn't start. Regardless of how good the product is.

Most early-stage B2B companies respond to this by doubling down on what they can control. Better pitch deck, more case studies, a bigger sales team. What they rarely do is audit the experience their buyer has before any of those things are even in the conversation.

Airtable shifted the challenge completely. Instead of asking how to sell better, they asked how they were perceived before anyone had agreed to meet them.

When you want to look like you’re a big enterprise-ready software brand, do what the big brands do. When a brand is spending on out-of-home advertising, the assumption is that they’re credible and have solid resources behind them. Billboards signal scale.

The trick was that Airtable found a way to buy that perceptive assumption without the budget that usually comes with it.

They used remnant inventory, the leftover advertising slots that sit between major campaigns, available at a steep discount because the window to use them is so short. Sometimes they’d have 24 hours from signing the contract to having artwork live.

Airtable created a flexible ad template they could turn around fast. They identified the specific buildings and intersections where their target enterprise buyers worked and commuted. They bought the remnant slots. Then they ran it again and again and again.

Execs in those buildings started seeing Airtable repeatedly, before a sales call had happened, before a cold email had landed. The brand had already registered as one to be taken seriously.

One user described spotting the ad, bringing it up over lunch, and trialling the product before they were back at their desks. The product hadn't changed at all, but the perception had.

The billboard was the headline move, but Airtable also backed it up with a deliberate perception stack built around every touch point in the enterprise evaluation process.

A comprehensive template library signalled product depth and real-world versatility, giving evaluators a ready-made sense of what the tool could actually handle. Zapier integrations, over 450 apps by the time they were scaling, told buyers the product was part of a real ecosystem and would connect directly with their existing tools. Airtable Universe, the library of user-generated templates, showed the product solving real problems at real companies. Enterprise buyers are always trying to work out whether something functions for people like them. Universe answered that at scale.

Every element was closing a different trust gap. Together they formed a coherent answer to the perception challenge.

Most brands audit their product, their pricing, their pitch deck. Airtable audited signals.

They mapped out what a senior decision-maker at a company like Tesla or Airbnb would actually encounter before agreeing to a first meeting. The exercise was about understanding which signals existed in that world, which ones Airtable was already sending, and which they were missing entirely.

For most early-stage B2B companies, the honest answer is not much. Or worse, the signals that do exist are working against you. A thin website. No brand presence in the places your buyer actually operates. No social proof from companies they recognise. You look exactly as small as you are, if not smaller.

Airtable understood this gap and closed it in a way that was specific, targeted, and deliberately designed rather than left to chance.

The approach was disciplined. Audit how you're being perceived. Acknowledge what you find. Address each gap in the most targeted way you can afford.

That's the part most people miss about this story. The billboard was clever, but the thinking behind it was the real work.

There's a version of this approach that ends badly.

You manufacture the perception, then the product can't back it up and trust dissolves immediately. Word spreads, and you end up with more damage to undo than if you'd never tried in the first place.

There's a useful test for this. If you engineer a perception and a buyer walks through as a result, would the product justify what they felt when they first saw you? For Airtable in 2017, the answer was yes.

If the answer is no, that’s misleading territory.

You definitely don't need billboards to apply the same logic.

The more useful audit is about where your buyers are forming their first impression of you, and what they actually find when they get there.

They don't. They compound while your sales team wonders why the pipeline keeps stalling.

Airtable's playbook is more than a case for outdoor advertising. The real takeaway is a habit of looking at your own brand from the outside in. Before anyone has heard your pitch or used your product, they've already formed a view of whether you're worth their time. That view is shaped by signals most companies aren't conscious of, let alone actively influencing.

The brands that grow fastest are the ones that recognised perception gaps early, take them seriously, and are deliberate enough to close them.

Airtable has gone from that $4.5 million ARR in 2017 to almost $500 million today. The product did the compounding, but it couldn't compound until the door was open.

Most startups invest heavily in their product, their pitch, their pipeline. Very few stop to audit what their buyers actually think before any of that matters.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: brandchemistry.co/p/airtable-enterprise-ready