Case Study: Zendesk achieves 233% increase in startup referrals and faster approvals with Airtable

How Zendesk built an Airtable app that supports start-ups

Zendesk’s Zendesk for Startups program needed a better way to track where applications were coming from and which VC partnerships produced high‑quality startups. Before using Airtable, the small team relied on a 250‑entry spreadsheet and had little visibility into referral sources, conversion rates, or which partnerships were worth investing in. Airtable was chosen to give the team a single, scalable system to manage startup intake and partner tracking.

Using Airtable, Zendesk imported its spreadsheet, integrated with Zendesk, and built a custom Airtable app, scoring system, forms, dashboards and a customer portal to create a single view of the funnel. Airtable’s solution let the team prioritize partnerships and iterate quickly; the result was a 233% increase in referrals from partnerships (VC‑sourced startups rose from ~15% to over 50%), startups from those channels are twice as likely to be approved and three times more valuable at graduation, and the team saves about 2 hours a week. Airtable enabled Zendesk to scale its program and prove the ROI of VC partnerships.

Zendesk

Brad Bowery

Director of Startup Customer Acquisition