Valuations are not always straightfoward, and we don't know Airtable's ARR. I see Airtable as an Excel + Repl SaaS replacement. Does that have a larger market available to it? Maybe! Also, it doesn't appear Airtable has any competitors in the space (whereas your example has multiple competitors; MuleSoft is at ~$300 million/year in revenue, Microsoft doesn't break out their Flow service revenue unfortunately).
I think Airtable and Zapier are both great products, and recommend both to clients, but they have different use cases.
What's the most impressive Airtable use-case that comes to your mind, since you recommend it to clients?
I'm trying to think of something that Google Spreadsheet + Zapier add-ons don't cover...can't come up with much
A client has a popular t-shirt production business and brand that does around $60 million a year in revenue and they're using Airtable as their process workflow tool (inventory, shipping, production, etc). They'll eventually graduate to a traditional ERP system, they're just not ready yet.
Also, I don't find Google Spreadsheet to be a compelling tool for anything mission critical.
Their main competitor Fieldbook shut down earlier this year. I liked Fieldbook better because it was faster and had a cleaner UI, but Airtable always had more features and better pricing. I’ve migrated over to Airtable now, and I’m happy they’ve raised this round because they’re definitely here to stay.
Their main competitor should be considered Salesforce.
I know at my own company we moved to Salesforce NOT because of its CRM capabilities, but because it's basically a managed database with app-building capabilities. Lots of point-and-click stuff, and lots of development tools too.
I think we're just starting to see this space heat up. The basic capabilities have existed forever at the "enterprise" level (think SAP, Oracle, Microsoft with Access and Sharepoint, etc).
But the focus on making the promise of relational databases available to everyone -- with minimal computer science expertise required -- is what's sort of new and, in my opinion, now taking off.
Coda and notion both seem to be in the space of dropbox paper crossed with confluence crossed with airtable. I feel like these have more promise than airtable in the long run, or perhaps if dropbox paper starts adding more functionality with their own tables, having different views, apis, workflows.
Our org uses Salesforce for exactly that purpose. Unfortunately the deeper reality is that the value in this database is that non-database-savvy individuals can arbitrarily modify the data schema through a simple GUI tool leading to Objects/Tables with hundreds of fields, computed properties, and other often undocumented pitfalls and dependencies.
As might be expected this yields large numbers of performance penalties and application level work-arounds that deeply slow application development and neuter the quality of often business-critical tools.
It's my theory that the reason such platforms are allowed to exist without employees immediately breaking out in open rebellion is because the users of Salesforce and similar products are often non-technical enterprise workers whose quality bar has been welded by management and past experiences to be lower than the Mariana Trench.
This is definitely a real challenge. No argument from me.
I think the niche where this product can thrive -- and its a huge niche -- is all those small-to-medium size businesses that have so far been running things through a hodge podge of unconnected spreadsheets, obsolete special-purpose applications, and lots and lots of paper.
It's easy as a programmer to more or less forget that most people, when facing a task or challenge, do not think: "I wonder what the most efficient way to do this might be, and if technology could help." Instead, it's: "What methods do I already know that I could apply to this problem?"
More often than not, the answer is paper. And email. Or excel.
So this type of the-database-is-everything app has huge value. Unfortunately it won't be run entirely by engineers with 10+ years of experience in what makes for good database best practice.
It's the trade-off we have to make.
In return, we get:
- A single system that has access to all of the business' data (rather than a dozen different "systems" [if they can be called that] which do not interoperate in any way, with endless duplication and data entry.
- Customization (for better and worse)
- Radically simplified I.T.: Just give everyone a chromebook and be done with it.
- Access to these systems anywhere in the world (cause it's web)
It's better than paying a bookkeeper to (literally) manage paper-based ledgers.
FYI - Zoho CRM's rebuild (from about 2 years ago) is a super user-friendly version of SFDC at a fraction of the price. Has many of the functionalities you just mentioned.
Zoho customer support is so terrible the company should not be used for anything mission critical.
Our account was closed because we kept getting strange credit card billing errors. No amount of calls or emails would resolve it. Just kept getting "we don't see errors on our end" despite us sending screenshots and trying different cards from different issuers. We literally could not pay for the service so out account was shut.
They are not even remotely playing in the same league. Zoho's product is a testament to the capabilities of unlimited human resources tasked with building features and stopping exactly at the point where each feature "works."
Totally offtopic, but the screenshot on the top of the page shows the Airtable dashboard with a fictional magazine cover about the "best in class American cruiser" with a Ferrari in the background... And a GM logo next to it...
This screenshot comes from Airtable's press package. If you are releasing press material, at least check it for facts first.
They will ban you from their community if you ask them to explain why they are not implementing certain features that are being requested over and over for years.
Problem is they often delete posts that have more than a slight hint of dissatisfaction in them. If they had provided that answer before, I, and others, couldn't know. The thread I am remembering had no responses from staff and multiple asking for an answer. Then it was gone. Then my account was temporarily banned.
It left a REALLY sour taste for me. That's the first time that's happened to me and I express my desire for features often.
I know this is just a single anecdote but it was a really heavy-handed approach.
edit: I actually REALLY REALLY like Airtable. That's part of why I am so "traumatized" by it. My colleagues were getting annoyed with how much I was raving about it. "We could do so much with this and it's easy to use to use too!"
I've had similar not /great/ experiences. I ended up on a conference call with one of their staff to work through some limitations. Some basic interface fixes were required, especially when it came to some Blocks implementations -- sad to say this was ~6 months ago and those changes still haven't happened.
It's a database primarily operated upon using a spreadsheet interface. You can create different representations (literally Views) of your data / rows. You can add custom logic "blocks" to rows / entries / tables that, for example, send a text message to a customer in the table.
You can arrive at Airtable as a product from first principles by basically just saying: most applications are CRUD apps atop a database with some custom callouts to external APIs. What if the database was super easy for a non-technical person to manage, we could provide data insertion / retrieval in a few standardized views, and there were integrations for the most popular 3rd party services upon record creation / editing / etc.?
You're not going to build a brand new consumer app on Airtable, but all of the backoffice and internal crap we write over and over and over again... it's a really good option for simplifying those processes and is accessible to non-developers.
Thanks for this explanation. Serious question, though - what is the core benefit over using Google Sheets + Apps Script? Is it just a better UI layer and baked-in API access, or is there an underlying structure of some sort that's superior?
Composing views and dynamically linking sheets (tables) together through information. Again, it’s a full database with a spreadsheet view / control on top, not a spreadsheet that can act like a database.
By playing around with the app, I can totally see that this supersedes Google Sheets and Apps Script by a long way. Yes, the UI layer and the API accesses. In the backend, I feel a lot of interesting things are going around - their relational engine natively supports collaboration, type support, revision history. All your mini blocks can be packaged into one big "base" which forms your workspace.
All of this can be done ... without writing a single line of code, which is impressive!
It's funny how people say things like "just a better UI layer", when to non-techies, the application IS the UI, and the only thing that matters (as long as the performance is acceptable) is features and ease of use.
More obvious third party integrations, and explained workflows and presets for common tasks non techy people doing business on the web have to deal with.
The difference is that Airtable's core data structure is a relational database whereas Google Sheets' core is a spreadsheet. It's very easy to link to records in other tables in Airtable. Google Sheets does not have the concept of records. You could hack something together, but it just works in Airtable. Airtable shines when you want to have a list X, and then for each item in X, have a list Y. X could be homes, clients, or events, and Y could be rooms, tasks, or guests. In Google Sheets, these types of relationships are awkward to represent.
OK, thank you for the explanation. As a developer, I was thinking "It's a phpmyadmin with a spreadsheet UI". Never would I have had the balls to sell something like that. But... I am $1.1B wrong!
I just wanted to give a big congratulations to Howie and team, as I'm pretty confident all founders read comments on their HN posts. ;)
I was introduced to Airtable by some of their investors. Within days I had recommended it to our customer advocacy team, who now use it as a lightweight but fully customizable CRM (without having to go "full Salesforce", we're a small team!). I've since recommended it to some of our investors for things like providing LPs with access to fund portfolio co info / etc. who initially had said things to me like, "I don't really get it."
I think the product is category-defining, and it's amazing to see Howie's ambition beyond being a $B unicorn. :) Great work all around, and it's absolutely amazing driving by your billboard on the 280 coming back from work. I'm sure it feels great, and it's something all startup founders and cos yearn for - really awesome to see a great product and team succeed!
Last year we used Airtable with 60 volunteers working concurrently on the site updating a Base to collect and organize information to help the Sonoma County fire victims. The Rails code is a very light wrapper on Airtable and if I were to do it again I would just write a Sinatra / NodeJS interface. (I didn't know JS at the time) We had about 130000 page views all backed by Airtable as the DB.
If the volunteers are using a Rails app to access the Base, who is accessing the Base directly in Airtable? Was Airtable just a convenient data backend to get the Rails app up quickly?
Sorry, they were using the base directly on airtable. The rails app was just a thin layer to hide the apikey and cache the data so we weren't hammering Airtable directly.
That makes sense. I see how Airtable's user permissions (Owner, Creator, Editor, Commenter, Read-only) allow someone to quickly create a useful CRUD app that is safer than letting people randomly edit a Google Spreadsheet. :)
Which is a huge problem with webapps that try to replace desktop software (aka. Service as a Software Substitute). You end up outsourcing maintenance/ops work at a price of vastly reduced featureset, performance and usefulness in real-life conditions.
I'm curious as to why you feel offline support is such a big deal?
Maybe my perspective is warped by living in a major US city, but I'm pretty much connected to the internet all the time. I'm pretty sure the only time I disconnect and have my computer on me is when I'm on a plane.
So much of my other work requires the access to the internet and the ability to communicate, I just don't see the need for offline mode. To put it another way, I can't see many situations where I could effectively do my job (outside of some minor tasks) without internet access, even if Airtable was available offline.
I do agree that it's a nice to have, but I just don't see it as a deal breaker.
> I'm pretty sure the only time I disconnect and have my computer on me is when I'm on a plane.
That is changing too. I remember when airline wifi was new and we used to watch netflix (now they block it of course). But now I frequently VPN in from a plane and continue working. Sometimes I get more work done because there are even fewer distractions on the plane.
I work in NYC. The most efficient form of transportation is the subway, and phone signals are not great down there. If you take a train out of the city, there are huge dead zones. There is at least an hour of my day that I am trying to be productive that I do not have good internet connections.
Same here. It’s not just the lack of offline support but the absence of an on-premises offering that kills this product for me. The great thing about Excel and Access is that there are no barriers to using them in a typical enterprise environment – no need to pay for a subscription or ask the security team to approve the use of a new cloud provider to store private data. You can just start building something and share it on your internal network, or even email.
I wouldn't think this is a product problem, but a low-hanging fruit technical problem that they can just address it if they had enough demand for this. This is also not a new problem in this space. And it has been done in the past.
I've used AT a couple times but not recently. It was useful and solid.
I have to assume the $1.1B is based on more API usage and/or their backed as a broader servive.
I think AT is useful but none the less not everyone is ready, willing and able to use such a tool. I certainly wish them well. I'm still overwhelmed by that $1.1B. Just me?
Revenue is on track for $20M in 2018 [1]. While $1.1B could be considered high by some, it's a done deal now, Airtable is a real business pulling real revenue, and their continued execution and direction will determine the rest. :)
For a SaaS founder with 20% growth, $1MM ARR and 95% gross margin, hoping to even get within spitting distance of a 2x multiple, that 50x is one hell of a thing.
Now exit and raise are very different valuations, but 50x...
The VCs know what they are doing. Growth is absolutely king because it’s where you are going not where you are.
Profits would be like dividends - literally counting against you for not knowing what better to do with the money and instead giving 20%+ away to taxes.
Consistent (aka stagnant) profit is like running a zombie startup. Very difficult to exit that.
> "Consistent (aka stagnant) profit is like running a zombie startup. Very difficult to exit that."
I think you might have inadvertently adjusted - in a good way - the valuation lens. That is, it's not about valuation per se in the more traditional sense but valuation relative to exit / the ability to exit.
That is to the VCs, that's ultimately the goal / figure that matters. And their POV takes form of the public (to so speak) valuation. Put another way, it's not about the (broader) market per se, it's about the VC market.
The product is novel and interesting - it's in a way an 'obvious' spin on an old classic. It works well.
As soon I tried it, my immediate thought was how on freaking earth, Google nor MS with their billions haven't been doing this long ago. Their products haven't changed much in a while, do they have anyone running product experiments?
That said, my company is full of languishing, unmaintained spreadsheets, like a big mess cobble of data ... I wonder how this might spread to the corporate world.
> my immediate thought was how on freaking earth, Google nor MS with their billions haven't been doing this long ago.
My biggest takeaways so far, running an early stage startup and working around and with Enterprise cos and "late stage startups" (i.e. $10B+).
- Large cos can move surprisingly slowly, especially around significant product updates and improvements.
- Large cos, to varying degrees, have a tendency to stifle innovation inadvertently via internal politics: those with the ambition to make change often don't have the lateral freedom to execute.
These are mostly a function of being a victim of success: you move slowly because you don't want to alienate an existing, paying userbase and you have politics because of policy and process that have helped you reach massive scale.
Startups (i.e. Airtable) have a massive advantage early on if they stay lean for as long as possible before nailing product-market fit and scaling, because it's easier to make "alienating changes" to your product and innovate when you have fewer customers and little revenue. Politics also haven't yet set in as a defining characteristic. To my knowledge, Airtable did a fantastic job early on at executing carefully, clearly defining their product / market and understanding their customer before scaling.
Fully agree that is essentially it - however - Google and MS are not slouches. They have the ability to have cracker jack teams work on stuff ... and maybe the ability to spurn out a different product that meets different needs and to not 'alienate' customers.
Though I wonder if a bunch of Airtable-like features in Google Sheets would be alienating. They're features that don't have to be used.
As well, large companies may see a product opening in the market, but because they make so much money, a $100m revenue product may not even be in their interest due to time/money ratio. It's somewhat like me and you doing some jobs that pay substantially less than what we think our per hour dollar amount of effort is.
I think they have managed to come up with a product that appeals to everyone while giving a lot of freedom to non tech users.
There has been a lot of attempts to make « coding product » for « non coder » but ultimately DataTable is probably the most convenient way to do it as the majority of workforce is used to excel or Google Spreadheet...
Personally I love their pricing and the concept but I found the UI super heavy and not that much intuitive .
Good luck to them. Although I don't feel a spreadsheet is the most flexible representation of a "database", it's probably useful for their audience - non-dev knowledge workers. If they could bake in GDPR compliance tools, they'd probably be able to capture some enterprise customers.
I'm not a user but I did look at their product a while back. It seems like it's more of a spreadsheet UI for data tables, which is the next step for spreadsheets IMO.
You could argue there are extensions, scripts, plugins etc. that also do this but it seems Airtables are built for it from the ground up.
I think in general we’re about at the limit if “one size fits all” UIs especially for things as personal as workflows, customer data, etc.
I’ve long thought the idea of “A Todo App” makes no sense because everyone works a little differently. That’s why apps like Pivotal Tracker are such garbage... they support too many use cases to do anything well.
The problem is if you try to make it configurable, you still have all the complexity behind the scenes. And your configuration UI recapitulates that hell.
So there is a need for someone to come in and start over with a more configurable foundation and maintain really serious software engineering discipline so that the base layer doesn’t get infected with individual business requirements (which will eventually be infinite).
I don’t envy Airtable trying to do this with a big client roster and huge scale. I think the problem would be easier solved in a smaller company with less pressure from investment timeline.
BUT if they’ve already solved the problem, or at least solved it to their satisfaction, then they will be fine and the platform can get as convoluted as they need to make their clients happy.
It’s only if there’s research remaining, core UI questions to be solved, that they’ll have a hard time competing with whomever comes to eat their lunch.
The interface is very slow to work in, and everything requires multiple steps, because if they are going to facilitate the endless possibilities their customers present, everything has to be atomized into pieces that fit every puzzle.
I have found, after working in Zapier for a couple years, that the primary value doesn’t come from ease of use or the ability of non-technical people too easily do technical things, but rather in the flexibility afforded by a layer that connects services together in any way conceivable.
My guess is that air table will become generally useful in a similar way, where maybe you need some technical people to help you set up things, but at least you can achieve most of what you need, as a small company, without having to hire a team of programmers to build it from scratch.
> a layer that connects to services together in anyway conceivable
This sounds quite much like general-purpose programming. But the tool is much higher level, apparently, at least, in some respects.
This opens (logically) endless possibilities, but watch out for well-known programming pitfalls; the Turing tarpit is already referenced as "very slow, and everything requires multiple steps".
I've been fortunate in building a consultancy that's grown pretty quickly almost entirely based on this insight (https://superwork.io). We've helped some companies basically 2x just by dumping their existing SaaS-based processes.
The days of one-size-fits-all SaaS are numbered.... most companies can find massive efficiency gains through smart deployment of tools like Airtable and Zapier with turnkey automations.
There used to be a time this wasn't feasible because the only option was to hire a development team and deal with legacy software - we don't have that problem anymore.
> The days of one-size-fits-all SaaS are numbered.... most companies can find massive efficiency gains through smart deployment of tools like Airtable and Zapier with turnkey automations.
Yeah, we're working through Zapier integration at the moment for our paperwork assistant (https://lexico.io) and I'm pleasantly surprised that there aren't as many established B2B SaaS companies doing the same thing as I thought. Self-serve automation definitely feels like the path ahead.
This is exactly the problem we have tried solving with the Frappe Framework [1] (Open Source, MIT).
The core concept in Frappe is a DocType, which is configurable metadata. Using this you can quickly build small, special purpose apps for very niche targeted use cases for their own business. You can also configure rule based permissions and add simple scripts. We have used it to build hundreds of use cases for ERPNext (Open Source, GPL) by allowing complexity to grow linearly (instead of exponentially).
This also helps keep the base layer and the "one size fits all" business layer (like say an Accounting Ledger) clean. And you don't have to worry about UI, permissions, REST API, deployment, maintenance and users get a consistent experience.
I agree with this sentiment except for your reference to Pivotal Tracker - it's the opposite of “one size fits all”.
It is so ingrained into the particular Agile Scrum way of doing things that this is actually cited as its drawback by teams wanting to be more "flexible".
met the co-founder Howie at a dinner in San Fran back in 2012 - I think the app was called Grid back then? Very passionate and driven, I remember him leaving the event early to work on the app.
I also remember my typical cynicism (held to myself of course) when he described the idea (what's this, Excel for ipads??!).. But now with a $1.1B valuation, wow - so well done to him and his team!
I believe you’re thinking of a different startup, Grid, from the YC S12 batch. Howie was a YC alum from a previous batch, but Airtable didn’t go through YC.
(I was in the YC S12 batch and am friends with Howie)
It's more databasey. Airtable is to Sheets the same way that MS Access is to Excel... for example, you can do many-to-many relationships between tables using junction tables.
The UI is much better than Google Sheets (Sheets is likely better for power users), multiple views (calendar, Kanban), attachments etc. You could also set relationships between tables, which as far as I know, you can't do in Sheets.
The number of rows allowed per table is too low for any data driven serious application - this explains why it is used by smaller companies and individuals. A non-tech person can set up a handful of tables and be up and running in minutes.
I am a fan, though I wish they allowed more rows per table.
I wonder the database structure behind airtable-like flexible data apps. I suppose they would create databases and tables on the fly to increase performance - or maybe they just use unstructured (or flexibly structured) databases like mongodb?
"First off, we're huge fans of both Meteor and Asana. I spoke with Geoff @ Meteor a couple years ago when we were first starting to build out the Airtable product and was very impressed by their approach and vision.
We've closely followed the developer blogs of both those projects (and in Meteor's case, their source code). With those learnings, we built our own realtime database engine that supports relational data (which Meteor doesn't yet support) and also some other major features like the ability to undo any user action out of order (like git revert), which is necessary to support undo in a multi-user context (because the last thing that you did may not be the last change globally if other people are concurrently making changes). Undo is a particularly challenging feature to implement in a structured relational database context, because it can't be reduced to a set of simplistic character insertion operations as is the case for a google word doc, or a spreadsheet (which is a simple 2d array of values without type constraints, foreign key relations, etc)."
As a researcher, I have been completely impressed by how Airtable has changed the game for collecting and sharing information. Howie has been personally interested and the whole team takes a strong interest in hearing the needs of an incredible diverse set of users and improving things as they grow. I have run a research program from Airtable, connected tons of different inputs and outputs using Zapier, and even planned a wedding inside it. It's not really a "one size fits all" product, it's more a portal for 'regular people' to get the value of a relational database without any coding, which ends up being extensible in the same way as say, Wordpress or Drupal (without the actual pain of Wordpress for the most part). (Edit for spelling)
I remember getting an interview invite to YC S2012 for MetaModeler (spreadsheet.io), a spreadsheet-database service. Seemed the timing was right, but the pitch was off at the time. Great seeing a Airtable execute on a similar vision.
> Tesla uses airtable to track inventory of vehicles as they leave the factory; $20 billion office-space startup WeWork is a customer, too.
I've tried airtable and used the tool to plan my trip to Japan. It's great. I heard a few iOS developers use airtable as a lightweight backend instead of firebase.
I like its idea and design. I was trying to use it as replacement of my evernote (It's probably too weird to you). Then one day, I found https://notion.so. I decided to switch to it. It's faster and have offline support. But the only missing part is notion.so doesn't have API yet.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadI think Airtable and Zapier are both great products, and recommend both to clients, but they have different use cases.
Also, I don't find Google Spreadsheet to be a compelling tool for anything mission critical.
I know at my own company we moved to Salesforce NOT because of its CRM capabilities, but because it's basically a managed database with app-building capabilities. Lots of point-and-click stuff, and lots of development tools too.
I think we're just starting to see this space heat up. The basic capabilities have existed forever at the "enterprise" level (think SAP, Oracle, Microsoft with Access and Sharepoint, etc).
But the focus on making the promise of relational databases available to everyone -- with minimal computer science expertise required -- is what's sort of new and, in my opinion, now taking off.
As might be expected this yields large numbers of performance penalties and application level work-arounds that deeply slow application development and neuter the quality of often business-critical tools.
It's my theory that the reason such platforms are allowed to exist without employees immediately breaking out in open rebellion is because the users of Salesforce and similar products are often non-technical enterprise workers whose quality bar has been welded by management and past experiences to be lower than the Mariana Trench.
I think the niche where this product can thrive -- and its a huge niche -- is all those small-to-medium size businesses that have so far been running things through a hodge podge of unconnected spreadsheets, obsolete special-purpose applications, and lots and lots of paper.
It's easy as a programmer to more or less forget that most people, when facing a task or challenge, do not think: "I wonder what the most efficient way to do this might be, and if technology could help." Instead, it's: "What methods do I already know that I could apply to this problem?"
More often than not, the answer is paper. And email. Or excel.
So this type of the-database-is-everything app has huge value. Unfortunately it won't be run entirely by engineers with 10+ years of experience in what makes for good database best practice.
It's the trade-off we have to make.
In return, we get:
- A single system that has access to all of the business' data (rather than a dozen different "systems" [if they can be called that] which do not interoperate in any way, with endless duplication and data entry. - Customization (for better and worse) - Radically simplified I.T.: Just give everyone a chromebook and be done with it. - Access to these systems anywhere in the world (cause it's web)
It's better than paying a bookkeeper to (literally) manage paper-based ledgers.
IMO - Their main competition is Excel.
Our account was closed because we kept getting strange credit card billing errors. No amount of calls or emails would resolve it. Just kept getting "we don't see errors on our end" despite us sending screenshots and trying different cards from different issuers. We literally could not pay for the service so out account was shut.
It was bizarre.
I’m pretty sure I’m gonna end up quitting my job and building a better Fieldbook next year.
AirTable is nice and they have an insane amount of funding now but their interface leaves a lot to be desired.
This screenshot comes from Airtable's press package. If you are releasing press material, at least check it for facts first.
It left a REALLY sour taste for me. That's the first time that's happened to me and I express my desire for features often.
I know this is just a single anecdote but it was a really heavy-handed approach.
edit: I actually REALLY REALLY like Airtable. That's part of why I am so "traumatized" by it. My colleagues were getting annoyed with how much I was raving about it. "We could do so much with this and it's easy to use to use too!"
It's a database primarily operated upon using a spreadsheet interface. You can create different representations (literally Views) of your data / rows. You can add custom logic "blocks" to rows / entries / tables that, for example, send a text message to a customer in the table.
You can arrive at Airtable as a product from first principles by basically just saying: most applications are CRUD apps atop a database with some custom callouts to external APIs. What if the database was super easy for a non-technical person to manage, we could provide data insertion / retrieval in a few standardized views, and there were integrations for the most popular 3rd party services upon record creation / editing / etc.?
You're not going to build a brand new consumer app on Airtable, but all of the backoffice and internal crap we write over and over and over again... it's a really good option for simplifying those processes and is accessible to non-developers.
Don't underestimate that.
All of this can be done ... without writing a single line of code, which is impressive!
What's old is new; what's new is old.
I was introduced to Airtable by some of their investors. Within days I had recommended it to our customer advocacy team, who now use it as a lightweight but fully customizable CRM (without having to go "full Salesforce", we're a small team!). I've since recommended it to some of our investors for things like providing LPs with access to fund portfolio co info / etc. who initially had said things to me like, "I don't really get it."
I think the product is category-defining, and it's amazing to see Howie's ambition beyond being a $B unicorn. :) Great work all around, and it's absolutely amazing driving by your billboard on the 280 coming back from work. I'm sure it feels great, and it's something all startup founders and cos yearn for - really awesome to see a great product and team succeed!
I should send them an email. I'm sure a good chunk of that investment will go towards building out their sales team.
Specifically: https://github.com/chimera/sonomafireinfo.org/blob/gh-pages/...
Also working on a MTurk interface for Airtable (A Big WIP): https://github.com/workmachine/workmachine
I haven't used AT, but I have a pretty urgent new need to use it, and need to quickly ramp up on how I can build against it.
I just created an account today.
I'm surprised this isn't a non starter for more people/companies.
Maybe my perspective is warped by living in a major US city, but I'm pretty much connected to the internet all the time. I'm pretty sure the only time I disconnect and have my computer on me is when I'm on a plane.
So much of my other work requires the access to the internet and the ability to communicate, I just don't see the need for offline mode. To put it another way, I can't see many situations where I could effectively do my job (outside of some minor tasks) without internet access, even if Airtable was available offline.
I do agree that it's a nice to have, but I just don't see it as a deal breaker.
That is changing too. I remember when airline wifi was new and we used to watch netflix (now they block it of course). But now I frequently VPN in from a plane and continue working. Sometimes I get more work done because there are even fewer distractions on the plane.
I have to assume the $1.1B is based on more API usage and/or their backed as a broader servive.
I think AT is useful but none the less not everyone is ready, willing and able to use such a tool. I certainly wish them well. I'm still overwhelmed by that $1.1B. Just me?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2018/11/15/move-s...
Now exit and raise are very different valuations, but 50x...
The VCs know what they are doing. Growth is absolutely king because it’s where you are going not where you are.
Profits would be like dividends - literally counting against you for not knowing what better to do with the money and instead giving 20%+ away to taxes.
Consistent (aka stagnant) profit is like running a zombie startup. Very difficult to exit that.
I think you might have inadvertently adjusted - in a good way - the valuation lens. That is, it's not about valuation per se in the more traditional sense but valuation relative to exit / the ability to exit.
That is to the VCs, that's ultimately the goal / figure that matters. And their POV takes form of the public (to so speak) valuation. Put another way, it's not about the (broader) market per se, it's about the VC market.
That is, now $1.1B kinda makes sense.
As soon I tried it, my immediate thought was how on freaking earth, Google nor MS with their billions haven't been doing this long ago. Their products haven't changed much in a while, do they have anyone running product experiments?
That said, my company is full of languishing, unmaintained spreadsheets, like a big mess cobble of data ... I wonder how this might spread to the corporate world.
My biggest takeaways so far, running an early stage startup and working around and with Enterprise cos and "late stage startups" (i.e. $10B+).
- Large cos can move surprisingly slowly, especially around significant product updates and improvements.
- Large cos, to varying degrees, have a tendency to stifle innovation inadvertently via internal politics: those with the ambition to make change often don't have the lateral freedom to execute.
These are mostly a function of being a victim of success: you move slowly because you don't want to alienate an existing, paying userbase and you have politics because of policy and process that have helped you reach massive scale.
Startups (i.e. Airtable) have a massive advantage early on if they stay lean for as long as possible before nailing product-market fit and scaling, because it's easier to make "alienating changes" to your product and innovate when you have fewer customers and little revenue. Politics also haven't yet set in as a defining characteristic. To my knowledge, Airtable did a fantastic job early on at executing carefully, clearly defining their product / market and understanding their customer before scaling.
Though I wonder if a bunch of Airtable-like features in Google Sheets would be alienating. They're features that don't have to be used.
I think they have managed to come up with a product that appeals to everyone while giving a lot of freedom to non tech users.
There has been a lot of attempts to make « coding product » for « non coder » but ultimately DataTable is probably the most convenient way to do it as the majority of workforce is used to excel or Google Spreadheet...
Personally I love their pricing and the concept but I found the UI super heavy and not that much intuitive .
You could argue there are extensions, scripts, plugins etc. that also do this but it seems Airtables are built for it from the ground up.
I’ve long thought the idea of “A Todo App” makes no sense because everyone works a little differently. That’s why apps like Pivotal Tracker are such garbage... they support too many use cases to do anything well.
The problem is if you try to make it configurable, you still have all the complexity behind the scenes. And your configuration UI recapitulates that hell.
So there is a need for someone to come in and start over with a more configurable foundation and maintain really serious software engineering discipline so that the base layer doesn’t get infected with individual business requirements (which will eventually be infinite).
I don’t envy Airtable trying to do this with a big client roster and huge scale. I think the problem would be easier solved in a smaller company with less pressure from investment timeline.
BUT if they’ve already solved the problem, or at least solved it to their satisfaction, then they will be fine and the platform can get as convoluted as they need to make their clients happy.
It’s only if there’s research remaining, core UI questions to be solved, that they’ll have a hard time competing with whomever comes to eat their lunch.
The interface is very slow to work in, and everything requires multiple steps, because if they are going to facilitate the endless possibilities their customers present, everything has to be atomized into pieces that fit every puzzle.
I have found, after working in Zapier for a couple years, that the primary value doesn’t come from ease of use or the ability of non-technical people too easily do technical things, but rather in the flexibility afforded by a layer that connects services together in any way conceivable.
My guess is that air table will become generally useful in a similar way, where maybe you need some technical people to help you set up things, but at least you can achieve most of what you need, as a small company, without having to hire a team of programmers to build it from scratch.
This sounds quite much like general-purpose programming. But the tool is much higher level, apparently, at least, in some respects.
This opens (logically) endless possibilities, but watch out for well-known programming pitfalls; the Turing tarpit is already referenced as "very slow, and everything requires multiple steps".
The days of one-size-fits-all SaaS are numbered.... most companies can find massive efficiency gains through smart deployment of tools like Airtable and Zapier with turnkey automations.
There used to be a time this wasn't feasible because the only option was to hire a development team and deal with legacy software - we don't have that problem anymore.
Ha, brave language!
Feel free to contact me directly, I've got some business for you.
Yeah, we're working through Zapier integration at the moment for our paperwork assistant (https://lexico.io) and I'm pleasantly surprised that there aren't as many established B2B SaaS companies doing the same thing as I thought. Self-serve automation definitely feels like the path ahead.
Still don't quite get Airtable though.
The core concept in Frappe is a DocType, which is configurable metadata. Using this you can quickly build small, special purpose apps for very niche targeted use cases for their own business. You can also configure rule based permissions and add simple scripts. We have used it to build hundreds of use cases for ERPNext (Open Source, GPL) by allowing complexity to grow linearly (instead of exponentially).
This also helps keep the base layer and the "one size fits all" business layer (like say an Accounting Ledger) clean. And you don't have to worry about UI, permissions, REST API, deployment, maintenance and users get a consistent experience.
[1] https://frappe.io/frappe | https://github.com/frappe/frappe
It is so ingrained into the particular Agile Scrum way of doing things that this is actually cited as its drawback by teams wanting to be more "flexible".
Are you getting it confused with Jira?
I also remember my typical cynicism (held to myself of course) when he described the idea (what's this, Excel for ipads??!).. But now with a $1.1B valuation, wow - so well done to him and his team!
(I was in the YC S12 batch and am friends with Howie)
I would love it if they supported white labeling embeds of their products into other apps. I'm guessing there is a huge need for this.
In what use cases does airtable outshine google sheets?
The number of rows allowed per table is too low for any data driven serious application - this explains why it is used by smaller companies and individuals. A non-tech person can set up a handful of tables and be up and running in minutes.
I am a fan, though I wish they allowed more rows per table.
I agree. Like the product, but being constrained by a rather limited number of records even in their expensive pro plans makes it a non-starter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374468
Could be good solution to simplify managing multiple sites through API calls.
Basically creating a spreadsheet with external calls. And a sexy ass website.
I think there are a TON of answers that you could fill in the blank with.
> Tesla uses airtable to track inventory of vehicles as they leave the factory; $20 billion office-space startup WeWork is a customer, too.
I've tried airtable and used the tool to plan my trip to Japan. It's great. I heard a few iOS developers use airtable as a lightweight backend instead of firebase.
I like its idea and design. I was trying to use it as replacement of my evernote (It's probably too weird to you). Then one day, I found https://notion.so. I decided to switch to it. It's faster and have offline support. But the only missing part is notion.so doesn't have API yet.