12 ms·

Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation

404 points by kbyatnal 8y ago

r_singh 8y ago
Revenue numbers aren't mentioned in the article. Does anyone know about the multiple (valuation/revenue) they've raised at?
- tschellenbach 8y ago
  I'm guessing 20-25x revenue. Probably around 40m in ARR?
  - orliesaurus 8y ago
    You're telling me AirTable makes more money than Zapier? wow
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      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.
      - orliesaurus 8y ago
        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
        toomuchtodo 8y ago
        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.
        orliesaurus 8y ago
        Thanks for sharing!
        toomuchtodo 8y ago
        Happy to help, a rising tide lifts all boats.
- rebelidealist 8y ago
  The Forbes article mention that they are on track to be around $20M https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2018/11/15/move-slow-and-make-things-airtables-howie-liu-built-a-1b-software-giant-emphasizing-substance-over-speed/#74fbefaa1f20 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2018/11/15/move-s...
josephpmay 8y ago
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.
- nickelcitymario 8y ago
  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.
  - omnimus 8y ago
    I think nowdays they also compete with Notion. Their features start to overlap a lot.
    - porker 8y ago
      Coda is another one to keep an eye on https://coda.io/welcome https://coda.io/welcome
      - wetpaste 8y ago
        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.
  - 8y ago
LeonM 8y ago
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.
eatonphil 8y ago
Big fan of Airtable. Been using them for a month now trying to find a hosted/paid alternative to using both Google Drive and Trello.
JungleGymSam 8y ago
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.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  Sounds annoying. I'm assuming you weren't satisfied with the answer (even if implied) of "it's not our priority right now"?
  - JungleGymSam 8y ago
    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!"
- photoGrant 8y ago
  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.
nkg 8y ago
I understand it's some kind of killer app, but I still don't get it.
- keithwhor 8y ago
  The tl;dr for a more technically-minded person: 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.
  - trimbo 8y ago
    It's FileMaker pretty much?
    - bsder 8y ago
      Plus a sales and applications team that apparently doesn't suck. Don't underestimate that.
  - mdorazio 8y ago
    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?
    - keithwhor 8y ago
keithwhor 8y ago
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!
- austhrow743 8y ago
  Sales person here. I use it as my own lightweight crm and it works well. I should send them an email. I'm sure a good chunk of that investment will go towards building out their sales team.
abhiyerra 8y ago
For a lot of simple apps I write now I just use Airtable as the database with some caching to avoid rate limiting. It works great even at scale.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  I susoect that's where the growth is / will be. Care to share a repo or two on anything you've done using AT? tia
  - abhiyerra 8y ago
    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. Specifically: https://github.com/chimera/sonomafireinfo.org/blob/gh-pages/FireResponse/config/initializers/airtable.rb 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 https://github.com/workmachine/workmachine
    - cpeterso 8y ago
      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?
      - abhiyerra 8y ago
        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.
        cpeterso 8y ago
hammerbrostime 8y ago
Weird valuation. Ok app, had to write it off because of lack of offline support. I'm surprised this isn't a non starter for more people/companies.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bootlooped 8y ago
  What kind of offline support are you looking for in a cloud application? Most cloud services don't work offline at all.
  - djtriptych 8y ago
    A lot of the big players do, to wit Google’s office suite.
    - hammerbrostime 8y ago
      Yes, Google has superb offline support for their suite of productivity apps
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    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.
- superfrank 8y ago
  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.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
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?
- keithwhor 8y ago
  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. :) [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2018/11/15/move-slow-and-make-things-airtables-howie-liu-built-a-1b-software-giant-emphasizing-substance-over-speed/#78a83b9d1f20 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2018/11/15/move-s...
  - zaroth 8y ago
    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...
    - trhway 8y ago
      Not to offend. Just compare the AT growth. In SV the growth is what valued, with revenue and profit being the distant 2nd and 42nd.
      - zaroth 8y ago
        Zero offense taken. 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.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
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.
- i14g 8y ago
  Good point, seems the valuation might be a little high.
- keithwhor 8y ago
  > 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.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    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.
asien 8y ago
That’s really impressive in such short time... 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 .
kradroy 8y ago
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.
- bduerst 8y ago
  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.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
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.
- gonational 8y ago
  Very similar to Zapier. 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.
  - nine_k 8y ago
    > 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".
yannis7 8y ago
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!
- glaugh 8y ago
  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)
rgrieselhuber 8y ago
Howie is a great CEO and super helpful in the startup community. Congratulations on this well-deserved milestone. 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.
ryanjodonnell 8y ago
Welcome to nubtown
- richsinn 8y ago
  lol
wheelzr 8y ago
Ok, so it's SmartSheet with API integrations. Could be good solution to simplify managing multiple sites through API calls. Basically creating a spreadsheet with external calls. And a sexy ass website.
- a13n 8y ago
  Could be a good solution to ___________. I think there are a TON of answers that you could fill in the blank with.
pololee 8y ago
This is the information I found https://www.businessinsider.com/airtable-review-guide-app-walkthrough-spreadsheets-tables-blocks-2018-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/airtable-review-guide-app-wa... > 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 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.
hayksaakian 8y ago
I guess I just don't get it. In what use cases does airtable outshine google sheets?
- markdoubleyou 8y ago
  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.
- justaguyhere 8y ago
  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.
  - thirdsun 8y ago
    > 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.
gary__ 8y ago
Their Show HN in 2014, some interesting tidbits about the design. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373914
egeozcan 8y ago
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?
- shardinator 8y ago
  Maybe something similar to a triple store.
- gary__ 8y ago
  "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)." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374468
ptd 8y ago
I use airtable everyday. Awesome tool for education.
laurex 8y ago
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)
tzm 8y ago
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.
laserson 8y ago
So many people use Excel/Google Sheets as a database rather than a spreadsheet, except you don't get any of the advantages of a database. It's astounding to me that there hasn't really been a webapp that's essentially just a nice collaborative frontend for a SQL database, which is how I use Airtable in my lab. I'm very happy to see they're on a sustainable path, and I hope they continue to support the use case of just-a-database. Congrats!
jamesmcintyre 8y ago
People keep calling out how this isn't a new solution/idea (i.e. MS Access, FileMaker, SmartSheet, Google Sheets + Scripts, Knack) and those people I hope understand that Airtable's success has everything to do with their execution of this idea not that the idea is somehow groundbreaking. I've used many of those ^ products and I can tell you they are no where near Airtable's level of UX. The Airtable team has obviously taken a lot of time and energy to really nail the design and user experience instead of making another "just good enough". I think this is also a good example of how desperate users will resort to using subpar products or cobbling-together numerous subpar solutions if the problem is painful enough. Having used MS Access a decade ago I can tell you it was out of desperation and it never really solved the problem- it sort of got you ~75% there. One last thing I'll mention is that when you take on something as flexible as Airtable you end up dealing with an much larger dimension of possible edge-cases and more importantly you end up challenging designers to craft constraints on the users very thoughtfully so that you're not limiting them but also you're not overwhelming them with too much complexity. In other words- solutions in this space succeed precisely because they figure out how to walk that fine line not because the idea itself is earth-shattering.
- titanomachy 8y ago
  Great execution involves new solutions and ideas, though. After seeing this post, I tried creating an airtable for a project I'm working on (finding a new condo to buy) and one thing that really stood out to me was that after filling the table with some data, airtable automatically generated a documented API that I could use to upload data to my table. Slick execution, yes, but also a novel idea as far as I know. Granted, I'm not super familiar with all the other solutions.
ianmcgowan 8y ago
There's definitely a market for something like this, the question is how big. I used DabbleDB back in the day, and it was great, but perhaps a little early to the party. The competition to Airtable is not just SalesForce and Sharepoint, but also all the janky access db's and excel-macro laden informal systems that get built at big companies. It's not hard to be better than that. And if an Airtable app grows to the point of needing a rewrite, then congrats-you've just got past MVP...
andrewstuart 8y ago
I use AirTable. Impressive product. It feels to me like a successful implementation of Lotus Notes for the web.
rawoke083600 8y ago
Well done ! Looks amazing
itronitron 8y ago
Shouldn't Tableau already own this space seeing as they are the swiss army knife for whittling relational data?
Kaveren 8y ago
I use Airtable for my job, mostly as a project management application. This may be an unusual use case, but I find myself limited at many times. I feel like Airtable is very unresponsive. On the community forums, they seem to communicate rarely, and not implement very simple functionality for long periods of time. Very good features that would be highly beneficial and should take a weekend go months without even a reply. It's death by a thousand cuts for me. Sorts in Kanban view don't automatically resort when you add cards, so you have to manually resort every time. No rich text formatting on cards. Copying tables doesn't copy the field type. There's so many minor things I'd like changed. None of the problems by themselves are deal-breakers by themselves, and I will continue to use Airtable (Trello, for instance, does not offer the field customization I love about Airtable). But I can't help but think execution can be so much better. It's almost like nobody at Airtable pays attention to the design of features. Everything is so limited. Blocks are an incredibly useful idea, but in practice uncustomizable and not something I find helpful. It's a good product, but not a great product. I've been considering working on my own product in this line. At least if nobody else uses it, I'll be able to.
- hadsed 8y ago
  There is one lurking competitor to Airtable that no one knows: Notion. Except Notion is far more capable than Airtable. You can do all these table joins across pages but in Notion everything is a page whereas in Airtable it's just a form. That is the ultimate flexibility which makes it exceptionally well suited for any kind planning effort. And it's a great canvas for creative projects. It's amazing to see that there's a billion dollar company building something comparatively so... bad. Plus Notion has some of the best customer service around. Half the company are there for support!
  - ksec 8y ago
    I don't understand why there aren't more people using Notion. It is like a better looking BaseCamp + Airtable in one.
    - thirdsun 8y ago
tejasmanohar 8y ago
Anyone know what their revenue multiplier is? I was pretty surprised when I saw the $1B number.
austinhutch 8y ago
A month or so back I tried experimenting with Airtable based on glowing reviews on HN and elsewhere. I really hated the on-boarding process which forced me into a template (contact list, schedule, todo) when I just wanted the equivalent of a blank google sheet. The concept of structured data collection in a user interface that anyone can ramp up on is very compelling but I didn't even pass go.
harrybr 8y ago
It's worth knowing that Airtable uses some nasty dark patterns. Airtable has a share button much like Google Docs. If you're on the free tier of Airtable, and you use the share button, you receive $ credits on your account when a user accepts the invite into you "workspace". So it lulls you into a pattern of sharing widely. When you go premium, use of that "share" button has the opposite effect. Instead of receiving credits, you are automatically, silently billed for each person that joins your workspace. There is no warning in the UI that this will happen. It's completely invisible [1]. In my first month of being a premium Airtable user, they billed me over $2000 USD onto my credit card - without any warning whatsover. This is because about 10 people in my team accepted shares. They also do some other weird stuff with accounts, e.g. if you create a premium account, it's only premium for one workspace (a workspace is effectively a folder of databases with its own permissions). If you create another workspace, it's set to the "free" tier and you have to pay all over again. Team subscriptions with multiple workspaces get very expensive, because they multiply up in some way. The pricing is model very opaque. It pains me when start-ups are successful using cruddy growth hacking tricks like this because it tells then next generation of start-ups "This is how you do it". [1] https://twitter.com/harrybr/status/1030195061550710784 https://twitter.com/harrybr/status/1030195061550710784
- Aissen 8y ago
  How was your specific issue resolved in the end ? Were you refunded ?
  - trystero 8y ago
    Another team that I know had the same problem, they were refunded apparently without problem. But this strikes me as shady... Are they hoping a significant number of clients will not ask for a refund?
    - harrybr 8y ago
      That’s how this sort of play works. It’s about capturing a percentage who don’t notice - plus those who do notice but see their time as too valuable to justify spending the time to request a refund. I believe It’s unlikely that anyone would ever welcome a totally unexpected charge to their credit card.
jayonsoftware 8y ago
Looks like https://www.filemaker.com/ https://www.filemaker.com/ is looking at competing. I with Microsft does the same with access
mitchill 8y ago
Honestly Airtable is the future, I'm very excited to watch it grow. 90% of software I create for enterprise companies is just spreadsheets on the cloud.
bePoliteAlways 8y ago
Very Nice interface. Takes things to the next level. However seeing the word workflow I assumed that there will be visual graphical representation of "my task" for a given project. It will show dependencies between the tasks. I assumed it will be show me the different steps visually with a nice diagram and I can drill into things to see subtask if required etc. (edited to make it more clearer)
psteinweber 8y ago
Airtable is great - I use it every day. It's perfect for anything in-between document and spreadsheet; when you have to deal with database-like entries that are awkward to handle with a word processor or spreadsheet. I was hoping that Dropbox might acquire Airtable one day, and integrates it into Dropbox Paper. That would put them ahead of Quip, Coda and the like in an instant (for my use case).

404 points by kbyatnal 8y ago

Revenue numbers aren't mentioned in the article. Does anyone know about the multiple (valuation/revenue) they've raised at?

tschellenbach 8y ago
I'm guessing 20-25x revenue. Probably around 40m in ARR?
- orliesaurus 8y ago
  You're telling me AirTable makes more money than Zapier? wow
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    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.
    - orliesaurus 8y ago
      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
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        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.
        orliesaurus 8y ago
        Thanks for sharing!
        toomuchtodo 8y ago
        Happy to help, a rising tide lifts all boats.
rebelidealist 8y ago
The Forbes article mention that they are on track to be around $20M https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2018/11/15/move-slow-and-make-things-airtables-howie-liu-built-a-1b-software-giant-emphasizing-substance-over-speed/#74fbefaa1f20 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2018/11/15/move-s...

josephpmay 8y ago

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.

nickelcitymario 8y ago
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.
- omnimus 8y ago
  I think nowdays they also compete with Notion. Their features start to overlap a lot.
  - porker 8y ago
    Coda is another one to keep an eye on https://coda.io/welcome https://coda.io/welcome
    - wetpaste 8y ago
      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.
- 8y ago

LeonM 8y ago

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.

eatonphil 8y ago

Big fan of Airtable. Been using them for a month now trying to find a hosted/paid alternative to using both Google Drive and Trello.

JungleGymSam 8y ago

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.

ryanwaggoner 8y ago
Sounds annoying. I'm assuming you weren't satisfied with the answer (even if implied) of "it's not our priority right now"?
- JungleGymSam 8y ago
  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!"
photoGrant 8y ago
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.

nkg 8y ago

I understand it's some kind of killer app, but I still don't get it.

keithwhor 8y ago
The tl;dr for a more technically-minded person: 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.
- trimbo 8y ago
  It's FileMaker pretty much?
  - bsder 8y ago
    Plus a sales and applications team that apparently doesn't suck. Don't underestimate that.
- mdorazio 8y ago
  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?
  - keithwhor 8y ago

keithwhor 8y ago

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!

austhrow743 8y ago
Sales person here. I use it as my own lightweight crm and it works well. I should send them an email. I'm sure a good chunk of that investment will go towards building out their sales team.

abhiyerra 8y ago

For a lot of simple apps I write now I just use Airtable as the database with some caching to avoid rate limiting. It works great even at scale.

chiefalchemist 8y ago
I susoect that's where the growth is / will be. Care to share a repo or two on anything you've done using AT? tia
- abhiyerra 8y ago
  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. Specifically: https://github.com/chimera/sonomafireinfo.org/blob/gh-pages/FireResponse/config/initializers/airtable.rb 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 https://github.com/workmachine/workmachine
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    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?
    - abhiyerra 8y ago
      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.
      - cpeterso 8y ago

hammerbrostime 8y ago

Weird valuation. Ok app, had to write it off because of lack of offline support. I'm surprised this isn't a non starter for more people/companies.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bootlooped 8y ago
What kind of offline support are you looking for in a cloud application? Most cloud services don't work offline at all.
- djtriptych 8y ago
  A lot of the big players do, to wit Google’s office suite.
  - hammerbrostime 8y ago
    Yes, Google has superb offline support for their suite of productivity apps
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  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.
superfrank 8y ago
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.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

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?

keithwhor 8y ago
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. :) [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2018/11/15/move-slow-and-make-things-airtables-howie-liu-built-a-1b-software-giant-emphasizing-substance-over-speed/#78a83b9d1f20 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2018/11/15/move-s...
- zaroth 8y ago
  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...
  - trhway 8y ago
    Not to offend. Just compare the AT growth. In SV the growth is what valued, with revenue and profit being the distant 2nd and 42nd.
    - zaroth 8y ago
      Zero offense taken. 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.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

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.

i14g 8y ago
Good point, seems the valuation might be a little high.
keithwhor 8y ago
> 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.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  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.

asien 8y ago

That’s really impressive in such short time... 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 .

kradroy 8y ago

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.

bduerst 8y ago
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.

erikpukinskis 8y ago

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.

gonational 8y ago
Very similar to Zapier. 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.
- nine_k 8y ago
  > 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".

yannis7 8y ago

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!

glaugh 8y ago
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)

rgrieselhuber 8y ago

Howie is a great CEO and super helpful in the startup community. Congratulations on this well-deserved milestone. 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.

ryanjodonnell 8y ago

Welcome to nubtown

richsinn 8y ago
lol

wheelzr 8y ago

Ok, so it's SmartSheet with API integrations. Could be good solution to simplify managing multiple sites through API calls. Basically creating a spreadsheet with external calls. And a sexy ass website.

a13n 8y ago
Could be a good solution to ___________. I think there are a TON of answers that you could fill in the blank with.

pololee 8y ago

This is the information I found https://www.businessinsider.com/airtable-review-guide-app-walkthrough-spreadsheets-tables-blocks-2018-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/airtable-review-guide-app-wa... > 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 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.

hayksaakian 8y ago

I guess I just don't get it. In what use cases does airtable outshine google sheets?

markdoubleyou 8y ago
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.
justaguyhere 8y ago
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.
- thirdsun 8y ago
  > 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.

gary__ 8y ago

Their Show HN in 2014, some interesting tidbits about the design. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373914

egeozcan 8y ago

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?

shardinator 8y ago
Maybe something similar to a triple store.
gary__ 8y ago
"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)." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374468

ptd 8y ago

I use airtable everyday. Awesome tool for education.

laurex 8y ago

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)

tzm 8y ago

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.

laserson 8y ago

So many people use Excel/Google Sheets as a database rather than a spreadsheet, except you don't get any of the advantages of a database. It's astounding to me that there hasn't really been a webapp that's essentially just a nice collaborative frontend for a SQL database, which is how I use Airtable in my lab. I'm very happy to see they're on a sustainable path, and I hope they continue to support the use case of just-a-database. Congrats!

jamesmcintyre 8y ago

People keep calling out how this isn't a new solution/idea (i.e. MS Access, FileMaker, SmartSheet, Google Sheets + Scripts, Knack) and those people I hope understand that Airtable's success has everything to do with their execution of this idea not that the idea is somehow groundbreaking. I've used many of those ^ products and I can tell you they are no where near Airtable's level of UX. The Airtable team has obviously taken a lot of time and energy to really nail the design and user experience instead of making another "just good enough". I think this is also a good example of how desperate users will resort to using subpar products or cobbling-together numerous subpar solutions if the problem is painful enough. Having used MS Access a decade ago I can tell you it was out of desperation and it never really solved the problem- it sort of got you ~75% there. One last thing I'll mention is that when you take on something as flexible as Airtable you end up dealing with an much larger dimension of possible edge-cases and more importantly you end up challenging designers to craft constraints on the users very thoughtfully so that you're not limiting them but also you're not overwhelming them with too much complexity. In other words- solutions in this space succeed precisely because they figure out how to walk that fine line not because the idea itself is earth-shattering.

titanomachy 8y ago
Great execution involves new solutions and ideas, though. After seeing this post, I tried creating an airtable for a project I'm working on (finding a new condo to buy) and one thing that really stood out to me was that after filling the table with some data, airtable automatically generated a documented API that I could use to upload data to my table. Slick execution, yes, but also a novel idea as far as I know. Granted, I'm not super familiar with all the other solutions.

ianmcgowan 8y ago

There's definitely a market for something like this, the question is how big. I used DabbleDB back in the day, and it was great, but perhaps a little early to the party. The competition to Airtable is not just SalesForce and Sharepoint, but also all the janky access db's and excel-macro laden informal systems that get built at big companies. It's not hard to be better than that. And if an Airtable app grows to the point of needing a rewrite, then congrats-you've just got past MVP...

andrewstuart 8y ago

I use AirTable. Impressive product. It feels to me like a successful implementation of Lotus Notes for the web.

rawoke083600 8y ago

Well done ! Looks amazing

itronitron 8y ago

Shouldn't Tableau already own this space seeing as they are the swiss army knife for whittling relational data?

Kaveren 8y ago

I use Airtable for my job, mostly as a project management application. This may be an unusual use case, but I find myself limited at many times. I feel like Airtable is very unresponsive. On the community forums, they seem to communicate rarely, and not implement very simple functionality for long periods of time. Very good features that would be highly beneficial and should take a weekend go months without even a reply. It's death by a thousand cuts for me. Sorts in Kanban view don't automatically resort when you add cards, so you have to manually resort every time. No rich text formatting on cards. Copying tables doesn't copy the field type. There's so many minor things I'd like changed. None of the problems by themselves are deal-breakers by themselves, and I will continue to use Airtable (Trello, for instance, does not offer the field customization I love about Airtable). But I can't help but think execution can be so much better. It's almost like nobody at Airtable pays attention to the design of features. Everything is so limited. Blocks are an incredibly useful idea, but in practice uncustomizable and not something I find helpful. It's a good product, but not a great product. I've been considering working on my own product in this line. At least if nobody else uses it, I'll be able to.

hadsed 8y ago
There is one lurking competitor to Airtable that no one knows: Notion. Except Notion is far more capable than Airtable. You can do all these table joins across pages but in Notion everything is a page whereas in Airtable it's just a form. That is the ultimate flexibility which makes it exceptionally well suited for any kind planning effort. And it's a great canvas for creative projects. It's amazing to see that there's a billion dollar company building something comparatively so... bad. Plus Notion has some of the best customer service around. Half the company are there for support!
- ksec 8y ago
  I don't understand why there aren't more people using Notion. It is like a better looking BaseCamp + Airtable in one.
  - thirdsun 8y ago

tejasmanohar 8y ago

Anyone know what their revenue multiplier is? I was pretty surprised when I saw the $1B number.

austinhutch 8y ago

A month or so back I tried experimenting with Airtable based on glowing reviews on HN and elsewhere. I really hated the on-boarding process which forced me into a template (contact list, schedule, todo) when I just wanted the equivalent of a blank google sheet. The concept of structured data collection in a user interface that anyone can ramp up on is very compelling but I didn't even pass go.

harrybr 8y ago

It's worth knowing that Airtable uses some nasty dark patterns. Airtable has a share button much like Google Docs. If you're on the free tier of Airtable, and you use the share button, you receive $ credits on your account when a user accepts the invite into you "workspace". So it lulls you into a pattern of sharing widely. When you go premium, use of that "share" button has the opposite effect. Instead of receiving credits, you are automatically, silently billed for each person that joins your workspace. There is no warning in the UI that this will happen. It's completely invisible [1]. In my first month of being a premium Airtable user, they billed me over $2000 USD onto my credit card - without any warning whatsover. This is because about 10 people in my team accepted shares. They also do some other weird stuff with accounts, e.g. if you create a premium account, it's only premium for one workspace (a workspace is effectively a folder of databases with its own permissions). If you create another workspace, it's set to the "free" tier and you have to pay all over again. Team subscriptions with multiple workspaces get very expensive, because they multiply up in some way. The pricing is model very opaque. It pains me when start-ups are successful using cruddy growth hacking tricks like this because it tells then next generation of start-ups "This is how you do it". [1] https://twitter.com/harrybr/status/1030195061550710784 https://twitter.com/harrybr/status/1030195061550710784

Aissen 8y ago
How was your specific issue resolved in the end ? Were you refunded ?
- trystero 8y ago
  Another team that I know had the same problem, they were refunded apparently without problem. But this strikes me as shady... Are they hoping a significant number of clients will not ask for a refund?
  - harrybr 8y ago
    That’s how this sort of play works. It’s about capturing a percentage who don’t notice - plus those who do notice but see their time as too valuable to justify spending the time to request a refund. I believe It’s unlikely that anyone would ever welcome a totally unexpected charge to their credit card.

jayonsoftware 8y ago

Looks like https://www.filemaker.com/ https://www.filemaker.com/ is looking at competing. I with Microsft does the same with access

mitchill 8y ago

Honestly Airtable is the future, I'm very excited to watch it grow. 90% of software I create for enterprise companies is just spreadsheets on the cloud.

bePoliteAlways 8y ago

Very Nice interface. Takes things to the next level. However seeing the word workflow I assumed that there will be visual graphical representation of "my task" for a given project. It will show dependencies between the tasks. I assumed it will be show me the different steps visually with a nice diagram and I can drill into things to see subtask if required etc. (edited to make it more clearer)

psteinweber 8y ago

Airtable is great - I use it every day. It's perfect for anything in-between document and spreadsheet; when you have to deal with database-like entries that are awkward to handle with a word processor or spreadsheet. I was hoping that Dropbox might acquire Airtable one day, and integrates it into Dropbox Paper. That would put them ahead of Quip, Coda and the like in an instant (for my use case).