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$8600 MRR business on Airtable
- upen946 4y agoThe backend is written in Node.js, TypeScript, PostgresQL, GraphQL and hosted on Heroku. The frontend is React.js, TypeScript and Airtable's Blocks SDK.
- tluyben2 4y agoNot sure how that is different from a 8600 mrr business running on postgres; seems putting airtable in the title is just for clicks? It would be very interesting to read about someone building a $$$$ mrr business on just airtable; no programming. Not that it is not impressive getting up a 8600 mrr business, so congrats.
- wyem 4y agoYou haven't read the article! He has made a no-code tool to import data from anywhere into Airtable! The backend is written in Node.js, TypeScript, PostgresQL, GraphQL and hosted on Heroku. The frontend is React.js, TypeScript and Airtable's Blocks SDK.
- karamanolev 4y agoI also got tricked, but it seems that "on Airtable" doesn't mean it's built on top of Airtable and is a "no-code business". It means built to interface with Airtable, as in "a tool for Airtable", for other no-code users. This is a very-much-code business.
- upen946 4y agoSorry. Not meant to trick. I mean to say 'around Airtable' niche. In anycase, its impressive.
- fxtentacle 4y agoApparently, you didn't read the article? The product, DataFetcher, imports data into Airtable because the customers are no-code users.
- upen946 4y agoThankyou. Yeah, thats what is means.
- jacquesm 4y agoIt depends on what your definition of 'on' is.
- upen946 4y agoOP here. Probably, my bad too - I meant 'around Airtable niche'
- buro9 4y agoFor those also blocked by the newly registered domain: https://archive.ph/nsO2H https://archive.ph/nsO2H
- upen946 4y agoOh what does this mean? HN blocks newly registered domains? Or Some people's firewall blocks newly registered websites?
- buro9 4y agoSome people's firewalls. It prevents a lot of crypto scams and malware. i.e. https://nextdns.io/ https://nextdns.io/ gives the option: Block domains registered less than 30 days ago. Those domains are known to be favored by threat actors to launch malicious campaigns Equivalents exist on corp firewalls, etc. Something like 70% of malware and phishing points to domains registered in the last 30 days. So it is an easy way to mitigate the risk of the majority of attacks.
- mywacaday 4y agoMy corporate firewall also blocks archive.ph :-) URL: https://archive.ph/nsO2H https://archive.ph/nsO2H URL Categories: Anonymizing Utilities, Internet Services Reputation: Minimal Risk
- upen946 4y agoOh never know this one. I know that emails are blocked/pushed to spam if the domain is new. But good to know this. In anycase, founderbeats.com is legitimate
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- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI'm on a corporate network and am getting security errors, which likely means the corporate firewall has blocked it.
- tluyben2 4y agoWhat are the costs for airtable specifically? I checked it out a few times but even for toy projects it seems to cost a kidney if you have a tiny bit of traffic.
- ehnto 4y agoDepends on your business, but you could probably save a lot of money with caching, which some web services offer pretty easily.
- andycloke 4y agoFounder here. Airtable have a pretty generous free plan. In January, they changed it to let you install extensions (like Data Fetcher) on the free plan. It does get more expension if you have lots of collaborators ($24/ month/ user), but if you can use a tool like Softr to build user-facing portals without adding all your end-users as Airtable collaborators.
- rozenmd 4y agoThe actual business website explains what it does better: https://datafetcher.com/ https://datafetcher.com/
- ghoshbishakh 4y agoAfter the initial publicity on HN and Reddit, what did the founders do periodically for marketing? Specially for a developer or tech savvy targetted product like this.
- andycloke 4y agoFounder here! Content marketing - look at common customer use cases and turn them into blog posts and YouTube videos. Check out our blog, https://datafetcher.com/blog https://datafetcher.com/blog, and YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnED2FBe_jzntrCiB759y9w/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnED2FBe_jzntrCiB759y9w/vid..., for examples! I've now hired 2 freelancers to produce these, so I can focus on product/ support.
- upen946 4y agoThanks Andy for jumping in.
- nathan_f77 4y agoI'd be interested in the IPO alerts newsletter he mentioned at the beginning. I was recently thinking about building an IPO prediction website and newsletter, where users could vote on the probability that startups will have an IPO during a given year. (e.g. Q1 2023, Q2, Q3) It could be interesting to integrate a prediction market like PredictIt [1] (although I heard they got into some trouble recently.) I also started to worry about getting in trouble with the SEC, in case people start to win bets by using insider information. Anyway, does anyone have any predictions about the next IPO window? E.g. When do you think Stripe might have an IPO? [1] https://www.predictit.org https://www.predictit.org
- andycloke 4y agoFounder here - one of the reasons I didn't do the IPO idea was I found this company doing a great job with their newsletter: https://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPO-Center/News https://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPO-Center/News
- pdmfz 4y agoI built an upcoming IPOs app (https://ipowatch.app/ https://ipowatch.app/). I monetized by creating mobile apps and showing banner ads there, but they didn't make much.
- whoevercares 4y agoThis looks like AWS AppFlow https://aws.amazon.com/appflow/ https://aws.amazon.com/appflow/
- upen946 4y agoHaha. Appflow needs some good tech knowledge though with an understanding of AWS ecosystem. But kind of yes, syncing/moving data between Apps.
- quickthrower2 4y agoThere is a lot of money in "thing AWS does" ... "for mortals"
- whoevercares 4y agowhat if I tell you that AppFlow is supposed to be easy to use haha
- andycloke 4y agoFounder here! Happy to answer any questions people have. I'm also building in public here: https://twitter.com/clokehead https://twitter.com/clokehead A couple of people have been confused by 'on Airtable' in the title. Data Fetcher (https://datafetcher.com/ https://datafetcher.com/) is an extension built (with code) on Airtable's marketplace in the same way you'd build on the App/ Play Store. It's not a no-code app built using Airtable. MRR is up to $9400 since I did this interview, and should hit $10k in the next month.
- upen946 4y agoThanks Andy for clarifying. You are moving way too fast :)
- rdm_blackhole 4y agoThis URL does not work: https://datafetcher.com/blog/blog/screenshots-from-urls-in-airtable https://datafetcher.com/blog/blog/screenshots-from-urls-in-a... I thought you should know.
- andycloke 4y agoThank you! Fixed
- CSSer 4y agoHey there, still not working me for me (404).
- saaspirant 4y agohttps://datafetcher.com/blog/screenshots-from-urls-in-airtable https://datafetcher.com/blog/screenshots-from-urls-in-airtab...
- CSSer 4y agoThat did it!
- emptysea 4y agoI’m curious if you worry about Airtable incorporating your add on into their core offering? I feel that’s always my worry about building on top of someone else’s platform.
- onion2k 4y agoEvery business has external threats that you have no control over. Is it really sensible to give up "$8600/month * how long Airtable take to implement the feature" due to that concern, or should you move fast and execute to maximize the time you're making that money?
- andycloke 4y ago(Founder here) That's definitely the biggest risk to the business (other than competition). Airtable seem committed to being a platform that third-party developers can build businesses on, in the same way Shopify are. So I think (hope) they'd acquire me, rather than just cloning it, to maintain their reputation as a platform. But they definitely could do this and it's pretty scary! For now, my strategy is to try and grow to $350k+ ARR and diversify the profits into index funds etc. I also have a couple of other micro-saas ideas that aren't platform-dependent that I'll launch in the next couple of years.
- mritchie712 4y agoyou can probably worry about this less. I had the same worry when building seekwell.io and it turned out to not matter at all. Google did eventually launch some things you could use instead of us, but they sucked and by the time they launched it we were way ahead in features. They also had a ton of restrictions that made sense for Google (e.g. mostly only supporting their own cloud products as a source), but didn't make sense for most customers. Not a single one of our customers has said "we're using the built in Google features" as a reason for cancelling. Airtable is likely better then Google is this respect (will listen more closely to their customers), but probably not much. They are still a big company and you can do better. ps - charge more!
- 4y ago
- callmekatootie 4y agoI have always wondered how does one go about restricting user actions based on which pricing plan they have selected? Do they have to code it manually or is there a SaaS / library that does the job?
- andycloke 4y agoI coded it manually as the business logic is so Data Fetcher specific I don't think a library would help much. This blog post does an amazing job of explaining the approach you need: https://blog.checklyhq.com/building-a-multi-tenant-saas-data-model/ https://blog.checklyhq.com/building-a-multi-tenant-saas-data...
- tnolet 4y agoCool to see that post pop up (I'm the author). Glad it helped!
- callmekatootie 4y agoExcellent write up. Do you recommend any books or blogs that talk technical stuff equivalent to this, directed towards the Saas domain in general?
- z9znz 4y agoHe had/did the perfect combination: - right place at the right time (almost certainly a factor here) - actually building and releasing something - promoting it, letting the world know about him/it These success stories are really nice, but it's important to recognize that it usually takes all three of these key elements to be successful. Obviously if you don't do anything, you cannot get success. But if you do something, and the timing or market is wrong, you may not get much or any success. And if you do something but never make an effort to let the world know, then you may get a little growth but not real success. We can't control the market timing so much, mainly because we can't accurately predict the future. With some research, maybe we can improve on this, but it's still no guarantee. So, the best policy is to just stay in forward motion. Built a thing, promote it, and repeat. Maybe with 5 things in current operation, one of them catches.
- andycloke 4y agoFounder here - that's a great analysis. The way I manufactured right place/ right time was using this framework: https://twitter.com/clokehead/status/1340949414081392640?s=20&t=JRL3dROhPwvZnnES0rNyCg https://twitter.com/clokehead/status/1340949414081392640?s=2...
- z9znz 4y agoAwesome. Thanks for the advice!
- auspex 4y agoI got similar advice early in my career. You don’t have to create the wave. Find an existing wave grab a surf board and figure out a way to ride it.
- rchaud 4y agoThis is why we have a glut of indistinguishable "50-hour video courses" on every micro-topic imaginable. Everyone's trying to sell a shovel.
- ssharp 4y agoI'm curious how much time customer support takes for products around this price and how much impacts the viability of a business this size. At $8600 MRR * 12 ~= $103k. Obviously some level of expenses here but let's assume very high margins. $8600 / $40 plan = 215 customers. Given all that, how much time does it take to service 215 customers' support needs? Assuming profit would be in the $80-90k range, that's multiples lower than what a developer could make in a job, so is this a full-time work load or is it pretty minimal and could operate as a side-gig? It sounds like the plan here is to continue to grow well beyond the current state but just curious about this particular moment in the business and how sustainable it is if it doesn't grow.
- Handytinge 4y ago> Assuming profit would be in the $80-90k range, that's multiples lower than what a developer could make in a job HN really lives in a bubble. $90k USD per year is more than double the median income in the highest earning countries in the world [0]. There are very few places in the world you could not live extremely comfortably on that income. Even for software engineering specifically, there are only two countries where the median is > $90k USD. [1] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income 1. https://codesubmit.io/blog/software-engineer-salary-by-country/amp/ https://codesubmit.io/blog/software-engineer-salary-by-count...
- andycloke 4y agoSupport is roughly 10 hours per week and we're now up to 270 customers. The rest of the time is spent on product, reviewing marketing content and occasionaly sales. I've been full-time since $5k MRR as trying to juggle all this with a full time job was miserably + slowed down growth. $80-90k isn't actually that much less than a developer salary (in U.K., not U.S.), but it's an interesting question what I'd do if it didn't grow any more. I'd probably put it into maintenance-mode, and start another micro-saas, as I love the freedom of working where/when/how I want. I'm hopeful of hitting $150k ARR by end of year though, and $250k next year.
- rexreed 4y ago
- noasaservice 4y agoReminder: Just because this person did it, does not mean his actions are reproducible. If it was reproducible, then every VC would be doing this.
- mkl 4y agoSo nobody should try anything that anyone else has had success with? An awful lot of successful companies wouldn't exist if people followed your thinking. These aren't the kind of numbers VCs like, anyway.
- CrazyStat 4y ago> If it was reproducible, then every VC would be doing this. No they wouldn't. $8600 MRR is a lifestyle business, not a startup that can potentially 100x. To borrow an old Google saying, VCs have forgotten how to count that low. There's a lot of space for bootstrapped independent entrepreneurs at that level because VCs just don't care about a business that small. It's pocket change. The VCs will be focusing on finding the next platform (AirTable), not add-ons for existing platforms (this).
- rchaud 4y agoThe first half of your sentence, while correct, is negated by the second half. VCs don't care about anything that isn't going to deliver a sure-fire IPO.
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoMaybe they should. Find 1,000 half decent devs. Fund them for 1 year at 50K or so, with promise of 60% of company. Sprinkle over decent marketeers / designer / product mgrs. Cost is now 50M USD + change. Get to 10K MRR and its 120K pa, maybe 20-30K profit. Does it matter which ones are just paying back their investment over two years, and the 1/1000 that might be a unicorn? I just don't think VCs are playing the odds.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoIt seems like there is definitely an advantage to getting apps on these "stores" early in their lifecycle, though I never even hear about their existence until much later. Does anyone know a way to learn about new app stores/marketplaces early on, besides obsessing over tech news constantly?
- tortilla 4y agoYou could periodically skim the forums for pain points... I did this when Airtable first got off the ground. https://community.airtable.com https://community.airtable.com I didn't do anything with the info as I didn't have extra time to devote to a new product. I'm sure other unicorn startups will have communities around them or subreddits.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoYeah, once you know Airtable exists and has an app store. The question is how to find out about new platforms like this in the first place though.
- andycloke 4y agoFounder here. I use this site to find new platforms/ trends! https://explodingtopics.com/ https://explodingtopics.com/ then build them into tools using my framework: https://twitter.com/clokehead/status/1340949414081392640?s=20&t=sIV4k8xnQBg7kY2kM0PwSw https://twitter.com/clokehead/status/1340949414081392640?s=2...
- ElevenLathe 4y agoIs explodingtopics.com another project of yours?
- andycloke 4y agoNo! https://marker.medium.com/how-my-show-hn-project-got-acquired-after-6-months-954f81ca6a18 https://marker.medium.com/how-my-show-hn-project-got-acquire...
- T3RMINATED 4y ago
- RektBoy 4y agoNever heard about Airtable, why would anybody use it since there's Excel?
- PainfullyNormal 4y agoFor the obvious reason: there are things Airtable can do that excel can't. For example, I'm using airtable to track my job applications. I save the job ad, my cover letter and the resume I used as a pdf and attach them to the row in a column designed for attaching files. You can't do that in excel (at least not that I've seen).
- jen729w 4y agoBecause Excel isn't a database and Airtable is?
- coffee 4y agoThanks for sharing Andy! > Today, 30%-40% of my customers come through our YouTube videos or blog posts Could you talk about how you get the other 60% to 70% of customers? Thanks!