Airtable raises $100M at a $1.1B valuation

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 .

I'm surprised this isn't a non starter for more people/companies.

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).

> 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.

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?

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!

In what use cases does airtable outshine google sheets?

It feels to me like a successful implementation of Lotus Notes for the web.

Could be good solution to simplify managing multiple sites through API calls.

Basically creating a spreadsheet with external calls. And a sexy ass website.

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.

This screenshot comes from Airtable's press package. If you are releasing press material, at least check it for facts first.