Airtable Lays Off 27% of Firm, Shifts Focus to Big Clients | Hacker News Reader

Airtable Lays Off 27% of Firm, Shifts Focus to Big Clients

forbes.com

93 pointskpw9447 comments

We've been using Leaptable.us (https://leaptable.us/) which is much more simple (it's in beta) however's execution engine is open-source and it's support for AI Agents is the very promising.

We've found it hard to Justify Airtable within our organization. Practically 90% of it's functionality overlaps with Notion databases which users already have and is ingrained within our org deeply.

Leaptable GitHub sign in fails. User verification fails after email login. Unable to use; seems more Alpha than Beta.

Your post has the largest item ID. You are amazing.

Good tool that fills the huge gap left when Microsoft Access failed to make the jump to the online world. Kudos to everyone who grabbed a slice of that free money pie, but it was never realistic that every app would have hundreds of millions of users.

> We had the capital and said, ‘let's hyper-scale; let's recruit as many smart people as we can and just throw them into the business and see what they can do,’

Inner workings of the mysterious "leadership"!

Practically definitional ZIRP.

Wow. So visionary.

What did they ship from this? Interfaces? Is that it?

It would be fascinating to hear more about what this plan looked like internally.

I'm sure there are other things it does, but pragmatically every time I've seen Airtable used in business it's used in a way which a simple excel spreadsheet shared on one drive, Dropbox, box, etc. Would do.

Honest question, what does it do that excel does not?

I guess an advantage is that it's a competitor to a single Microsoft vertical? So is Notion though and a few others. Competition is healthy.

Forms, email automation or page designer are just some example. My wife works for a niche RE agency and she created a whole CRM from scratch with Airtable. This was impossible with Excel.

This is a great example! Thank you!!

You have the wrong paradigm. Airtable doesn’t improve on excel - it makes databases accessible to non-technical people. It’s the new MS Access: simple GUI for doing Joins, lookups, foreign keys without knowing that’s what you’re doing.

This is true, in theory. However when we attempted to deploy it this way in our org, the average non-technical user was simply unable to grok the concepts of relational databases and we ended up with a complete mess that needed to be manually groomed on a regular basis.

This resonates. Still, even simple Excel spreadsheets shared on OneDrive often end up a mess and need grooming by someone with some common sense.

I'm guessing I'm not the only one who's seen the folder with:

- Master Job List v1.xlsx

- Master Job List v1 (1).xlsx

- Master Job List v2-new.xlsx

- Master Job List v2-new updated.xlsx

- Master Job List v2-new 2023.xlsx

And then you open it up and there are 7 different fonts, sizes, duplicate sheets with conflicting information, circular refrerences, macros that won't load, some VBScript from 2004 that no longer runs... and this is the document that the COO uses daily to run the entire company.

Everyone knows the correct filename scheme is:

- Master Job List v1

- Master Job List v1 final

- Master Job List v1 final final

- Master Job List v2 final

- Master Job List v2 final, short

- Master Job List v1 absolute final

The v2 ones are forward looking, the 3rd one down is the one the COO uses to run the company, and the last one is the one they use to do the taxes

I built a CMS backed by it to build sites that are mostly data, but have a few text blocks and images, so since all the data entry was in Airtable anyway, moving the rest of the content there made sense and now lots of small dev tasks can be done with zero dev time (change gets made in Airtable, product manager triggers the CI build, CI build pulls everything from Airtable)

Thats kind of a crazy valuation to employee count ratio. 237 = 27% of company means they have ~850 or so employees for a company with an 11.7b evaluation. Seems off.

Dumb question - are you saying the employee count sounds too low given the valuation or too high?

That's their Dec 2021 valuation right? That was a valuation bubble. See the 30-80% fall of most companies since then.

Agreed. Airtable is only projected to have $150M in sale in 2023. Even $1B is probably optimistic at this point.

Asana founded in 2008 that went public in recent years is only worth $4B in market cap with over half a billion in sale.

They are trying to battle Microsofts Power Platform...and getting trounced.

Interesting. Seems like the enterprise is the opposite direction of what AirTable needs to go in. Good bye Air Table.

I tried to build some apps based on AirTable and found it lacking. Zero idea what use the enterprise is going to find for this. Microsoft has that cornered with Power Platform. Despite it being a rickity piece of shit it smokes AirTable.

I had a bad experience with Airtable because I couldn't purchase the subscription. It turned out Airtable doesn't support cards issued in India. It's surprising that they neglected the whole country.

> It's surprising that they neglected the whole country.

It's not. The number of Indian customers willing to pay for Airtable would be tiny.

Almost Airtable-ish Open Source and more economical alternative - https://baserow.io (no affiliation).

Baserow is cool. We evaluated it within our company a few months ago and eventually settled for Nocodb (https://nocodb.com/) - easy to run, more mature.

Leaptable is another Open Source framework like Airtable I saw recently with support for AI Agents. https://github.com/peterwnjenga/leaptable

I'm curious why AirTable needs to shed people in order to focus on becoming a pubic company, but Stripe can continue to grow and remain private.

Is this just the CEO signalling that he wants his exit?

I think you missed some layoffs news about Stripe.

I can’t speak for AirTable but in general you need to look at the cap table. A complex cap table and a likely down round could make it virtually impossible to negotiate another round. By series F there’s an awful lot of fingers in the pie.

I was wondering when this was going to happen. Airtable is a cool technology, but seemingly overhyped at their price point.

I feel similarly. It’s a cool tech but priced so it can’t take off.

They should focus on reducing resource need so they can cut price.

By focusing on big enterprises it starts a spiral because those companies can afford airtable, but they can also afford data engineering teams that don’t need airtable.

Imagine if google docs was $3000/user or something.

Founder of Grist here (https://www.getgrist.com/):

- focus on small teams and individuals

- open source (with community contributing!)

- can be run self-managed

- portable data (lossless export in SQLite format)

- full of great features (granular access rules, formulas with python, conditional formatting, webhooks, etc etc)

If it's little-known, it's because we spend too much time building, not enough time selling.

There's just way too much competition for Airtable:

- Retool with Databases

- Tooljet with Databses

- Budibase

- Baserow

- Grist (getgrist.com)

- Bubble

- The various Google Sheets Builders

- Probably 20+ other apps

Does anyone have a great self hosted competitor to Airtable with a comparative mobile app?

Baserow

Grist doesn't have a mobile app, but has pretty decent UI on mobile browsers.

Don’t forget plain old Excel, which every office worker knows how to use.

Not to mention the original microsoft access database.

No one I know now uses Access, even those who used it previously. That being said, give the average office worker Excel and if they know their way around the software, they will find ways to do extremely cool things with it. I've seen a bunch of cool shit built on excel, including a full blown POS system.

Budibase has its own database and can connect to other data databases.

On top of that: It's open source/supports self hosting Supports JS Design/interfaces are much more flexible

I think this is what happens to most companies, and what I also noticed with my projects too. The "big clients" usually make up for most of the revenue, while they require the least support and have the fewest complaints. The most vocal customers are the "cheaper" ones. It also makes marketing easier (spending $500 to get one customer paying $1000/month instead of 1000 customers paying $1/month).

For an open source alternative try something like Budibase or Baserow.

$150M and slowing growth isn’t even a unicorn. 1.4B raised, founded in 2013

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