I'm sure Notion DBs ate their lunch, but Coda had the best document database integration I've seen, but they got bought by Superhuman.
This entire market space is going to be messy for a while.
I was very surprised to see Airtable sold for reportedly less than what they raised and had assumed AI tailwinds (easy database GUI) would benefit them well. Presumably, this was insufficient to overcome enterprise revenue headwinds and a chilly SaaS financing market.
I do wonder how this might have played differently had their product and API been better engineered as a database for developers through faster read/write and data scale... unnecessary in PLG-focused pre-AI world, but an interesting avenue for agentic growth nonetheless.
Tough break for the Airtable team. It was a great product and I have recommended it often to small business owners over the years.
What was terrible about it?