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Founder of Airtable here--we did look at Lotus Notes as an interesting historical precedent, though of course we've also invented from scratch in many cases, and being web-based and collaborative by default is a huge wedge for us in terms of adoption virality. I admit I'm too young to have used Lotus Notes but we did buy an old Lotus Notes guidebook, as well as looked up old Infoworld and other magazine articles (Google Books indexes those magazines!) about Notes, dBase, and other products in the genre : ).

Also this page links to some in-depth case studies about how it's used: https://airtable.com?try=videoproduction

Cofounder of Airtable here. Video production is a common use case for us! Here's some relevant community-generated templates: https://airtable.com/universe/category/creative-production

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for all the feedback! These are all things that we're considering : ). In particular #1 is actually in private beta right now!

Thanks for the kind words! We love Zapier and use it extensively ourselves : ). Here's some example workflows Zapier wrote about: https://zapier.com/blog/airtable-automations/ https://zapier.com/blog/how-zapier-uses-airtable/

Fwiw Airtable has often been compared with DabbleDB :).

https://mobile.twitter.com/patrickc/status/51568968982347366...

Founder of Airtable here--Airtable is actually a relational database with foreign key relationships (the technicalities of which are abstracted away from the user). It's designed specifically to be somewhere between the accessibility of a spreadsheet and the customizability/structure of a Filemaker/Access/Force.com, all with a much more modern UX and collaboration experience. Airtable.com/product or Airtable.com/templates offers some more context!

To be honest, I haven't spent a lot of time using Fieldbook or Ragic. That being said, we spend an insane amount of time/effort making sure that Airtable delivers a first-class product experience. In fact, the first couple years of Airtable's existence involved myself and my cofounder Andrew--who previously PMed the redesign of Google Maps--building countless prototype variants to get the UX right, doing a literal hundred user studies with people from all sorts of industries/roles to understand how the full range of how they used spreadsheets, databases, and other products, and researching the prior art by talking to the creators of past products in the space (i.e. MS Access, Excel, Coghead, Podio, Dabbledb, etc).

We think Airtable is to spreadsheets/Access/Filemaker what Slack is to email (and fwiw, Slack itself uses Airtable http://bit.ly/2m58l4U ).

Specifically, our product offers the following (which to my knowledge Ragic/Fieldbook do not): x IMO a much more intuitive design x Native Android, iPhone, & iPad apps, as well as an electron desktop app ( airtable.com/downloads ) x Ability to create multiple views on the same table, each of which preserves its own filter/sort/visibility settings Multiple view types, including grid, grouped records, calendar, kanban, public forms, and gallery: http://bit.ly/2ky3WLB . x Inline collaboration i.e. @mentions in text fields, record-level comments x Many more useful field types x Visual revision history and snapshots x More integrations, such as with Zapier (see Zapier's writeups http://bit.ly/2lfGr79 http://bit.ly/2l3dZqG ), Slack, native calendars via an iCal feed, and Dropbox/Box/Gdrive/Evernote. x Greater capacity and smoother performance. x Full realtime sync for all changes, including schema modifications. x Lots of little things, like the ability to perform date calculations relative to today (i.e. a filtered view or formula that shows all projects due within 7 days from today and is automatically updated as time goes by), private share-links and embeds to give people access to a read-only view of Airtable without making them sign up for an account, inline document previews (e.g. view a text-copyable inline version of a .DOCX file)

Over 30,000 organizations already use Airtable--this includes tech cos like Airbnb, Box, Wework, and Tesla; non-tech cos like Atlantic Records and Penguin Randomhouse; educational institutions like CMU, Rice, and Stanford. We're growing our team and continuously releasing new enhancements to improve the product experience for all users.

In addition to native mobile apps, we do have a desktop app. It does require internet connectivity though (similar to Slack's app, it's built on electron). Airtable.com/downloads

Cofounder of Airtable here, I hear you and that's on the roadmap :).

For starters, 1) File attachments 2) Better mobile UI (Airtable's database records can be displayed as cards on touch devices, whereas a traditional spreadsheet is always a 2d grid). 3) Interactive fields like checkboxes, dropdowns, etc. 4) Ability to expand records into a form detail view for better readability of long text, etc.

I've amended the guide to more strongly recommend the reader consult with a startup attorney, even if they plan on filing the paperwork themselves to reduce costs. FWIW, I actually had stronger wording in an earlier draft of my guide, but somehow it got lost in subsequent revisions :(.

Under the section for "When should I use a lawyer", I added the below (I also introduced "Finding a lawyer" as the first step of the Delaware corp checklist tab): Though the formation documents are sometimes similar, mistakes can be made easily and are often costly (or impossible) to later remedy. I strongly recommend consulting with a startup attorney to provide guidance throughout the process and review important documents before you finalize them, even if you wish to file most of the incorporation paperwork yourself to reduce legal costs. Many startup lawyers will even do the basic incorporation for free of labor charge (passing through only the filing fees directly to you) in the interest of gaining your business as a long-term client down the road. Other lawyers will also/alternatively allow you to defer payment for legal work (up to a certain maximum, sometimes as high as the $10k range) until you've raised funding.

See here for a horror story involving DIY incorporation: http://bit.ly/incorporatinghorrorstory And the corresponding HN thread from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2399139 (I had to use a bit.ly link=>web archive because it seems the original link is now dead).

Author here, for the sake of constructive criticism, would love to hear why you don't find it useful?

The disclaimer is there because, while I tried my best to make sure all info in the guide is accurate, I don't think it's fair or necessary for me to take on legal liability if someone makes (or claims to make) a mistake by using this (free) guide. I certainly hope readers do not interpret this guide as a definitive and comprehensive substitute for proper legal counsel and research of their own--rather, it contains information which is designed to act as a supplement to those things.

In other words, it will hopefully help folks avoid false negatives in legal steps (i.e. forgot to file an 83b within 30 days or register with their city's business department), expose them to lesser-known alternatives that their own lawyers may not have told them about (using FF preferred stock to provide a small measure of founder liquidity down the road without skewing 409A valuations), and understand why it's necessary to do certain things (like adopt bylaws, file a Form D, etc).

The scope of the guide is strongly biased towards U.S. startups incorporating as a Delaware corp (a common approach, even for companies not based in Delaware itself).

You can expand the long text cells by clicking the expansion arrows that appear in the top right corner of the cell. I would also highly recommend using the full-screen version rather than embed (by clicking "View Larger Version"): https://airtable.com/shrOQ3Gf4Hs3Gvvvc

I would also add that, while I'm certainly biased, there is benefit to making this a "cloneable" database that you can then use as a personal checklist, add notes, further attachments, etc which you wouldn't be able to do with a simple blog post, for instance.

Thanks : )

A bit late to the punch, but we also let you copy and paste from most other spreadsheet programs directly into Airtable

Hi, author of the post here. Apologies if the format of the article was confusing or misleading. I will note that this article was posted under InfoWorld's "New Tech Forum", which is specifically for authors from industry to write guest posts.

Here's an example of another article from the New Tech Forum: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2607260/database/how-databa...

Here's some visual illustrations of why spreadsheets don't work well for organizational use cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zttu1JNgRck

Joel Spolsky also has a great essay about this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html

"What was I talking about? Oh yeah... most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations."

Hi, I'm a cofounder of Airtable. We have an alpha version of a Zapier integration, and also an API to directly push your order data into Airtable. The benefit of using Airtable over Google Sheets is that you get true database features without losing the speed and flexibility of a spreadsheet interface: foreign key linking, rich field types, multiple views, better collaboration and mobile access, etc.

Awesome! We're actually working on Slack and IFTTT integrations at this very moment. If you shoot me an email at howie[at]airtable.com we might be able to set you up with early access!

What kind of pricing would you expect? What size datasets are you using? You can create an unlimited number of databases for free, as long as each one is < 1200 records. We're also interested in exploring other pricing plans, especially for developers (our current plans are designed around business users)

By definition, the auto-generated APIs are specific to your Airtable Bases (eg, databases or mini-apps), so you need to first sign up for Airtable and then go to Airtable.com/api to choose a Base for which to view documentation. Sorry if this wasn't clear!

The bet also serves as an interesting hedge for anyone whose net worth is already heavily correlated with the success of the tech sector (which certainly includes VCs). 100k is not enough to really matter to a GP at a 500MM fund, especially if it goes to charity either way. But there are plenty of smaller VCs or even startup founders (including myself) who would do that deal not because they're skeptical of tech's fundamentals, but as a way to counteract exposure to an overall macro/tech downfall.

It's on our short term roadmap along with a lot of other major improvements planned for the mobile app. Totally agree the experience would be greatly improved if it handled reopening the app better!

Hi, yes--we definitely want to get a dev blog up and start talking about some of this stuff!

Re: conflicts, in the case of a scalar value, last in wins, and the system (if you consider the server and each client as nodes in a distributed system) is eventually consistent (i.e. everyone will eventually see the exact same state). In that particular case, we show the other user's profile picture and highlight the cell to flag that change so you realize somebody else is editing at the same time as you.

Thanks!

Re: data sync, see this comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374364

Re: UI, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374446

Thanks! Yes, it's definitely on the roadmap. We will support certain types of integrations/automations natively, and also plug in to Zapier/IFTTT for others

Thanks for the feedback. We'll find a way to make the foreign table creation at 1:59 more intuitive.

Re: the auto cross out, one thing you can do is add a filter that filters by "Completed?" = unchecked, which will make each row automatically fade out when you check (you can create a different view to show the Completed books)

Thanks! Will do. Been using Zapier personally for some misc personal workflow (receipts=>evernote=>email to our accountant). Love it!