The Product Review: Airtable
Understanding how a company offering supercharged spreadsheets took off
I remember when my friend joined Airtable 3 years ago. I didn’t get it. I remember hearing about Airtable from investor friends. I didn’t get it. I had colleagues leaving their jobs in 2020 to join Airtable. I still didn’t get it.
Then I saw the announcement earlier this year about the $185M raise, $2.6B valuation, and most importantly from a long-term perspective, the low-code feature set and platform capabilities. Earlier comparisons to spreadsheets left me deceptively confused about the opportunity. I had heard about low-code and no-code. Now as I saw use cases and passionate tweets about problems Airtable solved, I started to get it.
What is special about the Airtable product?
1. Simple and specific value proposition
...for an incredibly complex product. Marketing is a competitive advantage. It is even more powerful when comprehension matters but competitors can’t communicate well. Good marketing in enterprise software is a superpower; in consumer it is table-stakes.
In a single glance, I understand that this is a general workspace that is configurable (see: templates) that is meant to help knowledge workers figure things out (see: hero image). The company still has work to do in messaging what it can be used for, but that challenge is persistent for most ‘platforms’ that can do almost anything. The answer is not to pivot or narrow the feature set; it could be: figure out your message.
Notice limited navigation options and homepage copy with a singular focus on getting a user to sign up because for all the concise language, it is betting on comprehension-through-usage (not comprehension-through-words).
2. Sets a user up for becoming paid without force
I love that I am “selected” for something. Airtable doesn’t make me choose a plan upfront. Maybe it knows my @gmail.com signup means it’s best for me to be a free/personal (“Creator”) user than a paid enterprise user. It doesn’t have a domain to associate me with but if it did know I had a @company-domain.com email address, it would put me into that onboarding flow and workspace. This gets me to be in the mindset of being “on a plan” which helps down-funnel in getting free users to convert to paid — without feeling pressured to upgrade right away. It also flips my mindset as I read the features I have access to feeling lucky rather than bored by a feature list. Notice how they’re starting me down comprehension-through-usage post-signup.
3. Collects enough information to onboard usefully
Airtable knows that if it knows what I am here to do, it can give me a much better product experience. Some product designers and product managers would shy away from inserting this step, or argue that any product should be good enough to ‘just work’. But that’s a naive, overgeneralized perspective. Particularly for a complex product like Airtable that the company must make simple to use, asking a single question - and doing so in a fun way with emojis and the right-hand illustration - likely creates enough useful upfront information to tailor onboarding and future sales.
4. Inelegantly rips off the bandaid into product
The next step was a bit overwhelming. Product demo video. An alert about verifying my email address. And a fully-featured but a bit overwhelming new UI in background.
5. Opinionated — and right — product execution
At this point, and after the video, I felt connected enough to the product and began to recall things about the company’s evolution that I wanted to step back:
Airtable decided to remain a horizontal tool (not follow conventional wisdom to be a vertical SaaS and land/expand): For years, VCs and other experts in the collaboration space would advise companies to pick a specific vertical (e.g. sales) and build the product just right for them and expand. Many horizontal attempts at collaboration had come and gone. This bucked the conventional wisdom. Only now with the success of horizontal collaboration tools like Airtable and Notion (and Slack and Zoom before) is it becoming apparent you can indeed build a broad, robust product and grow into the market.
Airtable is structured but flexible (not structured and rigid): the demo video shows how you can take data and represent it any way you want: grids, calendars, Gantt charts, Kanban boards (like Trello), galleries. You name it. The demo video mentions something like “collaborate without compromising.” It hits on a truth with any collaboration product i.e. the pain to get your teammates to agree to use the same product (e.g. Asana or Jira). Unstructured but flexible has been tried but never gave the guardrails needed to be useful. Structured but inflexible made collaboration difficult. They found the right balance of structured and flexible.
Airtable inspires you with an overwhelming set of use cases and features while making it easy enough to take the first step: After I watched the demo video, I felt like there was tons I could do even if I wasn’t ready yet. Then I clicked yes to “Start Guide” and got dropped in the Applicant Tracker template. The setup guide took me through 5+ steps to make it a useful workspace. I didn’t have the time to read or digest it but it made me confident I could find useful features later. The goal is not to get someone to do all these steps but to know they can. Even though I didn’t need an Applicant Tracker and had said I wanted to use it for product development, I did find having access to a full workspace useful. It is sort of like someone in an Intro to Computer Science class handing you the code to run “Hello World” and letting you debug and tinker with it to learn how to do it. That’s a much better approach than asking you to write the program from scratch.
Airtable uses templates and data import to eliminate friction. Most products try to eliminate friction by removing a step from the sign up flow. But removing friction is not just about a digital user interface and getting a 5% bump in user activation conversion by polishing a product; it is about eliminating anything that makes your customer’s life harder than it needs to be. Templates do the work of setting up a workspace for you. Data import eliminates the work of recreating content in a new workspace, which is enough to dissuade anyone from trying. It also reminds a user of the systems to be moving away from (e.g. Google Sheets).
I think I get it now. I still do find the product a bit complex; through further iteration, I can imagine Airtable will find a way to simplify without sacrificing robustness. It is easy to make a product less complex and less powerful. Simple and powerful is hard.
For example, when I tried to use the “Product roadmap” template, I couldn’t figure out how to copy the template as blank so I could create my own roadmap. I also noticed how much rich information was in the “Releases” and “Employees” tab but wondered about how much work would have to go into inputting that data to make it useful. Additionally, when I clicked ‘Upgrade’, I was confused because I am on the Creator Plan but that is not an option on the pricing page. I wondered now if I would be charged for being on the Plus plan since it appeared like I was defaulted into that.
When I reflect on the approach taken to this page - which prioritizes comprehensiveness over brevity - it seems emblematic of the product approach. The same approach that also uses a lot of space linking to Resources and Guides. The approach is to put all the information out there. Even if it is a lot, Airtable puts it all out there for customers to consume and parse through. It may not be for everyone. It may not be for those who are not committed to the process or willing to deal with the complexity. But the product has created many super-fans. This is what happens when you take an opinionated approach and are OK overwhelming some people in order to answer all the questions that your biggest fans and most passionate users may have.
Ultimately the product is not for me right now. I don’t have enough robust personal or work use cases that justify the switching costs and learning process in the immediate term. This may be an opportunity. If Airtable could, as it moves through the adoption curve from innovators and early adopters to the early majority and late majority, evolve to make it easier to get started while trading off some of the feature-forward implementation, they’re more likely to be able to activate the next wave of users.
Airtable will grow dramatically as a robust horizontal workspace with increasing remote work, digitally savvy workforces, and information that is natively gathered and stored digitally
Now I get it. It is a powerful tool. I may not want to use it today. But many people have workflows that are better served by using this than not using it if willing to make the upfront investment. Growing social proof online and IRL, more coworkers who are championing the product to their collaborators, more community members who are publishing templates and making each other’s work easier, more investments in activating users now that a lot of the foundational product exist will all fuel Airtable to the next phases of adoption. This makes it more a question of quite how large the company will grow rather than an existential product risk at this point.