The founder of eTax and Airtable explains why their two companies needed different MVP strategies. eTax could launch fast and iterate, but Airtable had to be robust from day one because users were trusting it with critical business data and replacing established tools like Excel.
I'll contrast it also with my prior experience. My first company, eTax, was around for literally a year from start to finish, from when we founded it and started working on it to when we sold it to Salesforce as an acquisition. And I think we probably only spent 10 to 12 weeks building the product full-time before we launched it publicly and got a TechCrunch article and did the whole thing. We were in NYC. And so just very, very different approaches between the first company the latter. So I think I've kind of, you know, at least with one data point each, experienced both approaches. And I will say, like, you know, first of all, emotionally, they're very different, you know, kind of journeys, right? In the first case, it just felt like this constant furious sprint to try to get to the next milestone. And, you know, we didn't really know what was, you know, what the future would hold. Like, there was never really any clear or certainty around what the next 5 years look like. But the only thing that mattered was getting some form of forward progress. It was almost like we were these simple vector machines that were just pivoting around and trying to find what is the right direction to go to descend the gradient. And then with Airtable, we had just a lot more patience, maybe even arguably to a fault where obviously time is precious. I mean, we all would rather get to where we want to be in terms of impact, success, kind of product growth sooner rather than later, right? All else equal. And so I think we almost had this level of complacency or serenity around knowing that, okay, like here's what we're going to get to. We kind of know what the mid-game, end-game looks like and we just have to like methodically build the product that we think will unlock that or will be a great starting point. So to answer the question more specifically for Airtable, in that case, we were fighting against a few things that made that MVP a much higher threshold to pass, right? One is that we were trying to build a product that individuals and hopefully businesses would actually entrust with valuable data and important workflows. right? And so this is different from, you know, being, for instance, a consumer, you know, kind of social product where the stakes are fairly low. You know, somebody can just go and try out a new product like that with little ramifications if it doesn't work out. Whereas with Airtable, you know, we're trying to get companies to, you know, people and companies to actually put, you know, kind of important business process into Airtable, right? And, you know, if we went down, if we went bankrupt, if we lost their data, you know, that would have serious consequences for them, right? So that was already one reason why the stakes were higher. I think the second was that, you know, we were also trying to replace existing, um, you know, kind of behavior, right? So, you know, we weren't just trying to add a new thing into people's lives, as sometimes, again, like, you know, consumer internet product— products, they're trying to add a net new thing into the, you know, kind of suite of products that you use. Um, you know, TikTok isn't necessarily directly replacing your usage of, you Instagram, YouTube, et cetera, it's kinda adding a new thing, right? And so, you know, you don't really have to worry about, you know, replacing one for one all of functionality of the existing product. Whereas for Airtable, you know, we were trying to get people to displace other products with Airtable, whether they be, you know, project management tools that were more task-centric, Trello, et cetera, or even spreadsheets, right? And spreadsheets in particular were a challenging one to replace because, you know, if you think about Excel or Google Sheets, they're pretty sophisticated products with a ton of, complexity and I mean the number of lines of code and like, you know, countless, you know, probably millions of person hours of engineering effort, if not more, that have gone into Microsoft Excel over the past 3 decades to form the product that it is today. I mean, it's gargantuan and there's no way that we could get to perfect feature parity against that product. And yet we wanted people to replace their existing usage of Excel, especially for non-numeric workloads. Workflow use cases where they were really kind of using it as almost like an app or an app builder as opposed to a number crunching tool, we were trying to get them to replace that existing behavior with Airtable. And so I think there was a higher threshold, like we couldn't just have a weekend hack project version of Airtable that people would use instead of a traditional spreadsheet, right? So I think we just, the nature of our product and the bet that we were making around why people would use us over the prior art necessitated a much higher, you know, kind of MVP threshold to cross.
O processo de reconhecer limites, mesmo quando a vida parece exigir sempre mais.
Depois de tantas histórias, aprendizados e pausas necessárias, o @interior_iza está de volta
