Lessons in Scaling a Low Code Platform with Airtable | SaaStr Software Community

I'm Howie Liu. I'm the co founder and CEO of airtable. We really think of ourselves as this platform that lets anybody come in, regardless of industry or use case or company type and basically build their own internal workflows. We're the most meta software product out there because we're the software to build software. I really do believe that, you know, we have 100x plus upside from here. We're never for lack of ideas. There's just such a broad surface area of what we could do in our potential. It feels kind of like we're trying to upgrade an airplane that's in the middle of flying. You should be able to have control over your own software and make it work the way you want.

Howie, let's just jump into it. I'm going to. Let's just not assume everybody knows what airtable is. So just give us that like high level overview.

Yeah, I mean the easiest way to put it for this crowd I think is we are the bottoms up low code app platform. Meaning bottoms up, you know, is. Is in our world, meaning that we're adopted by business end users. You don't have to be technical, you don't have to be it, you don't have to be a developer to come in and build useful internal applications with airtable and low code, meaning you're building these real robust solutions that actually empower business processes within your company.

And so that when you think about how broad that can be. Give me some idea of the scope here because help me wrap my head around that.

Yeah, I mean, to be honest, some of this was a little bit of a serendipitous surprise. When we first launched the product. We thought this would be initially something that really appealed to more tech startups. You know, kind of you think of these tech savvier crowds that are able to come in and build, you know, kind of and be earlier adopters on products like this. But what really was, was incredible was as soon as we launched, we actually saw this enormous diversity of use cases popping up on our table. You know, we had hundreds of signups from, you know, big companies like Conde Nas or Nike within the first few months or certainly the first year of, you know, kind of launching as a product. But we also got, you know, literal cat going out and building cattle tracking applications with airtable. And so I think the staggering thing to me was just how much there is this distributed amount of what I think of as software creativity in the world. And these people within every company, within every industry, every type of organization are Just yearning to go and build software the way that they want it to work. And I think we've been fortunate to be able to provide an outlet for a lot of those use cases.

Yeah. So you had mentioned a broad range of use cases, and I think maybe some of the people that are watching struggle with this. I don't know. I'm curious. I always think it's somewhat of a blessing and a curse to have the ability to do anything for anybody. So when I think about there, there's some really important horizontal solutions out there in the world. And as you thought about this, did you think of it as a blessing or a curse? Or as we sort of go into some of the strategic challenges or opportunities that you have some of the people watching or face. How do you think about being this horizontal?

Yeah, I think it's. I think of the answer on time horizons, as in, you know, I think this is kind of like a marathon where if you're really good at holding this pace and just having this deliberate focus on being a horizontal platform and trying to serve this massively diverse, total addressable market, then I think in the long term you have more durable advantages. I think you have a bigger market to grow into and an easier path to scale into. Lots of different use cases. So you don't have this kind of market size risk down the road. However, upfront, there's kind of the cold start problem. It is hard to come in and just say, hey, you can build anything kind of platform, right? You can build a cattle tracking app, you can build a video production management system, you can build a way to orchestrate kind of your entire global market process around launching new products. And the fact that we're a horizontal platform, we're serving all these different use cases I think did make it harder initially to get that running start. Notable examples of this included when we went out and raised our first few rounds of funding, a ton of the investors out there, they would basically give us a feedback of, hey, we think you've built this really cool product. It's clearly, you know, required a lot of product talent to go and create something that's so powerful, yet so usable. And yet we think your entire business plan is fatally flawed by the fact that you haven't picked a single vertical to just very crisply define. Here's the exact target use case, target Persona, target company, and here's your go to market sales strategy to go and land those customers repeatedly. Right. Which I think to their credit there was some validity to that. Right. Because I think you Know, build it and hope, hope that customers come is generally not a very viable, you know, go to market strategy. Like I don't think, you know, you should ever put in your business plan. Like we're just going to build it and hope that people come. But I think in our case like we did, you know, it required some amount of effort. I think we really tried to study some of the early adoption that we got, understand how people were using us, build product improvements to better serve their needs. Also doing things like creating templates that really created this balance of like being able to suggest and give people kind of a launch off point for specific use cases, yet not bind ourselves to any one vertical. Those all helped. But I think we also frankly got a little bit lucky, right? Because every time a new company is launched, there's a little bit of the guy being cast. And did you roll a lucky kind of product market fit or did you not? And I think we did kind of just start seeing organic pickup and in addition to the hard work of everybody on the team, part of that was lucky.

Well, let me ask you, it's maybe a little bit of an aside, but I know like major motion pictures plan their movies on you, but then also you have this cattle thing. Like, can you. What?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the interesting things is like totally. I mean, I think one of the things is, you know, that, that we are trying to now navigate is it's, it's a valid point that we should start, you know, defining not the use cases that we exclusively want to be built on airtable or that we want airtable be exclusively used for, but at least what are the highest value use cases that for us as a business are the strategically most important to make sure that we continue to build product improvements for that we're serving 100% well and that we then also start kind of building these increasingly kind of specific go to market efforts to get out to the market for. So while at the same time we want to maintain this completely flexible product experience for anybody to come in, for the cattle farmers to be able to come in and use, we're not necessarily going to go and spend a ton of effort just given the kind of likely size of the cattle farming or the cattle tracking kind of use case vertical in comparison to something much bigger. Like if we can land every marketing team in the world, that's a much bigger vertical and also a strategically advantaged place to then expand to other parts of the enterprise. So you know, there's this combination of like trying to Keep the core product experience as intuitive and flexible as possible so that we can support all these long tail use cases like cattle farming, but then, you know, starting to layer on these kind of vertical prongs of product and go to market specialization so that we can do a really good job of going after the high value use cases.

So I think I'm thinking of this as these are some of the strategic decisions that you had to make. So horizontal platform that can do anything. How do you maintain flexibility and still be able to have an ease of use for an obvious market? And templates were one way that you did that. And it sounds like you continue to explore that. And there's just so many things that people in these different areas are doing with airtable. So do you find. I know that another sort of strategic question that people have on this road to scale is, is it bottom up adoption or top down enterprise sale? And. Or is it, is it one or the other? Is it both?

Yeah.

And is it, you know, how did, how did you think of, you know, one is this horizontal versus vertical? And I think that would be helpful, like you want to be flexible yet easy for the biggest use case. The second is like, what's your, how do you think about bottom up versus top down?

Yeah, yeah. I mean it's a, it's a great question and obviously a very challenging question. You know, I think on the product side, you know, I think it's foundational to build a horizontal product. As in, you know, it's really hard. And part of the reason why we chose to go down this horizontal route and commit to it, rather than starting with the vertical and then trying to make it more horizontal over time is like, I think it's just foundational that the product experience, you know, it's in our core DNA as a product to try to take all of this complexity, all of these things that you can do with the Lego pieces of airtable and distill them into these really intuitive pieces. Right. To give an example, like, you know, in airtable you have a few different primitives, if you will. Right. Field types, you have, you know, different types of views. We now have things like airtable apps that you can add on top of an airtable database. There's collaboration features. And all of these features have to be designed in a really elegant way that doesn't require, you know, reading a support article to figure out. Right. That anybody can come in and just intuit how they can piece them together to build the solution in their mind. Not a solution that we've already prescribed. Right. So I think on the horizontal product side, I think that's just foundational and like we made a real commitment as a company when we first started to always put this rigorous focus on making that product experience intuitive and continuing to build more power into the product without diluting or without like kind of tainting the elegance of that onboarding experience. So I think that that's just core on the go to market side I think it's really interesting. You know, we hired our CMO earlier this year. She's incredible. She, her name is Archana Agarwal and before Airtable she was at Atlassian where she basically helped lead marketing for a lot of their, all of their cloud, you know, versions of their products. Right. And Atlassian is sort of famous or maybe some people would call it infamous for being like very, you know, bottoms up oriented. Right. For a very long period of the company, even past, you know, ipo. And at the point they were at hundreds of millions in revenue, like the adage was like no salespeople. Right. And you know, I think that. And then you know, perhaps somewhat in contrast, you know, we just had our CRO start Seth Shaw, who whose background was actually in kind of a more hybrid sales environment, starting with Logmein where he was head of worldwide sales but also worked at companies like Riken and Vision that saw like kind of more of a hybrid approach. And so I think it's. I wouldn't call these compet philosophy so much is you know, there's kind of good parts of each of those experiences that we want to fuse together into like, you know, the perfect setup for airtable. I think that, you know, the Bottoms up engine, there's no question it's very high efficiency. Right. Like your unit economics are just going to look awesome if you do Bottoms.

Up that are listening. You started in bottom up, you had that adoption for sure.

Yeah, I mean we really didn't do much in the way of outbound sales and marketing, you know, before this year. And even now it's still kind of early days experimental efforts. And so you know, the SC got like, I mean you know, early on and even to the state like, you know, we get thousands of many thousands of organic signups per day and some percent of those convert through the funnel into active users. And then some of those people just pull out a credit card without literally ever talking to a person at our table, right. Sales or support and just start paying us. Right. And sometimes they'll add more seats and it'll expand and then sometimes they'll actually reach out to sales and we'll engage with them in more of a reactive and consultative way. But I think there's so many opportunities to now layer on top of that high efficiency bottoms up motion. Also this increasingly proactive enterprise sales motion, where I like to think of it as additive in value. Right. We're not just trying to like get our customers to pay us more money and use sales as the way to kind of extract that from them, but quite the opposite. I think sales has this opportunity to actually be proactive in presenting ideas for how these customers can make more, you know, make more use of airtable, build new use cases or even expand to new teams within their enterprise who could genuinely, you know, get value out of building on airtable. So that's a big push for us right now. And I think that, you know, there's kind of a new S curve to be built on top of the existing S curve if we can do both. So they're not competing so much as I think additive.

So what advice would you give to founders out there that start in the bottom up world or start in the top down? Like how long people are like, do they have to do both? Is there a time clock? Like, how do you, how do you think about that? Or what would you tell people who are watching to think about that?

Yeah, I mean, well, so there's a great post, I think it came out recently from Andreessen Horowitz on their blog about exactly this topic. You know, I forget the name of the exact article, but I think if you search for Bottoms up top down, you know, the 20, 30 million ARR, you would probably find it. David George is one of the authors and you know, I think it puts it really well, which is look like bottoms up is great. Like if you can get a bottoms up growth engine going, fantastic. You've just gotten this like free source of like, you know, it's like a spring that's just shooting out like free delicious water, but you don't have to bother excavating out of the ground. Right. And you should take it. Like there's no question you should take it and you shouldn't try to ignore it or suppress it. But at the same time it's, you know, it's probably not enough in most cases to provide durable growth for the next 10 years. Right. If your aspirations are to become a billion dollar plus revenue business, like it's very unlikely. Even Atlassian, it has layered in like real sales at this point, you know, getting to a billion and beyond. In revenue. And so I think, you know, it's sort of a matter of when rather than whether you, you take this bottoms up engine and not just replace it or, you know, build a completely separate sales engine. But I think the best models are really, you know, synergistic, where your sales people are actually, you know, leveraging the bottoms up adoption within an existing account. For us, for instance, we have like literally, you know, tens of thousands of companies out there who already have a, you know, five or greater seat workspace that's active on airtable. And so that's a great seed of adoption that a salesperson can reach out and say, hey, like, can we help you get more value out of airtable? Can we talk about like how to, how to set up airtable better or how to deploy it, you know, to other use cases. And so leveraging that bottoms up, you know, capability of the product rather than just saying, hey, we're going to build a completely different top down only, you know, or outbound only sales engine that is totally separate. Right. So I think it's, it's figuring out and it's, it's a whole new world. Right. I think, you know, none of these hybrid models, I think really existed in practice, you know, call it eight years ago at least. Certainly I wasn't aware of them. And so I think there is kind of this really exciting kind of renaissance and this conference is a great venue to kind of probably learn about it. But of these hybrid bottoms up, top down SaaS models, I think that's the future. I think the companies with the best unit economics are going to have this. I mean, Datadog is a recent example that I think has done this well, right. They have a bottoms up activation funnel. If you're a tech startup, you want to adopt Datadog, you can do so by yourself, but you can also talk to a salesperson and they can also layer on these kind of higher and higher enterprise kind of touches.

Yeah, I think of it too as a when, not an if. And in a way you're trying to build a giant burger with two big buns, bottom up and top down and forget the beef. Totally about that. Because I do, I think this is the future. So as you think about too, one of the things that always impressed me about airtable is something that I think a lot of people can learn from who are watching is how do you think about the category? Because it isn't, you know, it's like something but not. It's really different. So how did you think about category creation and how would you advise people who are watching to think about categories and how to fit and how to talk about it and how to exist and what's really different?

For sure. Well, I mean, first I wish we had thought more clearly about it earlier, you know, because I think for a while we had convinced ourselves that yeah, of course we're a completely different product from anything else out there. And it should be obvious to everyone out there, investors and customers alike. And so like we almost just assumed it was a given that we were in a different category. Right. And I think we pitched ourselves often to both customers and investors. As, you know, we're a software creation platform that anyone can use. Of course, that's a new category. Of course, nothing else out there exists like it. Right. And while that, you know, maybe that's not untrue. Right. We still do think of ourselves as a software creation platform that anyone can use. I think, you know, real category definition means that you've, you've been very explicit about what are your alternatives. The reality is not everybody in the world has heard of airtable or even the ones who have heard of airtable aren't using it. And so if they're not using airtable, they're clearly getting by. They're surviving in life, in work life without airtable. So what are they using? What are we actually coming in and competing with and replacing? And how are people thinking about the value of airtable with respect to those alternatives? Right. And so one, I would just say, you know, we're starting to get much more crisp about that I think going into the next couple of years, especially as our category heats up and, and we're starting to see more products that are truly coming after this category as opposed to, you know, always before there were project management tools that we didn't really think of as competitors and then there were top down low code app platforms like ServiceNow, Salesforce, App Cloud that are, you know, powerful but more heavyweight. It adopted that we also didn't think of as competitors but we are now starting to see, you know, direct competition. Microsoft has a product called List that is in many ways like a direct, you know, kind of attempt to replicate airtable. We think we have a lot of product advantages over that product but, but you know, it's a much more direct play against airtable. Google has a product called Tables and even Amazon just launched something called Honeycode, which is their, their closest, you know, approximation to the space. So I think we have to get CRISPR about like what is this category? Why are we poised to be the leader in it. And realistically, who do we compete with? Right. And so as, as we go over the next year, I think those are important questions. And I have to give a shout out to Karen herself who I think has, has helped many companies, including Facebook and Salesforce in the past. Think about these exact questions.

It's, I mean, it's exciting. And we talked about needing to ground people on something they already know because it's hard to be like, you get, you only get the ability to explain like one new thing you can't explain to any. So there's always this idea of grounding that's important when you think about category creation.

And that's exactly right. I mean, like the software creation pitch that I described earlier was faulty because I think it's not obvious to the average customer, to most customers, why do I need to create software in the first place? Right. It's not a need that's burning in their minds now if they actually figured out, wait, if I could build my own software, that means I can, you know, build this workflow in this much more structured, transparent, collaborative way. Like that would be the value, the benefit. Right. You know, maybe I can get even more, you know, content produced if that's my job, or build products to better with greater visibility into the progress within. But you know, just saying, hey, we're a software creation platform, that wasn't enough because it's not clear that people need that in the first place.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's one of the things I love working on the most. I mean, this idea of how do you, how do you create and, and own the category or, you know, be in an existing category and win? It's really, it's both for everybody. It's fun. It's really hard when you're living it. So I would love to go on to some of the challenges and bumps in the road, but almost before we do that, I learned from you in all kinds of different ways that are not just airtable. So I'd love to break it up and shake things up a little bit and do almost a rapid fire in the middle. Little bizarre going in the middle.

Yeah, I don't know if I can handle it.

I'm going to ask you. I know. But we're going to get to the bumps in the road, so just be prepared. Next are some of the challenges that you face. So let me just ask you a string of rapid fire questions. What's the worst advice you ever got?

You know, this is a little bit Easy and maybe unfair. But, you know, I think there were so many loud voices, especially from some of the investors that we pitched that felt adamant about the fact that we had to go vertical, right? It was like, you will not, it was a definitive statement of you will not succeed unless you go vertical and pick a specific use case. And I think it came from a good place. It wasn't mal intent by any means. So I don't want to like, you know, be rude about it, but I think the Net is, I think as founders, sometimes you just have to trust your own instinct, right? Like take advice. But also at the end of the day, if you really feel instinctively strongly about something, I think sometimes you have to just go for it.

Okay, what's the best advice?

This actually I got from Mark from Facebook, who I think is an incredible leader. But it was, you know, we had just seen Microsoft launch their competitor and the kind of advice basically was, you know, that we tend to overestimate competition in the short term. We get really freaked out about it, but we underestimate in the long term. So calm yourself down in the short term, but then be more paranoid in the long term about what this really means over the next five years. Even if their product right now does or doesn't impact our growth.

I think most people miss that. I think they get really freaked out in the short term and then forget about it. Especially if it's, especially if it's a big competitor, it's best not to forget about it. Do you have a book that helped you as a founder?

Yeah. So this year in particular I got really into Jim Collins and the best. I think my favorite book of a series is Great by Choice, which is much more oriented towards high growth startups than some of the older, more traditional companies. But it's an excellent book that talks about ultimately what are actually some of the consistent patterns of companies that become great, you know, even in the face of competition, even when there are other companies that look the same on paper, but one became a breakout success and the other didn't, you know, what, what, what was it that made them successful?

Yeah, he's phenomenal. I couldn't agree more on his writing. What's your current stress reducer that you can discuss in public?

Yeah. So long drives, you know, I think especially these days there's no traffic and, and you know, if you ever need to go somewhere, you know, I love driving, so I think it's just the right amount of mental engagement. But you can really kind of clear your mind.

Tea or coffee?

Coffee, definitely. And iced. And multiple cups a day, which I've convinced myself is not bad for health. I think there was a study that showed it actually is linked to a reduction in heart disease risk. So I'm going to keep drinking lots of coffee.

Yeah, you can find a study any which way.

Well, it makes me feel better about it. It.

So I'm a big caffeine person too, so I look for the studies that make me feel better. Okay. Do you have a current TV show or podcast that you justice?

Yeah, I just discovered the A24, the film distribution company's podcast, and it's really cool because they interview a lot of these creators, producers, actors. It's very candid discussion of a very different industry. But yet, you know, I think there are some, like, inspirational, you know, kind of patterns or leaps of creativity that apply even to tech into SaaS.

That's awesome. I didn't know about that. They're incredible on a very different group. I love that. They make some creepy movies too, for sure. Okay, so let's go back to the hard stuff. So as you're thinking about some of the lessons that you've learned in the bumps on the road, you've been a CEO and a co founder for how long now?

Well, you know, I've been working on airtable for about eight years. I will say in the early days, you know, even if you're called CEO, it doesn't really feel like being a CEO. Right. Because in truth, you're just kind of. You're there maybe coding initially or maybe you're taking sales calls like whatever it is, and you're just doing anything it takes to get from zero to one. Right?

Yeah, everything. Like so. But how has that changed? How do you think about that?

I mean, I think there's. For me, it's felt like there were these really qualitative shifts in the role. Every call it 18 months. Right. I don't know why it ended up being 18 months. And maybe for some companies it's even faster or slower, but for us, it was roughly every 18 months, I would say for airtable earliest days, I was literally there coding and thinking about product stuff in the weeds along with my co founders and our early employees. At some point after that, I think it shifted into, okay, I need to go out and hire, because we're never going to execute against the broader opportunity that we think we can with four people in a room or five. Right. And so a lot of my priorities shifted to figuring out how to hire and then how to align all these great people that we had put in the room and how do we figure out what everybody's working on and so on. And then you kind of transition again and again, maybe to a manager of managers, which is a different skillset, trying to figure out how to hire your first, you know, kind of, you know, early leadership team within the company that's still very scrappy and like, able to adapt, et cetera. But a lot of that time you're also still, you know, kind of literally the chief plumber. Like I remember distinctly there was a point where I plunged the toilet of our shared, you know, restroom, because we had one restroom. We had one toilet. And you know, sometimes you just had to roll up your sleeves and literally plunge the toilet. Right? So I think like early days was really just unblocking whatever need to be blocked. Horrible, unintentional pun there, but unblocking whatever needed to, to be unblocked to keep the company running. Right. And then I think as you get later, and for me it's been palpable over the past year especially you get to this point where I think we're still very early and we're still very much like the David in this kind of battle, especially against a Microsoft size Goliath. But it now feels like we have a pretty sizable comparatively amount of resources to like, certainly early days. Right. And so, you know, we've raised some, some funding. We have a few hundred million in the bank of cash that we can deploy towards, you know, hiring or marketing or whatever we want to do. And we also, I think, have the ability now to hire really, really great people across the board, whether it's individual contributors or execs. And so I think it becomes a challenge for the CEO to like, you know, really ultimately figure out. It's not just about working hard at this point. It's not just about throwing yourself full body at every toilet that needs to be plunged, either physically or metaph, but it's about figuring out how do you get the most leverage, how do you do the things that only you can do? Because everything else that you can hire for and in fact hire somebody who can do the job better than you. At which I think at this point, you know, most jobs within the company can be done better by somebody else. Like, you know, our CMO is much better at, you know, every part of marketing than I am right now. I can still partner with her to think about, you know, particularly tricky part of, you know, the messaging of some new product feature or how we position the product. Right. But likewise, the same would go for, you know, many of our other leaders. And so then I think it becomes a question of figuring out like what can I uniquely do? And it's partly hiring the right leadership team, especially building the right cultural practices and standards and like, you know, defining what the culture of the company is defining. Are you a performance oriented culture or not? You know, and there's no right answers to these things. Right. But what works for this type of company? You know, I think making the bigger creative leaps that I think sometimes a founder CEO can do on instinct and sometimes that instinct is wrong, but sometimes it's right and you can't prove it. But that's what strategy is. Making a big bet that we don't just want to compete against project management or productivity tools, but we need to keep pushing into building a platform ecosystem. We need to push into new layers of value that actually unlock additional TAM for us, such as the ability to customize a ui, for instance, on top of airtable, that kind of thing. So making these bigger creative leaps and resourcing against them and then finally, I think just simplifying that was a surprising part of the job this year for me was realizing it's not just about saying like, here's all the things we can or could do or should do, but really in fact, like, you know, I think part of the CEO as well as the exec team's role is to help navigate that almost terrifying expanse of possibilities. I mean, especially for us as a product, like there's so many different directions we could go in terms of product initiatives and go to market. And so I think the job partly is also to take all of that possibility space and distill it and simplify it into a clear set of objectives that everybody can fully align around, get, get behind, understand and then apply to be more creative and innovative in their day to day job. Right. Having that context, if here's the simplified frame of our strategy, you know, allows every person within the company to be more, more autonomous and then deciding what am I going to work on day to day.

So there are a ton more questions that I have. I'm also looking and I want to make sure we get to everybody else's questions. We have a number of lined up already in the Q and A section and I'll remind people they can ask more there. Maybe we should go just to some of the key takeaways and just have a sense of. Is there something you want to point out here on the key takeaway before I go to some of the audience questions?

No, I think a lot of them are self explanatory. The investors part is pretty important. I think we were very fortunate to always have at every phase of the company, at every stage of financing, investors that were one truly aligned with the goals of the company saw the massive opportunity to be this really large platform company rather than, you know, for instance.

Being need to understand it's an actual platform that people are building on.

Exactly. And that's a very different kind of business and execution path than if you just want to be a vertical SaaS solution or a productivity tool. Right. And so I think having investors who are very supportive of us basically swinging for the fences with the platform play, being patient with how long that would take was really, really important. I mean, I think, I think with a different set of investors, we may not have made it to where we are today. I think we might have gotten pressured to either sell out early or go down a more narrow path, compete more directly with project management tools. So I think that is a really important thing to get right. And just finding people who share both your very human values, cultural values, but also the values of the company and what you're aspiring to become.

Well, thank you. I believe our time is.

Thank you, Karen. It.