How Airtable grew to help over 300,000 businesses create better internal tools

Good morning! This is The Zero to One. Just like today’s deep dive Airtable, think of us as your no-code tool to build your startup’s growth strategy.

Here’s what’s in store for you today:

• Deep dive of Airtable, the do-it-all low-code tool used by over 80% of the Fortune 500.

Airtable: Slow to build. Fast to grow.

When 80% of the Fortune 500, including Amazon, Netflix, and Nike, use a product - it’s worth digging a little deeper.

After selling his first business to Salesforce, Howie Liu teamed up with Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas to build what would become the $11.7B go-to low-code tool for leading companies.

Airtable is the do-it-all software that you can use to build unique and robust apps and custom workflows.

With unparalleled versatility - you can create anything.

From a basic shopping list to its logical next step: a database for tracking and managing cattle vaccinations and pregnancy tests - as one Idaho farmer did.

This versatility, combined with its robust functionality, and user friendly experience, has led over 300k companies to use Airtable.

And this is reflected in Airtable’s latest valuation of $11.7B after their $735M Series F round at the end of 2021.

Since then, Airtable has reached profitability and has continued its rapid growth into enterprises.

But this isn’t about what’s to come.

This is the story of how Airtable went from Zero to One. 🚀

Business model: How Airtable makes money

Airtable’s business model is simple. They are your typical SaaS. And they moved upstream to serve enterprise customers as well.

They have three non-enterprise tiers:

• Free: For individuals and small teams getting started.

• Team: For teams looking to build more complex apps.

• Business: For teams needing even more advanced features and admin control.

Airtable does a good job of balancing value and scale with its free plan and incentivizing users to upgrade.

Although perfectly usable, and giving enough value for users to feel happy with the product, the free plan is not an option for anyone looking to make any complex products - with limitations on automations and records per base.

Another way they incentivize users to upgrade is by offering reverse free trials - the default option is to start on a free trial of the Team version.

Once users have had a chance to use the expanded limits and additional features, like calendar views, they are more likely to understand the value Airtable can offer them and thus stay on a paid plan.

As one of the pioneers of PLG (Product-Led Growth), design and ease of use were always super important to Airtable. Even as they started to focus more on enterprise clients - using the ease of use and design to create a habit around the product in individual users within a company and then usingh that to spread - but more on this later.

Airtable’s Growth

Airtable’s revenue and user growth has been a bit of a guarded secret throughout the company’s history.

What we do know is that they are used by more than 300k organizations, including over 80% of the Fortune 500 companies. That is really impressive!

We also know that they are in the 9 figures of revenue, hitting the $150M ARR mark in 2021.

They have also grown by “much more than 30%” YoY since then, meaning they are probably between ~$275M and $350M in ARR today.

However, it was a long and expensive road to get here for Airtable - having raised ~$1.4B dollars over the last 12 years.

But this money wasn’t fruitless - as of 2023, Airtable is profitable, with over $900M in the bank and a valuation of ~$11.7B.

But it hasn’t always been sunshine and rainbows for Airtable.

When capital was cheap during the Covid bubble, Airtable reached ~1300 employees. But the problem with blitzscaling is that it only makes sense in certain industries where it’s important to consume the whole market as quickly as possible, such as Uber or Airbnb did.

But Airtable isn’t in one of these industries.

So Airtable had to do mass rounds of layoffs. Cutting 650 people.

This is a cautionary tale about raising money and growing too quickly while not maintaining profitability. It’s not just your business that you hurt, but also the hundreds/thousands of employees (and their families).

So be responsible and intentional when raising money.

This massive failing is just one of the many lessons to be learned from Airtable’s explosive growth:

Key Success Factors (KSFs)

👩‍❤️‍👨 1. Building with your users: The founders of Airtable began to build in 2012, but only launched the business publicly in 2015, after a two-year beta period with ~20k-30k users testing and guiding the development of the product. This customer-led development process led to a longer path to revenue, but resulted in a more robust and useful product for users.

🧑‍💻 2. Understanding their different customers: The difficulty with building such a widely useful product is that it is very hard to market because there is so much it can do. Airtable were very good at watching, speaking to, and learning from their users to identify different customer profiles and popular use cases for the product.

👯 3. Nurturing connectors: One of the key customer profiles Airtable identified was what they called the “Creator” or “Tinkerer”. This is the type of person who likes to try new things and spread the word about them. Airtable sought these people out and used them as connectors to spread Airtable within organizations to make selling to them easier. 

👩‍❤️‍👨 1. Building with your users

Right from the start, the Airtable team decided that they would bring customers along with them in the development of the product.

The founders didn’t believe this was a problem that could be brute-forced and so decided to build a bit slower, but more intentionally and more thought through.

So Airtable went into a short Alpha test with ~100 users before going into a two-year Beta test with between 20k and 30k users.

They wanted to provide the best experience possible for their users. But how did they plan on doing that?

To copy Lego of course.

Huh?

Just like Lego, with Airtable, you can build anything you want.

But that doesn’t mean Lego just sell you a bunch of pieces.

They sell kits to build specific things like this awesome Harry Potter set:

Or those fake flowers my girlfriend wanted for her birthday - okay you probably don’t care about this, but it shows an important message, that people want to buy specific things, not an open canvas.

My girlfriend didn’t ask for a bunch of Lego pieces to make her own flowers - she asked for specific flowers pre-packaged.

And guess what, a week later she asked me to get her a robust tool for inventory tracking and management.

Okay, this one might not have happened.

But if it did, I could’ve given her Airtable’s Inventory Tracking Template - a pre-packaged solution for a product that can do anything.

The problem for Airtable was that with so many possibilities, they didn’t know what were the best packages to sell. They needed to figure out their Star Wars Death Star.

And that’s exactly what they used this two-year beta period for.

They identified Airtable’s:

• Best verticals and industries 🏛️

• Best use cases ⛹️‍♂️

• Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) 👨‍✈️

This customer-centric approach to building, allowed them to deliver features without suffering from feature bloat.

While at the same time, allowing them to refine their marketing and future product roadmap - including for when they eventually entered enterprise sales.

🧑‍💻 2. Understanding their different customers

Airtable is an awesome tool.

It’s super powerful. Super versatile.

Almost too versatile?

It sounds silly, but this is an actual problem they had to deal with.

The product can do almost anything. And people use the product for so many different things. So how did they market it? “Create anything easily” isn’t very compelling.

They needed to understand the key verticals and key use cases for the product were, so they could market it to more users who fit them.

To find these verticals and use cases, Airtable started to study their users’ behaviors to get close to them and spot trends.

The first way they did this was through their Alpha and Beta releases, as discussed above - They worked closely with their users to build their public launch.

But this not only allowed them to launch an awesome product. It also gave them insights into their customers.

Equipping them with this understanding of their users, it set the foundation for their marketing and product development for years to come.

They were able to define their Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and refine their messaging for them.

To learn even more about who their different customers were, the team released Airtable Universe, which opened up user-generated content (UGC) for different templates - as well as building the Airtable community.

Through this, Airtable saw not only which templates were being built, but which were being used the most.

This was especially important in their expansion into enterprise customers, who have plenty of potential use cases for Airtable.

But by having a platform where Airtable could see the most popular use cases, they could market and sell enterprise plans more effectively.

But there was also another strategy Airtable used to enter the enterprise market…

👯 3. Nurturing connectors

As most SaaS companies with B2B use cases do after they see some consumer success, Airtable set its sights on the enterprise market.

But Airtable didn't want to lose what made them successful up until this point - users loved their product and shared it.

So they thought about how they could do the same within a single organization.

The first step was to build features that made the Airtable experience better as a team, such as live-syncing databases.

Then they needed to find and nurture Champions within large organizations to drive a bottom-up sales process.

Airtable had plenty of data from their testing and public launch, and had developed an idea of who they thought would be ideal product Champions - although this is harder than it sounds. Because rather than a specific role or level of seniority, it was a specific psychographic profile that they were targeting.

A Tinkerer.

Pity you can’t filter by these profiles with Facebook ads.

So they implemented a streamlined workflow via an integration with Slack to automate emails and organize 1:1 onboarding sessions with potential Champions.

The goal here was to make it impossible for these Champions to fail on the platform. Giving them everything they needed for success.

Turning them into marketing and customer support for other people in their organization.

Once these Champions had spread the product across their organization and a few hundred people were using Airtable, the Airtable sales team would come in and initiate the sales process, using the already existing adoption data from within the organization as social proof and a key selling point.

It’s a lot easier to sell to a large organization when they already have 500 daily users of your product.

They then layered in customer success to drive product adoption across the whole organization, working closely with users to ensure they were getting the most out of the product and introducing new features to ensure customer retention.

This heavy focus on customer success helped maintain a low churn rate and high satisfaction for the product - meaning that when the Champions they created moved to new organizations, they could repeat the process quicker.

I have made this process sound relatively simple, but you can’t just stop at finding and speaking your connectors, you need to build for them as well.

Find. Listen. Build.

Airtable launched dozens of features in quick succession to ensure their Champions felt heard and a part of the development process. And you should do the same.

Actions you can take to replicate Airtable’s success

Find Champions to spread the word 🏆

All PLG companies rely on the same thing - their product being awesome, useful, and beautiful enough that they create Champions who spread the word of their product organically.

This is the whole premise of PLG, that your product gets traction on its own, because it’s loved.

But usually, PLG is favored for consumer growth, and not necessarily enterprise - for that, direct sales is generally favored.

However, Airtable decided to leverage its product Champions and grow bottom-up within an organization.

Airtable overinvested into individual people (their Champions) to make sure they were successful with the product and would then share it with others.

As mentioned above, to identify these Champions at scale, Airtable had a Slack integration that pulled in all their users’ info on signup and had a button they could press to send an email to any potential Champions.

This email asked them for a call to discuss why they used Airtable, what they loved about it, how Airtable could support them in being successful on the platform, and plenty more questions to make sure they built Champions to spread the Airtable word.

They even gave their Champions Airtable swag - but like really swaggy swag, like airpods.

Through this process, Airtable was able to move upstream into enterprises by individuals spreading Airtable at the company organically and then once enough users were on the product, Airtable’s sales team would go speak to the IT department of the companies and sell them on the enterprise plan - a lot easier now that hundred of people in the company already used the product.

When you’re just starting out, you need as many supporters as you can get. But don’t just wait for them to come to you.

Find them.

Make sure they’re successful.

Create your brand Champions.

These will be the catalysts for your growth. Especially at the beginning.

And can even help you enter enterprise markets without only relying on traditional sales teams.

Low stakes testing 👩‍🔬

Airtable is an extremely useful and versatile tool. For the marketing and product teams, almost too versatile.

How do you market a product that can do everything? How do you focus product development when your use case is anything?

To answer these questions Airtable leaned into their individual users before going for big enterprise clients. Lowering the stakes of their testing.

Their beta gave the Airtable team tons of data to use on their product. Before they were even selling it publicly.

From this, Airtable identified different key use cases for their product that their customers were actually using Airtable for, one being product roadmaps.

Airtable then used this to start marketing multiple super-specific verticals that they knew Airtable was great for.

When building, remember you are serving your users. To grow, you need a product that people actually use.

So speak to your early users. Look at how they use your product. Start testing and see what sticks early on.

This will help you refine your product, and its marketing, as you grow.

Make your product easy to start 🏃‍♂️‍➡️

One of the most important reasons for the success of Airtable was how easy the product was to adopt into your daily life. Why was it easy? Two main reasons:

1. Familiar and intuitive:

Airtable’s founding thesis was basically if you use a spreadsheet for anything other than number crunching, you should rather use Airtable.

No more overly-complicated Excels.

Airtable gave non-technical users the power of a relational database but with the accessible, familiar, and consumer-friendly user interface of a spreadsheet.

This meant that even the most non-technical users were not intimidated by Airtable. Even though it was actually much more than a spreadsheet.

Making your product familiar can be a huge driver of adoption and habit-building.

Think about how you can integrate a commonly used tool, task, or process into your product that gives users immediate comfort and understanding of how it works and what they need to do.

2. Content. Content. Content:

Airtable is a huge proponent of giving as much value as possible, including making product adoption as easy as possible and teaching people how to use their product.

For Airtable, this means hundreds of templates based on real-life use cases - copying and tweaking a database to fit your needs is much less intimidating than building a no-code tool from scratch.

On top of their own templates, Airtable opened up a place for users to share their templates and workflows with other Airtable users, Airtable Universe. Giving their users a space to show off their creations that they are proud of.

And also creating social proof that people use Airtable, creating a community based around support - even for more niche use cases:

This has also boosted Airtable’s SEO efforts, driving even more potential customers to their product - who then see the enormous amount of support Airtable gives their users, and are then more likely to sign up themselves.

Creating content is starting to become a golden thread in all my deep dives.

And I’m not surprised.

In its essence, content is about giving value to your users. And more value to your users means more loyal customers, which leads to more referrals and network effects.

Which leads to more users, who also get this value you give them, and this cycle continues.

It’s so simple, yet not everyone is doing it.

Think about how you can create content that reduces the barriers of entry to your product - whether that be video tutorials, webinars, blogs, or even a newsletter. 😉

This will give potential customers more confidence that they will be able to get the most value out of your product. And thus they will be more likely to try it.

Have a great week, speak soon!

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