Airtable’s Path to Product-Market Match — Classes for Constructing Horizontal Merchandise

Introduction

As we speak on The Overview, we’re excited to launch a brand-new collection on product-market match, spearheaded by First Spherical companion Todd Jackson (former VP of Product at Dropbox, Product Director at Twitter, co-founder of Cowl, and PM at Google and Fb). Jackson shares extra about what impressed the collection within the opening word beneath, however if you wish to dive proper into our first interview with Airtable co-founder Andrew Ofstad, click on right here.

Product-market match is likely one of the most vital, but elusive, ideas in firm constructing. It’s not a transparent metric you possibly can measure or a milestone you possibly can simply verify off your to-do checklist. I consider product-market match because the transition second you’re feeling as a founder whenever you go from “pushing” your product on individuals to them “pulling” it out of your palms. However the path to get there’s deeply private. One founder’s journey to product-market match might look completely completely different from one other’s, and but each paths could possibly be fully legitimate — which may make it tough to discern which classes you possibly can draw whenever you’re on the surface wanting in.

There’s actually been an uptick in articles on the topic lately, but surprisingly little really helpful info on the market on the concrete steps it takes to search out product-market match. The suggestions that do exist both are usually too inflexible as a result of they’re based mostly on one particular person’s expertise, or too broad to be actionable.

Discovering PMF has been a relentless theme all through my profession, so I’ve skilled this journey firsthand — taking Gmail from beta to greater than 200 million customers as a PM and beginning my very own firm, Cowl, again in 2013. Now, as a Accomplice at First Spherical, I spend my days serving to founders deal with this very problem.

I’ve seen the search for product-market match tackle extra urgency currently, as follow-on funding turns into tougher to safe and the stress to hit stellar metrics has set in. So I’ve spent the higher a part of this 12 months interviewing founders who’ve already cleared this hurdle to assist inform the journey for earlier-stage founders. (Take a look at the publish on validating startup concepts that I shared earlier this 12 months in Lenny’s Publication or a couple of of the In Depth podcast episodes I’ve visitor hosted on the subject.)

As we speak, I’m excited to share that I’m teaming up with the First Spherical Overview group on a brand new collection devoted to telling extra of those tales. We’ve already shared some implausible assets right here on The Overview — just like the widely-read PMF playbook from Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra — and I’m excited to contribute to rising our assortment of recommendation on this matter.

Right here’s what you possibly can anticipate: Each different week, I’ll share an interview with a founder so you possibly can hear about probably the most pivotal moments on their path to product-market match — from how they stumbled into their firm concept to their first “aha second” and all of the nitty-gritty particulars in between.

I’ll be speaking to dozens of founders throughout backgrounds, verticals, and phases to showcase the numerous paths to PMF. Whereas there’s no singular playbook or recipe to comply with, I’m a agency believer that there’s lots to study from reverse-engineering the frameworks and ways others relied on to hit it huge. My hunch is that, if we gather sufficient tales, we are able to begin to pull out themes, patterns and insights that can be utilized to higher inform recommendation that really helps founders get to PMF. 

I hope you’ll comply with alongside. Be happy to share any suggestions with me over on Twitter, or counsel visitor concepts for future interviews!

With that, let’s dive into my first interview, with Airtable’s Andrew Ofstad.

— Todd Jackson

After a decade of firm constructing, the Airtable group has some stats to point out for it. The low-code platform boasts a buyer base of over 300,000 organizations, together with the likes of Amazon, Baker Hughes, Netflix and Nike. In actual fact, an astonishing 80% of the Fortune 100 use Airtable. 

The low-code motion is firmly established, the corporate is concentrated on going international (opening its first worldwide headquarters in London), and the group has raised $1.36 billion in funding, with an $11 billion valuation.

However like several polished story, for those who rewind the clock again to the earliest days, the image appears decidedly completely different. So many tiny particulars get glossed over with the passage of time and the halo of success, whether or not it’s the wrestle of architecting the primary prototype, or the challenges of determining the perfect buyer profile. In Airtable’s case, constructing an enormous, horizontal product made that path all of the extra daunting. (Browse their templates part to get a taste for the wide selection of use-cases this versatile product can deal with, starting from monitoring bugs and advertising campaigns, to cattle ranching and discovering child system.)

In 2012, Andrew Ofstad and his co-founders Howie Liu and Emmett Nicholas set out on what can be a “gradual construct.” In his present position, Ofstad spearheads the corporate’s long-term product bets, however in the present day he takes us again to the start, tracing Airtable’s path to product-market match. 

We dig into the nitty-gritty of how they validated the preliminary imaginative and prescient and approached the early product-building journey from non-public alpha to launch. From the glimmers that it was beginning to catch on, to the challenges of positioning and fascinated about the competitors, there are tons of classes in right here for aspiring founders — particularly these constructing horizontal merchandise.

The -1 to 0 part of firm constructing can take many shapes. Some founding groups coalesce round a specific concept moderately shortly, whereas others spend a number of months exploring fully disparate industries. For the Airtable trio, the early imaginative and prescient was broad, however had a transparent finish objective.

“The early imaginative and prescient was to democratize software program creation. All of us felt we had this loopy superpower of having the ability to construct software program, which had given us these benefits in our careers. You possibly can have great affect in a corporation — even for those who’re not in management — by constructing software program and deploying it to individuals. So broadly, we had been exploring how one can make software program creation simpler for non-programmers,” says Ofstad. 

A lot of that inspiration stemmed from computing historical past. “The early days of computing had been utilizing these arcane command traces to function a pc. It was solely by means of Xerox PARC’s GUI and Apple’s Mac that computing was made extra accessible to everybody. We needed to do the identical factor for software program — to provide everyone a software program stack they might construct helpful software program on high of.”

However an concept in hand isn’t sufficient — assessing its promise is the following important hurdle for aspiring founders to beat. How do you show to your self (and others) that it has legs? 

Taking your time right here is vital, Ofstad says. He advocates for what he calls a “lengthy gestation interval,” recommending that founders resist the temptation to dive into constructing options and transport underbaked ideas shortly. As an alternative, he advises founders dive deep and hit the books to look at the issue from each angle: what’s come earlier than you, the place there’s whitespace to construct out there, and your individual motivation to see it by means of:

Don’t comply with the fad: “We had been a bit contrarian. On the time, it was all concerning the Lean Startup, getting early buyer validation and failing quick. This e-book making the rounds known as ‘The 4 Steps to the Epiphany’ espoused this lean firm improvement mannequin, the place you place out an excellent tough prototype to get to know the shopper and shortly pivot,” he says. “We took extra of a primary ideas strategy — we did not need to simply throw spit on the wall, so we went actually deep on the issue earlier than formally breaking floor on constructing the product and attempting to get prospects.”

Brush up on the prior artwork: “We had been intellectually enthusiastic about happening that path of this common house of software program creation. So we spent a whole lot of time doing analysis. It was nearly like being on a sabbatical, studying all this prior artwork of previous computing pioneers, like Douglas Engelbart and Invoice Atkinson, and even contemporaries, like Bret Victor. We performed with previous merchandise, like HyperCard, that had flavors of software program creation for everyone, and skim lots about how one can visualize advanced techniques.”

Assess the potential and spot the openings: “We spent a whole lot of time fascinated about ‘What’s the marketplace for this?’ Spreadsheets have been round endlessly, however more often than not, individuals use them to trace objects: individuals, firms, easy tables. They don’t seem to be doing modeling and quantity crunching, which they had been invented for,” says Ofstad. “And when Howie was at Salesforce, he discovered extra concerning the enterprise software program market and noticed that almost all enterprise purposes on the market are primarily simply databases with views and enterprise logic on high, and there is a whole lot of reinventing the wheel in vertical software program. So we noticed the enterprise potential of how Salesforce — this big platform — was kind of only a versatile database. However you needed to be a complicated admin to know how one can configure and construct it. We noticed the potential of opening up that sort of software program creation to a a lot bigger market.”

Ensure you’re devoted to digging in: “We took our time early on to guarantee that it was one thing we had been dedicated to. In the event you’re going to deal with a horizontal product that’s fairly laborious to market and has a whole lot of stuff that must be constructed to get to MVP, I might suggest taking that point to just be sure you’re tremendous excited about the issue house and just like the individuals you are working with. It could’ve been laborious for us to get to that stage of conviction with out having that interval of going deep on the issue.”

We had this lengthy, early gestation interval the place we did our analysis on the technological problem, the market and priority earlier than us. We noticed that we might construct an enormous firm, however knew that it’d take a very long time to do, so we needed to get into the suitable mindset.

“The primary model was attempting to show that we are able to make a database simple to make use of. It was like a prototype — a whole lot of smoke and mirrors. We targeted 100% on the UI and the interactions. We did not actually have a backend, it was simply persisting to native storage and the browser — sufficient to verify we might check the interactions and get to a degree the place individuals might play with it. We needed to place it in entrance of individuals and ask them to attempt to manage one thing and see if they might really do it,” says Ofstad.

Product differentiation can be key to Airtable’s success, however that early model regarded suspiciously like a spreadsheet. “It was a database beneath, clearly, however we co-opted the spreadsheet interface, which is acquainted to most data employees,” he says. “We constructed a whole lot of the identical interactions, though we had typed fields, tables, and hyperlinks between international key relationships. However for lots of people, it simply did not click on. It took us a whole lot of iterations and doing issues like constructing templates to make it really feel completely different.”

Right here’s an instance: “Even smaller particulars like fields that had been coloured choose choices helped convey that psychological mannequin that you just’re coping with information, not a spreadsheet. We additionally at all times emphasised direct manipulation, making it really feel like you possibly can attain out and contact your knowledge. After we first constructed attachments, it got here with the drag-and-drop performance as a result of we needed it to really feel tremendous interactive, so we put a whole lot of effort into real-time structure.”

Regardless of these preliminary hurdles, there was nonetheless an early adopter crowd. “They had been programmers or database individuals, extra of that tinker persona who’s very structured of their pondering,” he says. “We had a buddy who was a video producer and he began monitoring his video productions, creating tables of his forged and crew and linking them collectively.”

Many founders may be tempted to forged a wider internet and get extra customers onto the product — however Ofstad once more cautions in opposition to shifting too shortly right here. With simply pockets of these click-into-place buyer moments, the Airtable group knew it could be an unusually gradual path to launch. 

As you assess your individual timeline, Ofstad recommends stepping again and reassessing whether or not a public launch will really assist you obtain your mission-critical objective on this early part. “We had been targeted on de-risking the primary danger for the corporate as early as attainable. For us early on, that was, ‘How can we really make this database accessible to non-programmers?’” says Ofstad. “For us that meant it was all about making it simple to make use of, iterating on a prototype and getting numerous suggestions. It appeared like launching the product publicly would not actually get us extra knowledge or speed up the trail to getting there.” 

Separate the idea of attempting to get suggestions from prospects and refining the product from the idea of a public launch.

Ofstad breaks down how that precept labored in apply:

Alpha: Keep lean whilst you de-risk your greatest hurdle.

“Our technique was to construct a really horizontal product after which roll it out to extra individuals over time. Very early on, we had a personal alpha. It was invite-only, however you possibly can refer different individuals, in order that helped us get some natural progress, however not a ton,” says Ofstad. “After perhaps 100 individuals or so, ultimately we felt like we had been in an excellent place.” This took two years, he says. “We needed to construct so many options to get to one thing helpful.” 

Along with delaying a public launch, this technique additionally saved the group comparatively lean — avoiding the early-stage lure of overhiring. “This work within the alpha part would have been actually laborious to parallelize. You possibly can’t rent a bunch of engineers to make that go quicker. It really would’ve been counterproductive to attempt to scale it up much more as a result of we wanted to nail that basis of the database. Hiring a bunch of individuals would have made it more durable to be nimble and alter the path of that basis,” he says.

In the event you’re constructing an analogous sort of product, Ofstad’s recommendation is to maintain the suggestions loop extraordinarily tight and loosen your expectations round what your MVP “ought to” appear like. “We would sit down with our prospects to see what they had been utilizing the product for. With horizontal merchandise, you construct this very generic factor and the cool half is seeing how individuals use it,” says Ofstad. 

The MVP for our product was not anyone factor. With a horizontal product, you are continually unlocking new use instances.

“As we added new options, we unlocked new use instances. It was a gradual roll of including a calendar view after which all of a sudden seeing individuals utilizing it for advertising use instances. Or including kanban and seeing individuals use it for processes and pipelines.”

Beta: Check, check, check — however push to go quicker.

“Ultimately we received to a spot the place we felt snug placing it into beta and attempting to get some extra prospects. We launched publicly on Hacker Information in 2014. We saved it as beta to provide us a possibility to have a greater public press launch in a while, and to have that beta tag on in case issues did not work proper,” says Ofstad.

“In hindsight, perhaps we waited a bit too lengthy. We most likely might have launched earlier and lower some options. However for probably the most half, we received the educational we wanted and launched once we had been prepared. We had been attempting to see if it was resonating with our prospects and if we might deal with the potential further site visitors. Did now we have the options so individuals will not lose knowledge and it gained’t be an enormous headache for us to get well it?”

“Early on, the way in which we approached our go-to-market was reverse of what most firms do, which is begin with an excellent area of interest viewers, discover them, goal them and increase to new markets,” he says.

“We began fully horizontal with a blank-slate product, and we received increasingly more slim with our give attention to touchdown prospects over time. We began seeing natural adoption for various use instances after which we’d create a whole bunch of templates.”

“But it surely’s actually solely been the previous few years that we have gotten tremendous focused with our go-to-market movement,” says Ofstad. “We have since gotten far more opinionated and narrowed the aperture. Now we’re largely targeted on advertising and product organizations by way of how we initially land in an organization. A part of that has simply been having a way more mature govt group to assist us refine this, with our CRO Seth Shaw and our CMO Archana Agrawal” (who shared her advertising classes on this earlier episode of In Depth).

However that path to figuring that out wasn’t simple. Right here’s Ofstad’s recommendation for fellow horizontal product builders:

1. Double down on early traction (fastidiously).

“Whenever you’re constructing a horizontal product, as quickly as attainable, perceive the place individuals are getting worth out of your product and actually double down. You possibly can construct a horizontal product with a deep buyer understanding of a particular use case. It is only a matter of not going too deep on it,” he says. 

“There is a stability since you additionally don’t need to take the primary use case that pops up, particularly if it is not going to be one thing that may develop lots or suit your longer-term imaginative and prescient of the corporate,” says Ofstad.

“However as quickly as you see some validation the place the shopper is within the wheelhouse of what your broader imaginative and prescient is for the product, co-build the product with them. Concentrate on understanding the issues and generalizing these into capabilities which may resolve a bunch of various use instances.”

In the event you construct a hyper-specific app for one operate, it is not going to capitalize on the broader imaginative and prescient you had for the product. Get knowledge factors from prospects, but additionally sample match that in opposition to your broader imaginative and prescient for the broader horizontal platform you are attempting to construct.

2. Mix the purposeful and the aspirational.

One of many greatest hurdles with a horizontal product was messaging. “Through the years, we have gotten increasingly more targeted on how we describe the issues we resolve and the use instances we’re good for. However earlier than we had product-market match, it was laborious to explain the product within the early days,” says Ofstad.

“We had a few messages. One was, ‘This can be a means so that you can construct software program.’ We had been largely only a database nonetheless. We hadn’t constructed issues like automations, however that is how we framed the mission. After which individually, we would say ‘It is a spreadsheet database hybrid, or a spreadsheet with the facility of a database.’ That got here from the way in which our prospects would describe us, which was, ‘It’s an easy-to-use database,’ or ‘It is a spreadsheet, plus plus.’” (We’ll word that the “Present HN” copy from 2014 learn: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid.)

3. Map out your adoption.

These “we simply went viral” product-led progress tales are by no means all that relatable for many startups which might be nonetheless struggling to search out traction. Ofstad digs deeper into Airtable’s progress trajectory:

“It occurred in a whole lot of completely different S-curves. We began seeing media firms the place we unfold word-of-mouth. Or the top of manufacturing would go from Netflix to another firm they usually’d carry the device with them. It was very gradual, and wasn’t till 2018 or in order that it began to actually inflect,” he says.

“That purposeful and industry-driven word-of-mouth progress, mixed with us constructing new capabilities that unlocked extra use instances and having the organizational maturity to increase inside firms, all layered collectively to trigger fairly strong progress previously 5 years.”

However a lot of it got here all the way down to the character of the product itself. “Any person builds one thing of their desk they usually share that with individuals on their group to do important work. As soon as individuals begin doing work in it, it generates helpful knowledge and different individuals need to devour that. So individuals invite them to the bottom. We describe these internally as golden datasets, these important datasets for an organization, like a product roadmap or a advertising calendar. When you get to that time, you get a whole lot of viral adoption on high of that.”

Key to figuring this out was the flexibility to trace these metrics. “The extra vital factor we did is that early on we had issues instrumented so we would get a notification each time anyone signed up,” he says. “As soon as we began getting extra adoption at bigger firms, we constructed out these community graphs that will present how the product unfold from particular person to particular person, after which group to group. That helped us perceive the mechanics of the product and gave us an intuitive psychological mannequin of viral adoption.”

4. Take into consideration pricing as positioning early on.

“We thought of pricing from the earliest days. Even throughout our alpha with our first pockets of customers, we had a pricing web page with a couple of completely different plans. It largely described options we hadn’t constructed but, however we a minimum of needed to border that this can be a product we will cost for,” says Ofstad.

“We additionally selected worth factors from a positioning standpoint — how can we place in opposition to the worth we expect we’ll carry to firms? We priced extra in opposition to the Salesforces and ServiceNows of the world, versus the Evernotes and Dropboxes. We did anticipate that individuals would construct purposes that energy vital firm processes on Airtable, so we needed to cost accordingly,” he says.

“The factor we did not construct for fairly some time was the precise billing system to cost our prospects. We really had a spot, buried in one among our settings pages, the place prospects might voluntarily put their bank card in, however we did not cost them. We had been amazed as a result of a few of our prospects really discovered this and put their bank cards in after which complained to us that they did not get charged,” he says.

Whereas this may occasionally appear to be the perfect drawback to have, Ofstad notes two components that could be ignored when founders hesitate over entering into pricing too early. “Our prospects had been apprehensive that Airtable would disappear. So whereas we’re constructing pricing from a advertising standpoint, it was additionally vital to convey that we had been right here to construct a sturdy enterprise,” he says.

“And I believe I might be skeptical myself if I begin utilizing a product and it is not clear how they’re being profitable. You surprise: Are they gonna promote my knowledge? Are they going to completely worth gouge in a while? That transparency is definitely good for the shopper too, and helps construct belief within the product.”

5. Preserve your head pointed ahead in the case of the competitors:

“We had been lucky to choose an area that did not have a whole lot of competitors respiration down our neck early on. After all, we did have comparable merchandise and substitutes that prospects would use, like a spreadsheet or a mission administration app, however these had been very various kinds of merchandise,” he says. “To be trustworthy, no-code wasn’t actually a factor again in 2012, and B2B productiveness software program wasn’t tremendous attractive — it was very a lot about shopper social. That afforded us a panorama the place there wasn’t a whole lot of direct competitors.”

This, after all, is not the case. However the improve in competitors does not faze Ofstad. As an alternative, right here’s his philosophy: “I used to run cross nation and monitor in highschool, and my coach would at all times say, ‘Do not look behind you. You may decelerate. Simply maintain your head pointed ahead and sense what competitors is doing, however do not give attention to it an excessive amount of, since you’ll lose monitor of the place you are going,” he says.

“The very best factor you are able to do is to have your individual sense of the imaginative and prescient for the place you need to go and to be sure you’re getting into that path. However after all, you possibly can study lots from different merchandise within the ecosystem, see what cool merchandise are launching and perceive what individuals are utilizing and the way the patron tastes are adjusting.”

Staying savvy on good merchandise and traits within the broader ecosystem is tremendous vital. However that’s completely different than focusing in your direct opponents and getting right into a myopic state of, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta construct this as a result of they did.’ That is counterproductive.

Product-market match isn’t a singular second in time — and it’s additionally a shifting goal. However wanting again, there tends to be an “aha” second for the founders, the place all of it clicks into place.

“There are a few completely different milestones that stand out. Whenever you initially see one particular person getting worth out of the product, like our buddy utilizing us for video manufacturing. Or whenever you first see a group utilizing us and getting worth out of it — we had a nonprofit that was like 10 or 15 people who began utilizing us early on for managing all of their candidates,” he says.

However the second that sticks with Ofstad was far more visceral. “We landed with WeWork and it grew virally inside the firm, going kind of wall-to-wall. After I was on this buyer tour to New York — after having largely interacted with prospects over the assist channel or Zoom — I visited WeWork. I regarded round and everyone’s pc monitor had Airtable open. And I used to be like, ‘Oh my God, that is really a factor. Folks use it.’ It grew to become a lot extra actual at that time. That was the primary second after I thought we would really constructed one thing which may make it.”

Sitting right here in 2022, it appears secure to say they did certainly make it. However for Ofstad, the journey is way from over. 

“We’re continually attempting to make the product simpler to make use of. And that is each for the person who’s constructing apps on high of Airtable, in addition to the end-user who’s utilizing these apps. We’re clearly specializing in the enterprise increasingly more, on our prospects who’re working massive departmental and company-wide processes on Airtable. So there’s lots now we have to do round larger-scale, higher permissions, all of the stuff you’d anticipate,” he says.

“Increasingly, we’re pondering of Airtable as a linked apps platform, and that is the class we’re defining. What which means is we need to give particular person groups and departments management over constructing and deploying their very own software program whereas on the identical time, connecting to shared knowledge units and shared tables that assist to interrupt down silos inside organizations.” (In the event you’d prefer to dive deeper into Airtable’s long-term technique right here, we suggest this Protocol profile on Ofstad’s co-founder Howie Liu.)