Did you think about going very thin and attacking a vertical like CRMs or personal task managers? Or were you like, “Let’s go broad from day zero?”Ī lot of investors gave us that advice and said, “Hey, you should start with a very narrow use case.” But we were pretty committed early on to building a horizontal product. If you look back, our Series Seed pitch deck was very similar to what our vision is today. So the pre-thinking of the market and opportunity happened well before. Even a year before that, while we were both working our full-time jobs, Howie had the broader idea and vision for the company. It was probably three or four months later that we started showing it to investors and pitching the product. We quit our jobs and within a couple of weeks had a very early prototype. How quickly from you quitting your jobs did you have something to show people? It was over the course of a year, a year and a half, before we had a real alpha product for people to actually sign up for it. At that point we got initial customers using the product and validating parts of it, giving us feedback. But we knew the collaboration aspect was important, and wanted it to be fully real-time.Īfter six months or so of just a purely front-end prototype, we started building out the server side. There wasn’t backend persistence, but it still allowed you to simulate the collaborative aspects of it. Pretty early on we built out a simple collaborative layer it still did something hacky, it shared data through local storage. We definitely were building the prototype with collaboration in mind. Did you worry that it was too focused on the single-player, single-session use case? Or you thought that if you could nail that, that was extensible to the whole problem? What’s the design to make that accessible to an end-user? Building out this spreadsheet interface, and this very simple table metaphor that people could easily interact with and understand, was the first thing we needed to de-risk. The main problem was simplifying this very complex thing in the database. We tried to prove out the interaction paradigms and the design. And we didn’t actually build the backend, so it would work really well and persist to local storage in the browser. We built the whole thing in our own Javacript framework on the web, in the browser. It was basically a complete, front-end only product. Subscribe Were you prototyping one feature at a time and testing it, or were you prototyping the whole thing? We pretty much took that approach in the early days of Airtable: create a lot of prototypes, create a very early demo, try it, show it to people, get feedback, and iterate quickly. The next day, rinse and repeating, making a bunch of changes, and testing that with users. The way they invented the initial GUI operating system, and the early days of Mac, was a lot of prototyping, coming up with metaphors, and testing them out with users. It showed us this was possible and kept us going. Moving from a command-line interface to something much more accessible to a broader audience. We saw these old products like HyperCard, old database products that were end-user focused, the creation of the original GUI operating system. Or the execution hasn’t quite been right. A lot of the best ideas have been around for a while, and the time hasn’t been right. In some ways it validated what we were working on. When you say you did research on early tech pioneers, I’ve talked to lots of entrepreneurs and haven’t heard that before. We actually knew each other in college and used to work on hack projects together and talk about tech a lot. We were inspired by the problem of taking this thing that we do as programmers, which is create useful software, and enabling anybody to do that. At Salesforce he saw that a lot of useful business software is more or less just a database with some CRUD actions and views and workflow on top of it. I was at Google, Howie had started a YC company, Etacts, that was bought by Salesforce. We both left our respective companies about the same time. I did a lot of reading from a lot of early computing pioneers, like Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart. Early days were just trying to set a solid foundation we took our time learning about the space. Our third co-founder, Emmett, joined shortly after. You started in 2012, give us a quick timeline of what it took to get Airtable live.Īndrew Ofstad: I started in 2012 with my co-founder Howie, our CEO. Immad Akhund: I want to dive into the journey of getting the product to market initially. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Highlights from Series Tea with Andrew Ofstad How Airtable thought about pricing their Pro account
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