Airtable gets $52M in funding • Hacker News Board

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#81

Post by digitalbase » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 10:37 PM UTC

Airtable is awesome.

We have been throwing out a ton of self-built admin forms and CRUD pages by Airtable bases. Now people inside the company can add new fields, versioning by default, super simple interface.

Largest con: No webhooks. Which makes you pull data every X minutes to find out if a record changed. I would throw them a lot more money (280$/month now) if they just had webhooks as it could replace a TON internal systems/reports.

Second con: Ids. I would want them to support client delivered record_ids. Right now airtable has it's own ID field (which can not be set). Therefore if you want syncing to work efficiently you need to store that airtable_id on your side to do REST updates (PATCH). Would be better that airtable record_ids could be provided by the client so I can inject database primary keys and not have to store/query their record_id

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#82

Post by cyberferret » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 10:40 PM UTC

veritas3241 wrote: post #19

Does anyone know how this compares to Coda[0]? I saw a post a while back about Coda and signed up to get an invite but haven't heard anything since. [0] https://coda.io/welcome

Hang in there - I applied for the Coda beta several months ago, but only got the Beta invite a few days ago.

First impressions, quite good really, but we've only created some small tables and pages in it so far. I am a developer by trade, and usually eschew apps that are based around "programming for non programmers", but I can see that Coda IS quite useful for people who are non technical. I especially like that I can create 'sub views' from a master table to share with users so they can see a summarised view pertinent only to them.

Biggest drawback, as another commenter has pointed out here, is that I have no idea what the costs (if any) will be for our company once they finish the Beta. For that reason we will avoid putting anything mission critical on there until we know more.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#83

Post by digitalbase » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 10:40 PM UTC

For everyone that does not get what makes this different from Google Sheets have a look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGUCqWa0Msc where the CEO of Airtable (Howie Liu) is live coding an example on top of Airtable

Google spreadsheets is a collaborative excel Airtable is much more than that (forms, views, versioning)

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#84

Post by ereli1 » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 10:40 PM UTC

inopinatus wrote: post #68

mjw1007 wrote: post #20

I like airtable, but the per-base row limits (50,000 before you reach "contact us for pricing") are too small for many of the things I'd like to use it for. And there's something a bit odd in their pricing model, isn't there? The plus tier is $10 per user per month with a limit of 5,000 records per base; the pro tier is $20 per user per month, with a limit of 50,000 records per base. Suppose I want to use it to repla…

Wearing my SaaS product manager hat I’d say shoot them an email describing your expectations and suggesting your price point. I’ve rejigged product packaging myself in response to high quality/specific presales feedback and reached additional market segments as a result. And conversely, I have an unmarketed plan with despite being a tiny customer with no leverage - the point being that the packages marketed aren’t al…

This is especially true for SaaS where the margins are huge and business models are designed to simplify and obfuscate the true costs of running a business.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#85

Post by cyberferret » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 10:42 PM UTC

viksit wrote: post #58

I for one hope Salesforce acquires Airtable and integrates them into Quip. That will be a kick-ass workflow and documentation system.

Doesn't the article state that the founder of Airtable sold his previous startup to Salesforce and regrets it and doesn't want to go down the same path again?

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#86

Post by conanbatt » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 10:42 PM UTC

digitalbase wrote: post #83

For everyone that does not get what makes this different from Google Sheets have a look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGUCqWa0Msc where the CEO of Airtable (Howie Liu) is live coding an example on top of Airtable Google spreadsheets is a collaborative excel Airtable is much more than that (forms, views, versioning)

Using zeit's now on that demo. Damn that service is so convenient.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#87

Post by petervandijck » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 10:43 PM UTC

Airtable runs businesses and I can easily see them becoming a platform (with other businesses being built on top of them) in the next few years. Amazing product and they've nailed something no-one else has for decades (merge excel and db advantages into one product).

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#88

Post by conanbatt » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 10:43 PM UTC

emddudley wrote: post #35

Just went to sign up using my Google account... why do they need to view my contacts?

To filter out the users that are not worth the effort to do support for.

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#89

Post by digitalbase » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 10:45 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #86

digitalbase wrote: post #83

For everyone that does not get what makes this different from Google Sheets have a look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGUCqWa0Msc where the CEO of Airtable (Howie Liu) is live coding an example on top of Airtable Google spreadsheets is a collaborative excel Airtable is much more than that (forms, views, versioning)

Using zeit's now on that demo. Damn that service is so convenient.

The video made me discover zeit. It changed my life :-0

Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding

#90

Post by snomad » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 10:49 PM UTC

ProAm wrote: post #69

kornish wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the better question is: during a life-and-death fire rescue effort, is it a better use of time to use Airtable as a backend or to write, deploy, and operate a concurrent editing backend yourself? There's a clear answer here.

Good point but most states have disaster relief infrastructure already in place for events like this? If this was scrounged up the day of it would make sense.

Why do you believe most states have IT-related disaster relief infrastructure in place? I worked for several years in CA govt, I would be surprised if anything beyond the major metros has much in place for coordinating shelters, etc. In fact, the sonoma fires are documented to have had lots of problems with reverse 911.