It's great to see, that people see real value in the market for project management SaaS solutions. We started developing Zenkit (https://zenkit.com) 1 1/2 years ago and have since then seen an explosion of new and amazing solutions coming to the market. I take that as a sign, that we're in the right market. I'm very excited about our future, and Airtable's. Congrats to Airtable for closing a new funding round!
Airtable gets $52M in funding
151–160 of 199 posts
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
if they are comparing Airtable with Spreadsheet, why there is a constraint on # of records unlike spreadsheet(although Excel sheets are limited to 1.048m or so records per sheet but that's plenty I think to work with)? They do have another constraint for free account allowing only 2GB storage but then that alone should be enough and they should just allow adding as many rows as one can until one gets maxed out with t…
It's also a provisioning problem. Let's assuming that the new pricing model is based on usage per user, like 50,000 records per user, and how are you suppose to track each individual record, even that is possible, it would not be very practical as the every CRUD operations would require a record count referenced to the user. Keep X records per Base makes the operation a lot easier and technically much more feasible.
I wouldn't suggest anything so complicated. Rather (if it isn't a technical limitation), I'd suggest they increase the per-base limit for customers who pay for more users, or else add a third paid tier above 'pro'.
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#153Pg's startup idea YC would fund from 2008: 22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid. People often use Excel as a lightweight database. I suspect there's an opportunity to create the program such users wish existed, and that there are new things you could do if it were web-based. Like make it easier to get data into it, through forms or scraping. Don't make it feel like a database. That frightens people. The question to…
I wonder what pg thought of dabbledb
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#154It's amazing how we are still using grid design for every thing and not much has improved other than few UI improvements. Maybe it's natural for our brains to map lists and tables.
And why do we need so many of these sheet apps. I remember my colleague showing me smartsheets. I wasn't impressed then too. Why spend so much time and energy to move to slightly better sheet.
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#155Anyone else getting a bit of a dodgy PR vibe about this post and all the glowing comments, or is it just me?
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#156This is pretty similar to DabbleDB. I wonder why this was so much more successful than DabbleDB. https://techcrunch.com/2006/03/11/dabbledb-online-app-buildi... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY
I'm not sure it's more successful yet.
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole charged-per-user SaaS culture is stupid. SaaS had to be priced somehow, then someday someone came up with the idea of charging per-user and everybody followed that up, but it is not smart. Most SMB end up sharing accounts, which makes your product look worse than it actually is and at the same time makes your users miserable.
That's one of the reasons I love Basecamp's pricing model - a flat $99/month for as many users as you'd like.
We recently decided to follow that path, but for us additional users will not have any significant increase in cost.
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#158Airtable is awesome. We have been throwing out a ton of self-built admin forms and CRUD pages by Airtable bases. Now people inside the company can add new fields, versioning by default, super simple interface. Largest con: No webhooks. Which makes you pull data every X minutes to find out if a record changed. I would throw them a lot more money (280$/month now) if they just had webhooks as it could replace a TON inte…
Zapier conveniently replaces web hooks and adds some mapping between fields. Try it out, they have a connector (Zapier calls this an Action)for airtable that works great. Edit: direct link: https://Zapier.com
When I last used this, it only supported polling (15 minutes at a time iirc).
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zapier conveniently replaces web hooks and adds some mapping between fields. Try it out, they have a connector (Zapier calls this an Action)for airtable that works great. Edit: direct link: https://Zapier.com
When I last used this, it only supported polling (15 minutes at a time iirc).
It now supports real time web hooks.
Gosh I sound like a Zapier salesman :)
Re: Airtable gets $52M in funding
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless airtable becomes its own thing worth a multiple of 50M $... they’ll prob need to sell. It just doesn’t seem like an IPOable business to me.
I dont know, I rely on Excel for everything in my day to day work, and it is so flexible and terrible at the same time, I would gladly pay for a different tool that makes me look 2x smarter. The whole corporate world that insists on doing something 'in Excel' is a ripe market for such an IPOable business
People have been trying that for years.