131–140 of 155 posts
I'm always puzzled by stories like this: Why not just cut staffing to a minimal number of people -- go back to existing customers, and renegotiate existing contracts down (due to reduced support), and try to balance out the revenue with costs to get back to some level of profitability. 2-3 person indie hackers that bring in 400k in revenue are considered wildly successful. I have to imagine airplane.dev was bringing…
What's Airplane's best alternative to build internal apps? Windmill and Retool were mentioned but I'm not convinced of them. Any guidance will be appreciated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such a founder perspective. Here is another; they fucked over their customers. Didn't even open source it on the way out?! Nobody with a memory for this is going use their products without second thought in the future. But peoples memories are short and a sucker is born every day. Would a board be lucky to have Ravi on it? Sure, maybe. So their personal success is secured fuck their users; slow clap .
I'm an airplane user, and have already moved our tooling over to retool. Fuck over their customers? I'm sorry, but you have a choice in what tools you acquire, buy, and invest in, if you don't take into account that the company is small, new, and requires VC funding to exist, I just can't empathize with you if you are angry about it not working out. I use new software because it usually gives me access to the team in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fuck over their customers? Yeah, I'm sorry you can't see that. > There are so many reasons it's not easy or straight forward to open source the software of a startup that failed I'm guessing zero effort was made to continue service for existing customers. If there were efforts made that failed, they would have mentioned it for PR. > All that said: please, don't use new software or tools, avoid startups and steer cl…
> Yeah, I'm sorry you can't see that. "Fuck over" to me implies malicious intent, if it doesn't to you then that may explain why we have differing points of view. > Apparently you don't need to be to have a founder perspective. How many startup founders have you worked closely with in your career when the company they ran was < 50 employees?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fuck over their customers? Yeah, I'm sorry you can't see that. > There are so many reasons it's not easy or straight forward to open source the software of a startup that failed I'm guessing zero effort was made to continue service for existing customers. If there were efforts made that failed, they would have mentioned it for PR. > All that said: please, don't use new software or tools, avoid startups and steer cl…
> Yeah, I'm sorry you can't see that. "Fuck over" to me implies malicious intent, if it doesn't to you then that may explain why we have differing points of view. > Apparently you don't need to be to have a founder perspective. How many startup founders have you worked closely with in your career when the company they ran was < 50 employees?
One factor that no one seems to have noticed is that both cofounders, Ravi and Joshua, have already built fairly big companies. Ravi was the co-founder at Heap (he took over my co-founder spot after I left), and Joshua was the CTO at Benchling. Both of those companies have raised >$100M. After that success, the prospect of continuing to run a middling company in the shadow of Retool isn't very appealing.
Do you know how Heap is doing these days? I see many similarities to the article we're commenting on.
Something about this narrative doesn't make sense though. Why would Airtable go through all this trouble just to get a product owner for something unrelated? Did Airtable even pay anything for Airplane.dev or was this just a face-saving maneuver? I don't understand how the Airtable board would sign-off on this if they are just tossing the tech AND all the users. Outside of those assets, acquihires happen with the aqu…
It still makes sense for Airtable, as they do get someone with a proven track record of building tech products in general to build out an important division of their company. You say that it's for something "unrelated", but integrating AI capabilities (Airtable isn't looking to build new foundational models I assume), should definitely be in their ballpark. Though of course that's a gamble with a very low bus factor.
So it's a win-win-win for Airtable, the CEO/CTO and the investors. Airtable gets a capable leadership person to de-risk their AI endeavours (where IIRC they were lagging a bit behind competition like Notion). The CEO gets to work in a less stressful position, and maybe something that's a more interesting topic to him. The shared investor is happy as it strengthens their already strong unicorn company at the expense of a company that probably wouldn't be able to grow to notable size for them. Many of the other investors that are individuals I'd wager were happy that their money isn't tied up in Airplane anymore and that they can place new bets in a hot AI market (just a guess based on who is on that list).
> Why not find a way to do right by their customers if Airtable truly isn't interested in the product? Open source it
Presumably because the cost of that is significant for little to no gain for them, especially if you factor in the opportunity cost.
> or find a company willing to take the product and customers on?
I think the buyers that make most sense there would be e.g. Retool, which are too close of competitors to Airtable that they want to directly sell marketshare to them. It's probably better for Airtable to let the customers spread across all their competitors.
That's a shame. I really think the world of software infrastructure needs a "more user friendly, batteries included service orchestrator" as an alternative for K8s and public clouds offerings.
Thanks to OP for the candid view. I was confused by Airplane.dev since it seemed like it was taking Temporal and putting SaaS + UX chrome over it. Temporal seemed like the hard part. It also made me wonder why Temporal wasn't doing something end-user friendly in parallel with their Cloud offering. I do enjoy Temporal and have shared my OSS related to it (Terraform modules and a half-baked Terraform Provider). Regardi…
However, it's still sad that in the end, the customers suffered the most. While I agree that the founder probably did fairly well in his situation, it's unfortunate that he did not consider or did not manage to achieve other options, such as buying out the company from investors. They had a decent product that could have become a successful and profitable business within its niche.