Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Airtable acquires Airplane

airplane.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 168 posts

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#61

Post by unethical_ban »

greatgib wrote: post #37
veeti wrote: post #3

"Thousands of engineers use Airplane to rapidly build UIs and workload automation for engineering, support, and operations teams." "As part of this transition, we will unfortunately be sunsetting the Airplane platform on March 1." So these "thousands of engineers" will only have two months to redo all of their work?

Probably a right punition for people thinking that they can be lazy and build their business critical apps on a random startup proprietary and closed source SaaS. Not to forget again that the cloud is just someone else's computer...

The bank is just someone else's money, the grocery store is just someone else's food, the OS is just someone else's code.

I used to use that cloud quip, until I researched what IaaS is and accepted there can be benefits. And note, that quip is usually used for IaaS, not SaaS.

That all said... This seems like a really shitty rugpull by the company.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#62

Post by adrr »

ctb9 wrote: post #2

Welp, this changes my 2024 outlook. I've been using Airplane.dev since their first post on HN, and I was repeatedly delighted with the way the product "just worked", I thought they made great choices about code vs. config vs. admin, and their feature development velocity was superb. I was ready to really jump in and move beyond simple internal tools to build complex, mission critical internal systems in airplane. Doe…

I have never used Airplane but have done projects in Retool which is really nice but little on the pricey side since they charge on a per user basis not on a per app basis. Wish they charged on a usage or app model since it makes it really expensive at first.

I know a lot of people using it so i doubt it is going away.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#63

Post by swyx »

Johnny555 wrote: post #55
swyx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if everyone was as blanket-critical of early stage SaaS as you we would get a lot less innovation (or at least challengers to keep incumbents honest). someone needs to be discerning of team/product quality, someone needs to take risks to solve pain for their stakeholders. there are good startups that are good partners, there are startups that give a good try and dont make it, and there are plain bad startups. don't t…

My company had a significant product based on an early stage startup's product -- before we signed a license with them, we negotiated a code escrow agreement with the company. And it was good that we did because about a year later they got acquired by a company that didn't want to continue selling the product we used, but we got the source code so were able to maintain the product. We picked up a couple of the develo…

woudl love to learn more - what startup was this? why could they not have gone out to market to compete with you instead of letting you whitelabel their product?

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#64

Post by senderista »

hipadev23 wrote: post #4
veeti wrote: post #3

"Thousands of engineers use Airplane to rapidly build UIs and workload automation for engineering, support, and operations teams." "As part of this transition, we will unfortunately be sunsetting the Airplane platform on March 1." So these "thousands of engineers" will only have two months to redo all of their work?

Don't integrate early-stage SaaS as critical to your business is the main lesson here. You get laid-off just like their employees when they rush toward a shitty acquisition.

I don't understand how any tech startup gets any adoption from business users with critical use cases. The risk seems obviously disqualifying.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#65

Post by dragonwriter »

swyx wrote: post #35

> As part of this transition, we will unfortunately be sunsetting the Airplane platform on March 1. We’ve closed new signups, and existing users will be receiving an email with further details. > To all our users and customers: we are sincerely grateful for your interest, support, and feedback over the years. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to learn about, collaborate with, and assist your organizations. i was/am a…

> i was/am a fan of the airplane founders but this is so disappointing. what went wrong?

The airplane founders/owners got a big payday. What makes you think that, from their perspective, something went wrong?

> no lessons to pass on to others.

Someone just paid them for all their lessons, why would they give them away for free?

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#66

Post by dvdhsu »

I have a lot of respect for the product and the folks at Airplane. And I (even as a "competitor") find it sad that such a great product is being shut down. My best guess is that they were running out of cash.

This to me is pretty surprising... because it's actually not hard to make a SaaS business profitable. You just have to build a great product, and be disciplined at hiring. It's weird that they seem to have done well on #1, but failed at #2 (which I'd deem the "easier" problem).

RE #2, I've heard they have less than $1M in ARR, but somehow (according to LinkedIn), have 61 employees. We had 4 employees when we were at $1M in ARR (and growing around 700% YoY). Even when we were growing quickly, we hired slowly: IIRC we were at around 30 employees at around $10M ARR. (That's less than half the employees Airplane had... even though we were 10x their revenue.)

When we started Retool, average headcount costs were around $300k / year. So if you have 60 heads burning $300 / year, that's $18M / year. If you only have $1M in ARR, you're burning $17M a year. Ouch! (If you're burning $17M a year, it's not hard to see why a fundraise of $32M would only last you 18 months.)

To me, it's tragic that a great product like Airplane has to shut down. Tragic both for the team, but also for its customers (who have three months to rebuild everything). Building a great product is the hardest part of starting a startup, not "not hiring". I'm hoping that a more challenging fundraising environment will make ~profitable startups more common going forward. (Especially because it shouldn't be that hard to make a SaaS company profitable!)

My sense is that many other startups are going to be going through something similar over the next few years. For example, last I heard, another one of our competitors (with the initials SB) has less than $1M in ARR and has 40+ employees. I feel that the 2020 - 2022 fundraising environment has spawned a bunch of fairly unsustainable businesses — and many of them will shut down in the next year or two. As consumers, it would be wise for all of us to be conservative when it comes to which platforms we choose to build our infrastructure on.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#67

Post by swyx »

jeremyjh wrote: post #58
swyx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if they were spending that much on cloud/servers/infra they wouldnt have a revenue problem... typically

They offered a nearly free runtime and free network ingress/egress. You’d only have to buy one $10 seat and use it for ETL to cost them a lot of money a month. No idea if anyone did that though.

most reasonable companies have limits to prevent abuse of that stuff, in the fine print. a professional company like airplane would not let that bankrupt them, this is rookie league

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#68

Post by senderista »

Johnny555 wrote: post #55
swyx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if everyone was as blanket-critical of early stage SaaS as you we would get a lot less innovation (or at least challengers to keep incumbents honest). someone needs to be discerning of team/product quality, someone needs to take risks to solve pain for their stakeholders. there are good startups that are good partners, there are startups that give a good try and dont make it, and there are plain bad startups. don't t…

My company had a significant product based on an early stage startup's product -- before we signed a license with them, we negotiated a code escrow agreement with the company. And it was good that we did because about a year later they got acquired by a company that didn't want to continue selling the product we used, but we got the source code so were able to maintain the product. We picked up a couple of the develo…

How many businesses have the in-house expertise to maintain a defunct codebase? And for how many of those that do is it actually an optimal use of resources?

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#69

Post by temp_praneshp »

jhatemyjob wrote: post #42
swyx wrote: post #35

> As part of this transition, we will unfortunately be sunsetting the Airplane platform on March 1. We’ve closed new signups, and existing users will be receiving an email with further details. > To all our users and customers: we are sincerely grateful for your interest, support, and feedback over the years. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to learn about, collaborate with, and assist your organizations. i was/am a…

-

[flagged]

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#70

Post by swyx »

dvdhsu wrote: post #66

I have a lot of respect for the product and the folks at Airplane. And I (even as a "competitor") find it sad that such a great product is being shut down. My best guess is that they were running out of cash. This to me is pretty surprising... because it's actually not hard to make a SaaS business profitable. You just have to build a great product, and be disciplined at hiring. It's weird that they seem to have done…

> You just have to build a great product [1],

sarcasm or is there a missing reference somewhere?

Post reply on HN