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Airtable acquires Airplane

airplane.dev

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Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#71

Post by johnnybananas »

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…

I think the Airplane Linkedin is overrun by people who say they work on an Airplane (the word not the company) :) It looks like they only had ~20 employees so not a super large team.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#72

Post by thrwy_hyperbase »

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…

Throwaway because I worked there:

Re the 1-2b tweet, two important numbers (2023 ARR, and hence growth rate) are wildly off.

The tweeter runs cbinsights, and then quotes cbinsights in the tweet. Super wried.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#73

Post by dvdhsu »

swyx wrote: post #70
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?

Sorry, forgot to write the footnote so just removed it. Agreed that building a great product and finding PMF is hard. But "not hiring" shouldn't be!

(So yes, I suppose the comment was tongue in cheek, haha.)

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#74

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…

> For example, last I heard, another one of our competitors (with the initials SB) has less than $1M in ARR and has 40+ employees.

as an investor in an "SB" that is tangentially related, i panicked a bit. found https://www.trustradius.com/products/retool/competitors and went "ah."

yeaa many such cases

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#75

Post by bdcravens »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #44
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…

> Also didnt Airtable just layoff 230 people 4 months ago. now they're acquihiring? What was the reason for the layoff? Layoffs often just mean something like "we overhired/overinvested in this area, and it turns out that area is less important to our strategy than we thought."

The pandemic/WFH was probably a boon for Airtable, as companies were learning new ways to collaborate. Hiring and firing can be highly cyclical or trendy (think of how many companies have desperately hired for AI roles in the past year).

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#76

Post by bdcravens »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #8
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?

Potentially an acquihire due to exhausting runway? Would align with the idea of a startup funding crunch in the current macro, but only someone with transaction details and willing to violate an NDA (if one exists) would be able to share (if details aren’t going to be made public). Depending on comp, benefits, and infra, it is not outside of the realm of possibility to burn through $32M (Sep 2022 Series B raise) in ~…

If they indeed ran out of runway, then Airplane missed an opportunity for a memorable "our incredible journey" post.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#77

Post by swyx »

thrwy_hyperbase wrote: post #72
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…

Throwaway because I worked there: Re the 1-2b tweet, two important numbers (2023 ARR, and hence growth rate) are wildly off. The tweeter runs cbinsights, and then quotes cbinsights in the tweet. Super wried.

hmm thanks. anand should have gotten that feedback, and yet his correction (https://twitter.com/asanwal/status/1703598605406265535) wasn't "hey i was super off"

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#78

Post by Viaaaron »

ouch! migrating tools can be intimidating for such an important part of your business

happy to advise for free or build-out in Retool for any Airplane users stuck with 2-months to figure out what to do....

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#79

Post by thrwy_hyperbase »

swyx wrote: post #77
thrwy_hyperbase wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwaway because I worked there: Re the 1-2b tweet, two important numbers (2023 ARR, and hence growth rate) are wildly off. The tweeter runs cbinsights, and then quotes cbinsights in the tweet. Super wried.

hmm thanks. anand should have gotten that feedback, and yet his correction ( https://twitter.com/asanwal/status/1703598605406265535 ) wasn't "hey i was super off"

Is he a well known person? The tone of his tweets doesn't sound like someone who owns up to mistakes.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#80

Post by ijustlovemath »

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…

If they released the customer's data in some sort of specified format, would you support importing their workflows into Retool?
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