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Airtable acquires Airplane

airplane.dev

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Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#91

Post by xyst »

antisthenes wrote: post #89
xyst wrote: post #59

Buy out competition. Phase them out. Migrate customers to your product. Bump prices across all tiers. Pump your P&L. Sell stats to vulture capitalists for Z funding round. Rinse and repeat. Eventually IPO. Founders cash out equity. Retail investors left holding the bag and leadership handed off to B-school flunkies. Product eventually circles the drain. Gets picked up by some private equity and guts it for pieces and…

No need to bash on B-schools. There are plenty of grifters and unremarkable people at A-schools who got in there with money and a white-sounding name. The rest is accurate.

B-schools is “business schools”.

I wasn’t referring to the “prestige” of certain colleges (ie, “Ivy League” vs public school)

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#93

Post by crooked-v »

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…

Why would you expect anything different than all the other "our incredible journey" notices? https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#94

Post by hobs »

Just a few days ago I was reading a post about how low code wasn't that great, and a poster talked about how they had an intern build their entire business on airplane and they were completely sold on low code solutions.

This is just one of the many times I think that not owning your own stack always comes to bite your ass in the end.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#95

Post by [deleted] »

johnnybananas wrote: post #71
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.

[deleted]

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#96

Post by wly_cdgr »

IvyMike wrote: post #47

I don't understand the tone of this announcement at all. "This is your captain speaking. I'm excited to announce that I have a parachute. Also, the plane is crashing. I wish you all the best in the new year."

What don't you understand? The captain likes that he has a parachute and doesn't give a flying fuck about you now that he no longer needs your money. This is just another expression of the enduring essence of Silicon Valley; it would be shocking to see something different.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#97

Post by kinj28 »

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 completely echo the sentiment of being frugal. (We are a competition to both retool and airplane and bootstrapped)

One of the companies we sold earlier was around leadership learning content and I was attending one shoot where the CEO of india unilever business was recollecting lessons from professor Ram Charan. one of them broadly equated inverse relationship between aspiration and resource as a determinant of entrepreneurial mindset. And they at unilever used to artificially starve resources to create such an environment for out of the box thinking. Net net there mostly exists a way to achieve things with minimum resources. And tough markets calls for such measures even more.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#98

Post by rubenfiszel »

(Founder of windmill.dev, the closest alternative to Airplane and we are OSS)

Congrats on the acquisition Airplane team. You were a strong inspiration for us, a precursor and set a high-quality bar for pro-code developer platforms. I have nothing but respect for the Airplane team and we probably wouldn't exist in our current form without your competition.

We are ready to migrate all Airplane customers and the migration would be very smooth as many of Airplane concepts map 1:1 to our own concepts. If you need urgent migration, ruben@windmill.dev

One customer, nocd, migrated hundreds of scheduled scripts and workflows in just a few weeks and with only minor changes.

Our platform being fully open-source, you will never be at the risk of us sunsetting anything since you can fully self-host it (it is not an hybrid deployment model like Airplane where the Control plane are in the cloud). We are used by thousands of businesses including a few F500 at scale and can send reference over emails.

We are a smaller team, have raised reasonably and are close to break-even. As an open-source product, I keep in mind to resist the urge of raising too aggressively so we can keep control of our destiny and never betray our open-source principles of transparency and fair pricing.

(note: we have an example repo of the folder layout one can use to be backed by git: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-sync-example, it's not all that different from airplane. See our CLI guide here: https://www.windmill.dev/docs/advanced/cli)

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#99

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

unethical_ban wrote: post #61
greatgib wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not good examples IMHO. The bank is legally your money. The OS can be freely reinstalled without hassles.

As for stores, they all have the same way of purchasing stuff, and if they all shut down, society would collapse and you have bigger problems.

Re: Airtable acquires Airplane

#100

Post by encoderer »

we do a lot of cron-related seo and for years the airplane guys have been buying ads on tons of cron-related terms including our own brand, with the pitch “ditch your cron jobs for airplane”.

Sigh. It truly sucks for the devs that took them up on that pitch. Meanwhile cron is still working fine.

In their defense, dev tools businesses are hard. We’ve navigated it by staying lean with very efficient go to market, but the traditional VC scale-up is very hard to pull off.

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