Airtable’s path to product-market fit — co-founder Andrew Ofstad on building horizontal products

[00:00:00] Todd Jackson: Andrew welcome to the show.

[00:00:02] Andrew Ofstad: Hey, Todd. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:03] Todd Jackson: Yeah. I'm excited in today's show to go really deep into the early days of Airtable, specifically on product design and go to market. You know, there's so much that gets glossed over. When you, when you hear about founding stories and the founders I'm working with today, really want to hear the tactics, how to think about their first MVP, how to figure out their ideal customer profile, how to identify the right growth model.

[00:00:25] And I think Airtable is just such an interesting example to learn from because it's just so difficult to build,  a big, horizontal, powerful product. And you've obviously had a lot of success with it over the last 10 years. So to rewind back to the beginning, Andrew I've, I've heard you tell the story of how Airtable got started about how you met your co-founders in college.

[00:00:43] Uh, but for those who aren't familiar, could you give a quick recap.

[00:00:47] Andrew Ofstad: Sure. Yeah. So kind of going way back. We, uh, we met at duke,  myself and Howie and Emmett, we were all kind of the tech nerds there. And this is kind of back in the days. I think we probably met in 2005 when the established path was very much, you [00:01:00] know, banking consulting or med school 

[00:01:02] And we were sort of the weirdos that like to talk about programming and video games and this place called Silicon valley that like, wasn't sort of, you know, on the radar of most duke students and, you know, kind of like started reading hacker news when that first came out and we'd get lunch and jamming ideas and just kind of were  kind of good friends 

[00:01:18] And so, you know, after college, we kind of went our separate ways. Uh, I got this job at Accenture. They had like this R and D department. They called tech labs and. So my job there was kind of building demos and prototypes of, you know, iPhone apps. And, uh, actually, like, I think that might have been even been before the app store was out, but just kind of like demos of cool things for our customers.

[00:01:39] And I actually, how he was a year below me at duke and I got him his first job at Accenture, I, you know, put in a good word. And  my manager was like, all right, this guy looks solid. Let's hire him. And the first day he actually didn't show up to work. Like I just had this empty desk next to me and I'm like, oh my God, where's where's Howie.

[00:01:55] And he called me like kind of frantic. And he is like, Hey, you know, I decided like last minute I really [00:02:00] wanna do this startup. And so I'm not coming to work. So kind of, uh, burn some bridges there, but, you know, uh, that was  the first attempt to work together. Um, and he actually tried to convince me to start work them on that company, but I just started this job and, and so 

[00:02:11]  didn't make the leap. And, uh, later on,  Howie's company was bought by Salesforce. I was the AP at Google and, and the sort of PM occasion program there. I, worked on Android for a year and maps for a few years. And eventually we were kind of both into place where we were at Salesforce and Google respectively as product managers, you know, decided we wanted to kind of take the leap together and start working on air table and,  the rest is sort of history from there.

[00:02:34] But, uh, you know, it took us another year to convince Emmett who was our  third friend from duke, And he was the best programmer we knew. So we eventually convinced him and he joined us about a year later, but that, that's  the short, short backstory on  how we got started.

[00:02:46] Todd Jackson: cool. So, Andrew, can you talk about where you got the idea for air table? Like, what was the early vision that

[00:02:54] Andrew Ofstad:  yeah, the early vision was very much, you know, to try to democratize software creation. And [00:03:00] for us,  we had like this crazy superpower of being able to build software that we had sort of just really, uh, you know, loved and, and kind of had given us all these advantages in our careers.

[00:03:10] And you could just have this tremendous influence through software. You can, you know, uh, build something and deploy it to people. And it's very cheap to do. And within an organization, you can have a lot of influence, even if you're not in a leadership position.

[00:03:22] So for us, that was kind of a lot of the broad vision was how do we make. Software creation easier for  non-programmers. And a lot of the inspiration too, was kind of thinking over the course of computing history. And there's very much the early days of computing, which was all about command lines and doing these sort of arcane commands.

[00:03:39] And that's how you operated a computer. And it was only through the sort of hard work of like the early, uh, you know, Xerox park and the gooey and apple Mac to kind of take that computing and make it more accessible to everybody. So very much we're inspired by that. And like, how do we take this thing, uh, of, of software creation and programming and really make that more accessible to a much larger audience.

[00:03:58]  so early on is very much like [00:04:00] an intellectual pursuit of like, you know, wanting to, to learn more about the history of, of software and, uh, how the Goey was invented and so on and so forth. And we all had had a passion for that and wanted to do the same thing for, for, um, software to kinda give everybody a so software stack, they can build useful  software on top of.

[00:04:18] Todd Jackson: And so, you know, there's a lot of founders I'd say just getting started with, with their companies today and attempting to validate the idea they're they're pursuing. Did you three do anything in the early days of air table to kind of help prove to yourself that it was a good idea?

[00:04:33] Andrew Ofstad: We, we were a bit trained in that way. I would say, I think at the time is very much about the lean startup and getting early customer validation and failing fast. And a lot of companies were pivoting every three months and, you know, kind of like there was this book making the circles called, like the seven steps to the epiphany that very much like espouse this kind of lean company development model where you just, you know, put out a super, uh, rough prototype to get to know the customer and kind of, uh, quickly pivot.

[00:04:59] If it it's not [00:05:00] looking like it's gonna stick. So we kind of took more of a first principles approach and, uh, didn't really wanna just kind of throw idea hit at the wall with the company. And like I said before, we were like really interested in this general space of software creation. And how do you take  a database and programming and make it way easier and more accessible.

[00:05:17] And I think just intellectually we're super, uh, interested and, and excited about, about kind of, you know, going down that path. And so I think,  we spent a lot of time early on just  doing research and almost like on a sabbatical, like reading all this prior art of, of old, uh, computing pioneers, like the Douglas Ingle Barts and the bill Atkinsons, uh, who kind of, you know, helped invent the, the gooey, uh, reading lots of essays on that playing with old products, like HyperCard, that kind of had flavors of software creation for everybody.

[00:05:44] And, uh, you know, even kind of like more contemporaries, like Brett Victor kind of read a lot about how to visualize complex systems. So for us, it was  a passion of like learning and, and sort of, uh, understanding the prior art. And I think simultaneously, you know, how he was at Salesforce, [00:06:00] where, uh, his company was acquired and really like, can learn more about the enterprise software market and saw that most business applications out there are essentially just kind of databases and views and business logic on top.

[00:06:10] And there's a lot of reinventing the wheel and, and sort of vertical software. So really we sort of like saw the business potential there where, you know, Salesforce was this giant platform where it's more or less just a flexible database, but  you have to sort of be a advanced admin to UN understand how to configure it and to build it.

[00:06:28] So we saw the potential of opening up that type of software creation to a much larger market and really kinda spent a lot of time thinking about like, okay, what is the market for this? Let's think about spreadsheets.  they've been around forever, but they are like the Kell app, but most of the time, the way people use them is to kind of track objects  they're tracking people, companies, simple tables, and they're not doing modeling and number crunching, which is where they're invented for.

[00:06:49] So, you know, all is to say like, I think the point is the, we had like this long, early gestation period where we kind of did our research both on the,  technological challenge, the sort of [00:07:00] market and kind of like the, the precedents be before us. And I think really sort of saw that we could build a big company here and, uh, that could kind of put us in the right mindset to say like, Hey, this might take a long time to do.

[00:07:11] Let's make sure we're dedicated to it. Um, and sort of informed a lot of the ways we kind of built the company in the early days.

[00:07:17] Todd Jackson: it. So like, almost from like, from the very beginning, you were committed to this idea of software creation for everybody. You, you had done the research, you knew it was a really big market and you were, you were just sort of in it  for the long haul from the beginning.

[00:07:29] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah, definitely. And I, I think it, it, would've been hard to get that level of conviction without having that period of just kind of like going deep on the problem without having like formally broken ground on kind of building the product and trying to like get customers and, and so on and so forth. So we, we kind of, uh, took our time early on to make sure that it's something we were committed to.

[00:07:47] And I think that was super helpful. And obviously it helped that we were friends,  But I think, uh, if you're gonna sort of do, like we did and kind of tackle a horizontal product that is pretty hard to kind of market and get started and, and just like has a, [00:08:00] uh, kind of a lot of stuff that has to be built to get to MVP.

[00:08:02] I, I sort of recommend, you know, taking that time to make sure that you're dedicated and make sure you're  super interested in the problem space and like the people you're working with.

[00:08:10] Todd Jackson: Yeah. So related to that, I think I've heard you say that you optimized in the early days for, for raising larger amounts of money, even if it meant more dilution. Um, and simultaneously you kept your burn rate down because you knew, you know, air table was gonna be this long journey, big product to build.

[00:08:24] Can you tell us about that strategy and, and maybe what advice you'd give to founders who are looking for ways to stretch their runway?

[00:08:32] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah for us, it was very much,  at any given point we were trying to figure out what we had to de-risk in order to kinda get to the next stage for the company. So I think, uh, initially like very early on it's like, uh, what, how do we actually make this  the database accessible to normal people and, and non-programmers, and, uh, so, so it was all about just sort of.

[00:08:52] Can we actually take this and make it easy to use iterating on a prototype, getting lots of feedback and kind of trying to de-risk that. [00:09:00] And I think that's something that's really hard to paralyze. Like it, it just kind of takes a team of, uh, a few people just daily kind of working on it and, uh, getting feedback and iterating.

[00:09:10] And you can't really like hire a bunch of engineers to kind of make that go faster. So, um, so, so I think like the early challenges we had kind of necessitated having a small focus team and actually it would've been counterproductive to try to scale it up a lot more because we sort of needed to nail that foundation of the database.

[00:09:28] Everything else was kind of built on top of that. So if we would've hired a bunch of people to kind of build stuff on top of the early foundation, we had it, would've slowed us down those iterations and it would've been sort of harder to be nimble and change the direction of that foundation. So really, I think for us,  the long runway was, was both a function of, we raised a lot of money, but also we wanted to be super lean and focused on, uh, de-risking  the main risk for the company as early as possible.

[00:09:53] And, and sort of only paralyzed once we kind of knew that we had a good foundation to build on build on, and that meant that we just had like a [00:10:00] lot, um, longer runway to you.

[00:10:01] Todd Jackson: So what did the first version of air table actually look like? Like what, what were you trying to accomplish with, with the early prototypes?

[00:10:07] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah. So the, the first version was very much like I kind of talked about before trying to prove that we can make a database easy to use. And so it was actually just very much like a prototype. Like it was a lot of spoken mirrors. We focused a hundred percent on sort of like the product and UI and the interactions, and  we didn't really have like a real backend, it was just kind of persisting to local store and the browser just enough to make sure we could sort of test the interactions and kind of get to a point where people could actually use it and play with it and say like, Hey, I'm confused.

[00:10:36] How do I create like a, a view or like linked record relationship and just something where we could kind of put it in front of people and ask them to try to organize something and see if they could actually do it. So that was very much the goal of the, the very early version, uh, in terms of what it looked like.

[00:10:49] I think the earliest version, it, it looks a lot like a spreadsheet.  it was like a database underneath, obviously, but, you know, I think we, we took this approach of coop and the spreadsheet interface, which is, [00:11:00] uh, familiar to most knowledge workers and built a lot of the same interactions. But, you know, we had typed fields and we had tables.

[00:11:08] You could link between and foreign key relationships.  but it took us a lot of iterations to kind of differentiate it and make it feel different and look different and communicate to users right away that this is not just a spreadsheet, but, uh, very much like the early version was like this grid and, and, uh, not too different from what it looks, looks like today in our grid view, but a lot of subtleties of, of how you, uh, set up, you know, things like queries and, uh, foreign key relationships.

[00:11:31] Those are the things we really had to iterate on to make it obvious to, to early users. How, how you actually set those up, uh, uh, kind of as a departure from the spreadsheet.

[00:11:39] Todd Jackson: so you had some of those concepts that you still have today, like views related rows. All of those things were in the initial prototype.

[00:11:45] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think they went through a lot of iterations. I would say that, you know, like the very early version, um, views were very much kind of done in a, a sort of a, a different way. And, and linked records were kind of confusing.  it took us a long time to, uh, [00:12:00] kind of make those things more obvious.

[00:12:02] Andrew Ofstad:  So one example is, you know, most databases, they have foreign keys and the way you sort of join two tables together is you write a query.

[00:12:09] Uh, so that was, that was kind of abstract and hard for people to figure out. So we took a very different approach of thinking to them more as like here's a field where you link to records in a different table. And we went through a lot of iterations to make that very visual. So for example, instead of, uh, when you link to a, a different record making it more of a grid, we made it more of like each record as a kind of its own card to really reinforce that, you know, this isn't just a, a sea of cells in like a spreadsheet, but instead each row represents an object in the real world in making those very visual and kind of like showing that they're almost like physical cards or objects.

[00:12:43] Like we, we did a lot of sort of, uh, almost like bordering on skew morphic things to kind of reinforce the, the database structure to differentiate us from the kind of grid, uh, spreadsheet, uh, model. So, so a lot of like subtle iterations like that, that helped convey those points to our early customers.

[00:12:59] Todd Jackson: Yeah. And so when you, when you put [00:13:00] this prototype in front of people,  cuz there were a lot of database concepts sort of baked in from the very beginning and I'm curious, like, did people know what to do with this?  their early users, what, when you put it in their hands, what did they, what did they do with it?

[00:13:12] Andrew Ofstad: It, uh, it kind of de depended. Like, I, I would say early on, you know, nine out of 10 people would look at it and say like, Hey, it's a spreadsheet. I know how to use a spreadsheet, but then they just kinda get confused when it sort of didn't match what they'd expected to do. Or they just like, didn't know what to do with it.

[00:13:25] Like, oh, should I organize this or that? So for a lot of people, it just didn't click early on. And it kind of took us doing things like building templates and kind of translating the product into. A use case they could understand for it to click with them, but we definitely did have like an early adopter, you know, kind of crowd initially that sort of just understood the structure of a database more and it kind of clicked with them.

[00:13:48] And didn't, didn't even really mean that they were sort of programmers or database people. Like, I think it was just sort of like this persona of tinker, uh, a person that's very structured in their thinking that sort of clicked with air table [00:14:00] and they would say, oh, this is awesome. Now I can organize, you know, my apartment hunt, or I can sort of start tracking my, uh, contacts here for like a very lightweight CRM.

[00:14:08] So for some people it's just kind of a certain mindset where it just clicked and they kind of thought in this more structured, almost like database way  And so very early on, those were sort of the customers. We would put it in front of them and they'd say, oh awesome.

[00:14:21] I'm gonna start keeping track of this thing and that thing. And for example,  we had a friend Naji who, uh, was a video producer and he saw it. He's like, oh my God, I'm gonna start tracking my video productions here. So we kind of created a table of all as cast all as crew link them together. And,  a lot of 'em kind of needed hand handholding to, to tell 'em what to do with it.

[00:14:40] But for some that just kind of clicked and we saw how they used the product and really leaned into their feedback for how to improve it from there. So the.

[00:14:46] Todd Jackson: cool. And so Andrew, tell us about that path from like, you know, these early prototypes to the, to the first version of air table that you considered launch ready, or like what, what did your first launch look like?

[00:14:59] Andrew Ofstad: We had kind [00:15:00] of a, a slow path to launch. I would say we, we kind of separated the concept of trying to get feedback from customers and to refine the product from the concept of like public launch. So very early on, we had just kind of a private, you know, alpha where we just get, you know, friends to use it and we ourselves would use it.

[00:15:19] And we'd very much like sit down with those customers and, uh, just kind of, you know, see what they're using the product for and,  And eventually we, we felt like

[00:15:27] Todd Jackson: was that like 10 people, 20 people at that time. Okay.

[00:15:29] Andrew Ofstad: It's probably like, I would say a hundred people or so, but it was, you know, it, the, the thing with the horizontal product is that you build, you know, obviously this, this very generic thing.

[00:15:40] And then the cool part is  seeing how people use it. So we kind of built this very horizontal product and then, uh, kind of rolled it out to, to more and more people over time. We had a beta eventually. Um, and so with each one of those iterations where we kind of get more customers, we would kind of, uh, see new pockets of use.

[00:15:57] And as we added new features, we kind of [00:16:00] unlocked new use cases and it was sort of a slow role of, uh, just, you know, add this calendar view. Suddenly we see people using it for marketing use cases, or, you know, kind of add like this con bond and people are using it for more kind of, uh, project management or managing processes and pipelines.

[00:16:14]  I feel like the MVP, uh, for our product was not like any one thing because each, you know, it's a horizontal product, so you're kind of like constantly unlocking new use cases.  so we sort of had like this just kinda slow roll of, of building new features, unlocking use cases.

[00:16:29] And eventually we get to a spot where we felt comfortable putting it into beta and trying to get some more customers. And while that was just kind of our, our gut and seeing that it's resonating with our earlier customers. And honestly, just kind of feeling ready from a standpoint of, can we handle the, uh, potential traffic and do we have the features so people won't lose data and it's not gonna be a big headache for us to recover it.

[00:16:51] So I think we were, um, you know, even when we were in like the off stages constantly kind of trying to find new customers and, and grow, but, uh, kind of timing [00:17:00] the, the launches and the going from beta to public launch more about the readiness of kind of taking on that extra traffic more than anything.

[00:17:06] Todd Jackson: Okay. So you went from alpha to beta to public launch, and I assume alpha was invite only was, was beta invite only, also.

[00:17:14] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah, we, I think we actually had like a alpha that was invite only, but  you could refer other people. So I think that helped us kind of get some organic, um, growth there. Not, not like a ton, but we'd invite somebody to get super excited about it. They'd add somebody else to their base and then maybe that person would build something else.

[00:17:29] So we sort of saw, um, just some traction from that. And then beta, we did publicly, we, I think we launched on hacker news. It was like maybe 20 14, 20 15. And, uh, just kind of kept it as beta just to, to sort of, you know, two things. I, I think one was to give us an opportunity to have like a bigger kind of public press launch later on.

[00:17:51] And the other was just kind of like put the beta tag on in, in case, you know, things didn't work right. Or , it kind of seemed somewhat half baked. So, uh, yeah, we had a alpha then beta then, [00:18:00] then public launch. But you know, uh, there was quite a bit of time between each of those, but we, we definitely tried to acquire customers and learn from them as mu much as possible between each, each of those milestones.

[00:18:09] Todd Jackson: yeah. How long was the alpha and how long was the be.

[00:18:12] Andrew Ofstad: The alpha is probably, I mean, it kind of, it kind depends on when you define the start of it. Cause I think we probably didn't even call it alpha initially. It's just like we used it ourselves. We gave some, some customers, but I would say maybe like probably a year or two, I think maybe even like two or three years, it's quite a while.

[00:18:29] Um, and I think we, you know, like it was just, we had to build so many features to kind of get to something useful  and  we had, like I said,  a commitment to the long term and pretty good runway where we were  in the mode of. Let's build and de-risk the core challenges, and it seemed like launching the, the product publicly wouldn't really get us  more data there, or like give us, you know, accelerate the path to that.

[00:18:53] So we, we definitely like took our time with those early, you know, alpha beta periods, because we felt like we were getting the customer [00:19:00] learning. We felt like we were very focused and could build efficiently.  maybe we waited a bit too long, I would say, uh, I think we probably could have launched earlier and that's always the case and kind of cut, cut some features.

[00:19:09] But, uh, for the most part, I, I think we, we got the learning and,  launched and we were ready and I think, you know, in hindsight that worked out, but there's probably a place we could have gone faster.

[00:19:19] Todd Jackson: during that, that beta period, you know, I'm always curious about horizontal products. Like, how did you explain what air table was to people? Like when, when you posted the beta on hacker news, you were like, air table is a, what.

[00:19:32] Andrew Ofstad:  I think we, we sort of mixed a, a few things and, and it was super hard. Like it was hard to describe the product. And, you know, I think that's one of the hardest parts of horizon on a product, but we, we had like a couple messages. One was like, this is a way for you to kind of build software, which  very early on.

[00:19:49] We, we were mostly just a database. We hadn't built things like automations and a lot of different views and interfaces and so on. Um, but that's kind of how we frame the mission. And then separately, we'd say like, [00:20:00] oh, it's kind of like a spreadsheet database hybrid, or it's like a spreadsheet with power of database.

[00:20:05] So I think the way our customers would describe us would be it's like a easy to use database or it's a spreadsheet plus plus, but I think we always try to kind of like describe the broader mission and vision and would kind of mix those two together. Uh, but yeah, it was tough.  over the years we've gotten more and more, uh, sort of focused on how we describe the, the problems we solve and sort of the use cases we're good for.

[00:20:26]  but  early on, it was very much database spreadsheet and I think it was, you know, a slightly more sophisticated or early adopter audience, uh, that, that kind of resonated with. So, so it kind of worked out, but it's, it's always been a struggle for us.

[00:20:39] Todd Jackson: And at what point,  over the course of the alpha over the course of the beta, like, was there a moment that you remember that hit you where you were like, Hey, I think we have product market fit or like something's starting to work here.

[00:20:51] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah. I think there's a lot of different milestones. I kind of think of, uh, in terms of product market fit.  initially just kind of seeing one person getting value [00:21:00] outta the product, like our friend aji, who's using us for video production. Um, and then you sort of see a team using us and getting value out of it.

[00:21:06] So we had a nonprofit, there was like 10 or 15 people. that started using us early on for managing all their applicants. Um, and then like, I think maybe where I really felt like we had product market fit, like is when we had our first customer where, you know, the, the customer was WeWork and, um, we kind of landed with them and it grew kind of virally within the company and, and went more or less wall to wall.

[00:21:31]  actually that's probably like one of the most, you know, kind of visceral memories I have. Of air table and thinking like, oh my God, we've actually built something that might make it. Is I, I like did this customer tour to New York after having like, mostly interacted with customers over, you know, uh, the sport channel and that type of thing over zoom or, or, um, you know, uh, whatever the video chatting apps were using back at the end, probably zoom, um, And so I went to New York and I, I visited WeWork and I looked around and everybody's computer monitor had air table [00:22:00] open.

[00:22:00] And I was like, oh my God, this is like, actually a thing. People use it. It  became so much more real at that point. But really, I think that's kind of when we started to see product market fit is both, you know, when we saw a few companies and where we expanded while the wall, but also certain industries and functions.

[00:22:15] So for example, media, we were being used for video production, a lot, or, uh, marketing teams and a lot of companies we were being used and kind of seeing repeatable, um, you know, cases of us landing within those industries and functions and then expanding  within a company. And so that's very much our,  the growth engine that we, we, uh, kind of live by today.

[00:22:35] So I think that that was kind of like the first case where it really felt like product market fit. And at that point, you really double down those customers become a hundred percent customer obsessed on them. And, and that's kind of the, the path we've been on for the past three, four years.

[00:22:47] Todd Jackson: amazing. So it's like you had these individual user use cases from video, you know, a nonprofit, and then all of a sudden you go viral inside a company and like hundreds of people are using it inside the company. And then did, did that sort of snowball, like did, did a lot [00:23:00] of companies start

[00:23:02] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah, definitely it snowballed. I think it, it kind of happens in a lot of different S-curves and so, you know, we started seeing. Uh, media companies where we kind of spread word of mouth, or, you know, the head of production would go from Netflix to, uh, this is just a random example, like some other company and they kind of bring the tool with them.

[00:23:22] So you kind of see like industries or functions where you get word of mouth adoption. Um, and then like, yeah, you kind of see more and more of those. And then you'd kind of start seeing more expansion within companies. So I think, you know, it, it wasn't any one point, I think I was a single inflection point.

[00:23:36] It kind of built over time and you just had these growth curves, like layer on top of each other, but, you know, obviously it starts very slow, but then at a certain point, maybe for us, like 2018 or so just kind of starts to really inflect. So I think it's, you know, a combination of us building more capabilities that unlocked more use cases and having the maturity to expand within companies and kinda getting these pockets of word of mouth virality within these different industries and [00:24:00] functions that kind of all layered together to, to cause, um, you know, pretty solid growth in, in, uh, the past five years.

[00:24:07] Todd Jackson:  at any point, did you, did you guys internally do anything to, to capitalize or engineer sort of drive that word of mouth yourself? Or was it the product doing all that.

[00:24:17] Andrew Ofstad: It was mostly the product. I think the nature of the product is that somebody builds something in their table, whether it's a product, you know, roadmap tracker, or like a marketing calendar. And they share that with people and their team and their department to do critical work. And once, you know, people start doing work in it, it generates useful data.

[00:24:38] So you, you suddenly have your product roadmap in it, or you have your marketing calendar. Other people want to consume that. So people invite 'em to, to  the base that shows that. So kind of get like what we described, um, internally as like golden data sets, like things that are really important, critical data sets for the company.

[00:24:55] And once you have that, you get a lot of, kind of, uh, viral adoption on top of that. And other teams kind [00:25:00] of building workflows off of. So definitely like, you know, there's a lot we are doing in the, the product to make, make it better for enterprises and  help support them in kind of building these, these, uh, golden data sets, which are incredibly valuable and then letting other teams kind of build on top of them in a safe way.

[00:25:15] Uh, but yeah, I would say mostly in product. I mean, there's some stuff we did with like, you know, referral, uh, bonuses and, you know, uh, just, just some like stuff like that that maybe helped a little bit, but probably not too much. I think it was just mostly by nature of the product being, uh, a very collaborative product  by its nature that I think helped us the most.

[00:25:34] Todd Jackson: Were there points in, in the product evolution where you sort of felt like, Hey, we actually just have to make this UI simpler or, or we have to evolve this UI into something that's just more natural for people.

[00:25:46] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah, I think there's a few examples of that.  one is that I think initially kinda like I was saying before, a lot of people just felt like Airtable was a spreadsheet, just a glorified spreadsheet. And I think, especially in the early days we had mostly [00:26:00] just kind of, um, text and number, you know, cells, I would say.

[00:26:04] And so we slowly kind of started to make the product look more visual. So kind of adding fields that were very obviously like image attachments or fields that were colored select options like that all kind of helped convey like. Hey, this is different than a spreadsheet. These are, uh, columns that have a specific type that's very visual, you know, and I think things like adding different views.

[00:26:27] So not only can you see your records into grid, but you can see a calendar and you can transform them. You can view them on a, uh, a timeline or like a gallery that all kind of helped convey that mental model of like you're dealing with records, not a, uh, you know, not a spreadsheet. So, um, I think, yeah, just making it super visual was one thing that really helped.

[00:26:47] And we kind of leaned into for quite a while. And also just, I, you know, I think there's a certain aspect of delight of being able to configure something and change the colors and make it truly yours, that we kind of leaned into a lot and was super [00:27:00] important to us. And I think, you know, we wanted to give people the same.

[00:27:03] Feeling we have when we create something, uh, in software where you're like, oh, I created this thing. It's awesome. I customized it. I wanna share it with people, show off what I've done. So I think we, the subtle stuff of just like the visual aspects and kind of conveying those, uh, difference from like a kind of beige spreadsheet or your traditional productivity tool went a long way as well.

[00:27:24] Todd Jackson:  I don't remember when you guys added it, but dragging images into cells, dragging attachments into cells. I think that was just one of the coolest things about air table. That was a real aha moment for me was that I forget when, when was that?

[00:27:35] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah, that was, that was pretty early on. I, I think like from day one, we've been pretty huge on just direct manipulation and making it feel like you could sort of reach out and touch your data, you know, for, for lack of a better, better phrase. But I think that was, you know, I think when we built first attachments that came with the drag and drop functionality and we wanted to be, to feel super interactive and to feel, you know, like it's alive and real time.

[00:27:57] And, and, uh, we put a lot of effort into just sort of [00:28:00] like the real time architecture. So if you, you know, drag a attachment on it pops up in the other person's screen immediately, there's just kind of like a lot of work we did there, but, you know, I, I think that. That sort of, uh, direct manipulation also helps you to build a better mental model for how Airtable operates.

[00:28:17] So for example, if you, uh, edit a field, if you change the type immediately seeing all the kind of cells below it changing from like a, a select value to like a, you know, a text field, so on and so forth, and kind of having that visual change reinforces what's gonna happen when you kinda make that change.

[00:28:32] So we did a lot around just like the delightful stuff, you know, drag and dropping attachments, animations to make things clear, just trying to make the whole experience real smooth and fast and, and kind of direct. I think that was, that was, uh, uh, um, really important to us early on.

[00:28:47] Todd Jackson: Yeah, so much attention to detail it, like in everything that you just described. And I, I feel like that is something that not very many companies have. You guys have always had it. Where, where does that come from? Just that attention to detail and getting all those little [00:29:00] interactions. Right. And, and  as Airtable grows, especially, and adds more, more folks internally, how do you scale that value?

[00:29:07] Andrew Ofstad: I think it's largely just a function of, you know, we really cared about it and I think we just got excited about it and it's kind of what we wanted to do, you know, just, we, we loved sort of the, um, just the little things and  I was super into like subtle animations and, um, I think we just kind of had, um, a deep appreciation for that and, you know, studied a lot of  the best products out there, whether it be kind of, you know, apple iOS or.

[00:29:33] Um, you know, uh, Trello was like an early example of something that was very direct and kind of had like this good dragon action. So I think we just really appreciated that stuff. And, you know, a lot of times probably spent too much time on it, but it sort of started to permeate our culture and you, you know, you wanna make sure the first few people you hire, if that is important to you really kind of have the same sensibilities and, and, um, there's, there's sort of a lot we've done to kind of keep the bar high in our hiring, [00:30:00] but you sort of wanna set that seat early.

[00:30:01] And I think a lot of just comes from the, what we cared about and what we enjoyed doing as a, a founding team.

[00:30:07] Todd Jackson:  one question that I wanted to ask you that I know a lot of early stage founders think about is pricing. And like when you actually start to charge for the product, um, you know, I get questions all the time.

[00:30:16] Like when should I start charging for my freemium product? How much should I charge? Should I charge everyone? Should I keep parts of the product free?  when did you guys start thinking about that and how did you approach it in the early days?

[00:30:27] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah, something we, we definitely thought about from the earliest days, I would say, I think even our alpha, or just like the first, you know, pockets of users we had, we had like a pricing page and we sort of had a few different plans that were mostly, uh, you know, they would describe features we hadn't built yet, but we at least wanted to frame that this is a product we're gonna charge for.

[00:30:48] And like, here's the kind of basic seat based pricing model. And we chose price points that we thought made sense. And I think the way we chose those is, you know, not super scientific, but we partially, from a positioning [00:31:00] standpoint, how do we kind of position against, uh, the value we think will bring to companies?

[00:31:04] And so we priced more against like the sales forces, um, and ServiceNow of the world, as opposed to like Evernote or Dropbox, because we did anticipate that people build applications, that power important processes and companies on air table. And so we wanna price accordingly. 

[00:31:19] The thing actually we didn't build for quite a while is the actual billing system to charge our customers. And we actually had, um, a place where customers could voluntarily put their credit card in. It was kind of like buried in one of our setting pages, but we didn't, we didn't actually charge them. We just hadn't built the billing system like yet.

[00:31:34] So, uh, we were actually like amazed cuz some of our customers actually found this and put their credit cards in and then complained to us. They didn't get charged and they were like worried that air table would disappear. So that's when we're like, oh, I guess we're like leaving money on the table. Let's build the actual billing system.

[00:31:47] So very much we were  building pricing, uh, from a marketing standpoint and from a, Hey, this business is gonna be around. we're here to build a durable business  But uh, didn't actually like start, you know, pulling in the revenue till later on. So yeah, that was our sequencing.[00:32:00] 

[00:32:00] Todd Jackson: Yeah, it sounds like the way you approached it is you wanted the pricing plans in there early, but it was almost so that customers would, would understand that, that there would be paid plans and they could have faith in air table being around and, and to learn as much as you could from them. Is that, I mean, did you approach it sort of, not for profit, but for learning for, for several years.

[00:32:16] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah, totally. Yeah, that, that was exactly it.  I think I would be skeptical myself if I started using a product and, um, it's not clear how they're making money. I'd be like, oh, are they gonna like sell my data? Or  Are they gonna totally price go later on?

[00:32:28] So I think that transparency is actually good for the customer too. And, and sort of, uh, makes them more likely to trust the product.

[00:32:36] Todd Jackson:  And so in these, in these first few years,  and we've sort of skipped over like funding rounds also, but were there particular metrics that you were optimizing for kind of in the first few years, and, and what were the metrics that you felt kind of lined up with? You know, whenever you raised your series, a, your series B, et cetera,

[00:32:52] Andrew Ofstad:  I would say we were pretty primitive with our metrics early on. I think  we had some basic dashboards. And I think the [00:33:00] more important thing we did at least internally, this is kind of outside of the, uh, funding environment, but we would, we had things instrumented, so we'd could like get a notification every time somebody signed up.

[00:33:09] And, uh, we had like a dashboard where you could see like, who is actually  using the product and if given moment, and that was more about just like the visceral feeling of, you know, seeing, or just kind of sensing that people are using the product. And, um, every day you wanna see more people using the product.

[00:33:23] So as a good motivator, uh, but yeah, in the early days, I think we paid more attention to individuals and teams and how they're getting value from the product than we did  any set of metrics. And we had like this, you know, uh, automation that would send out personalized emails whenever somebody signed up and offer to  meet with us and do like a feedback session.

[00:33:41] So we spent a lot of time just  understanding how people were using the product.  once we kind of started getting more adoption to larger companies. We built out these network graphs that would show how the product spread from individual to individual and then team to team, and sort of got a intuitive kind of mental model of, of the variety of the product.

[00:33:58] So I think that all that actually [00:34:00] like helped a lot because we understood,  the mechanics of the product, which I think informed the metrics we chose later on. Um, but yeah, obviously we, we sort of instrumented the basic SAS metrics of just, you know, churn and revenue and, uh, retention all that.

[00:34:14] And we kind of use that more for like fundraising, but I think internally it's only been in the past,  four years or so that we've really had kind of a more opinionated funnel that we're optimizing around. And I think in the early days, it's very much qualitative customer learning over optimizing metrics.

[00:34:31] Todd Jackson:  were you able to do it by talking about customer love, showing use cases? Like it was still more sort of product love driven than it was numbers driven at that point?

[00:34:41] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah, absolutely. I think we, we had customers who raid about the product and we had individual customers where we could kind of show like that, that graph I was talking about before of adoption and say like, Hey, here are a few cases where we've landed a legit customer and we've seen  a lot of growth.

[00:34:55] And by the way, we have like all this positive feedback from individuals who just love the product. [00:35:00] So it was more on that than, than I would say, metrics. I think  our  revenue,  that wasn't a huge part of it. I think it was more, more the qualitative and the, the data points and, uh, very much for the series AO was like, are you onto something?

[00:35:11] And then, you know, series after that is like, how do you repeat it and scale it.

[00:35:14] Todd Jackson: I wanted to ask you about competition and, and how you think about competitors. Um, you know, sometimes I think founders think about it in terms of jobs to be done, or like what product is the user firing so that they can hire your product.

[00:35:27] Uh, but, but how do you think about competitors and how much attention do you think founders should be paying to competitors?

[00:35:34] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah, I think for us early on, we actually didn't have a lot of competition. I think the nice part was we chose a product category and a product that wasn't super sexy at the time, to be honest, like no code, wasn't really a thing back in 20 12, 20 13. Productivity software, you know, B2B, SAS stuff. Wasn't super sexy.

[00:35:55] I would say it was very much about like consumer social. So I think  that sort of afforded [00:36:00] us at least early on a, a landscape where there wasn't a lot of direct competition. Like, you know, we did have comparable products or just kind of substitutes that customers would use. So for example, a spreadsheet or like a project management app, like you kind of do stuff they might do in our table in those, but they were very different types of products and roadmaps 

[00:36:18] So, you know, I think for us, like we were fortunate to pick a, a space that didn't have a lot of competition breathing down our neck at all times. Um, you know, that certainly changed recently. And I think,  the way we approach competition is certainly like, uh, pay attention and learn from them.

[00:36:34]  And I think the way I've thought about it before is that I used to run cross country and track in high school. And my coach would always say like, Don't look behind you, like you'll slow down. Um, so just keep your head pointed forward and kind of like, you know, sense what competition is doing, but don't focus on it too much, cuz you'll like lose track of where you're going.

[00:36:52] So I think the best thing you can do is have your own sense of, uh, where the company's moving and the vision for where you want to go and make [00:37:00] sure you're going in that direction. But of course you can like learn a lot from other products in the ecosystem and see what cool, uh, products are launching and what people are are using and how the consumer kind of, you know, um, uh, tastes are adjusting.

[00:37:13] And I think that's super important just to kind of stay savvy on good product and good business and, and, um, kind of the broader ecosystem. But I think that's a bit different than focusing on your direct competition and sort of getting into a myopic state of like, oh, we gotta build this cuz they did. I think that's counterproductive.

[00:37:30] Todd Jackson: So let's get more to the growth phase of things.  you have air table as this very horizontal product. It can serve a million different use cases, all kinds of people. How did the horizontal product strategy affect your, your go to market strategy? As you thought more about growing.

[00:37:46] Andrew Ofstad: I think the first answer is it's, it's pretty hard just like the go to market for a horizontal product. And it's just, you know, like I talked about before is hard to describe early on. And I think  the way we approached it is kind of opposite of most companies and the way they think [00:38:00] about go to market.

[00:38:01] Uh, so, so, you know, most companies they'll kind of start with a super niche audience and kind of expand to new markets. So maybe  you start a company that's like a vertical dog walking CRM or something like that. I don't know, just something random. And then like maybe you expand to dog groomers and so on and so forth.

[00:38:16] So kind of start with a very niche audience and find them and you can target them  and then like you expand to new markets. After that, we sort of had the opposite approach where we started completely horizontal with like a blank slate product, more or less.

[00:38:28] And we kind of got actually more and more narrow with our focus in terms of like, how do we land customers over time?  I think the first iteration for us, like, like I said, we were just completely horizontal. The second iteration was we started kind of building, uh, we started seeing organic adoption for different use cases, whether it was, um, you know, video production or product planning.

[00:38:49] And we create very specific templates for those. So we had maybe hundreds of templates and we had a template page, so on and so forth, people could get, get started with those use cases. And it's really only been the last few years we've gotten [00:39:00] really targeted, um, around kind of our marketing and go to market motions.

[00:39:04] And I think part of that has just been having a much more mature executive team with our CMO AO who's on actually the, the podcast earlier and our C Seth. And so they've helped us refine this, but  we have a much better sense of how we. Successfully land and expand within a company. And so we've gotten  much more opinion on that and, and have like really kind of narrowed the aperture.

[00:39:23] So we're mostly focused on, um, kind of marketing and product organizations in terms of how we  initially land in a company. And then we know from there we can expand all sorts of different departments. And so, yeah, we've kind of over time gone from very horizontal, broad in our GTM to more and more narrow over, like we're gonna land in this department, in this, uh, function.

[00:39:43] And from there, we'll expand to the whole company. So it's, it's kind of the opposite of Mo what most companies do. Yeah,

[00:39:49] Todd Jackson: So you said phase one was, was very horizontal phase two. You started actually, it, it sounded like you started seeing the pockets of which use cases were working, for example, around video production, and then you [00:40:00] leaned in and amplified the content and the templates around that did, did that. That sounds like that worked pretty.

[00:40:05] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah, it did. I, I think there's a lot of stuff we could have done to make that process faster. And like we could have leaned in earlier on the sort of, you know, place we were seeing traction and been even more opinionated about like, Hey, here's a solution for, uh, this or that. And kind of done more of that.

[00:40:18] But yeah, it, I think  the approach did work for us. I, I would say there's probably a lot we could have done to speed it up. there's probably more early kind of customer validation we could have done and, and just kind of like talking to those early pockets of, of usage and then very much kind of marketed the, uh, product a lot more to those value props, um, which 

[00:40:35]  we do a lot, lot of, uh, now, but I think, um, if we were to do it again, like maybe we, we kind of pick a handful of use cases earlier on, on, and, and kind of, uh, you know, target those a little bit more.

[00:40:47] Todd Jackson: so along the way, as you got more focused in your go to market, what were the kind of roles that you hired for, or, or were there people that, that you brought into the company who thought kind of in a different way than you had in the past?[00:41:00] 

[00:41:00] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah, I think the, the most helpful people that kind of helped us, you know, crack our, go to market motion were obviously kind of like our early sales team and just understanding our customer deeply. And I think a lot of our product team did this as well. And then kind of translating that into what's the actual problem they're trying to solve.

[00:41:18] And, um, actually, you know, like I think the interesting part about. Uh, sales and CSM teams is that they're kind of going into companies and they have to actually like build a solution for the customer a lot of times, or not, not build it themselves, but actually like, uh, work with them to kind of build a custom solution in the air table.

[00:41:34] And so they get  really deep insights into, uh, how do like video pro production processes work or like how does a product operations, uh, workflow work, you know? And so I think we really get deep insights from our customer facing teams. And I think we did a really good job of, you know, uh, from, from day one up, up through today, kinda hiring very smart,  systems thinkers for our kind of like go to market functions.

[00:41:56] And so I think we just had a lot of feedback and discovery [00:42:00] with customers that we could then sort of pattern match and start to create the marketing collateral and start to refine the product around  But it kind of started with having good people, working with customers, be able to translate that back into the product and marketing.

[00:42:15] Todd Jackson: very cool. So Andrew thinking about kind of advice for future founders, especially founders who are creating new horizontal productivity products. You've said  Hey, we had a hard time explaining what air table was in the early days. Users were using this for all kinds of different things.

[00:42:30] We had a very horizontal.  growth strategy at the beginning, and then we got more, more verticalized. What advice would you give? Like, is it okay for founders to just say, Hey, I'm having a hard time explaining what my product is, but that's fine. And people are using it for different things and that's fine.

[00:42:44] Or, you know, what have you learned along the way that would turn into advice for a future founder?

[00:42:49] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah, I think, I think, uh, you can build a horizontal product initially, but as soon as possible, like understand where people are getting value from your product and really like double down and just, [00:43:00] you know, go meet them, uh, understand what their problems are really kind of, you know, when you do see PX, traction, be super fast to kind of hopping on those.

[00:43:08] And I think there's kind of a balance because you don't wanna just take the first use case that pops up. Like if it's not gonna be. Something that's gonna grow a lot or not something that's gonna kind of, uh, fit your longer term vision of the company. Like you might not wanna spend as much time on that, but as soon as you see some validation that the customer is kind of in the wheelhouse of what your broader vision is for the product, like just completely double down on them and, and coil the product with them.

[00:43:32] And I I've seen a lot more companies do that recently and  it works out really well. So I think you sort of can build a horizontal. Uh, product approach with, you know, kind of deep, uh, customer understanding and, and kind of building for that, that specific, uh, function or department or use case.

[00:43:49] It's just, uh, kind of a matter of, you know, I think you have, you can't go too deep on it. Like if you build a hyper specific app for one kind of function, like it it's, it is not gonna [00:44:00] kind of, um, you know, capitalize in the broader, you know, vision you had for horizontal product, but  you understand the problems and you can generalize those into capabilities that might solve a bunch of different use cases.

[00:44:11] Uh, and you sort of get these, these data points from customers  and then pattern match that with your broader vision for where you see the product going and  the broader, horizontal, um, uh, platform you're trying to build.

[00:44:24] Todd Jackson:  Thanks so much for taking us through kind of everything, you know, you guys have done and, and how you got here. I want to talk a little bit about what's next for you. Um, air tables come such a long way. Where do you go from here? And what are the areas that you see air table expanding into?

[00:44:38] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah, a few things. And, and I think these have been themes for us for the past few years, and, and we're not, uh, kind of moving away them anytime soon, but one is like, we're just constantly trying to make the product easier to use. And that's both for the person that's building, you know, apps on top of air table, as well as the end user who's using those apps that they build.

[00:44:56] And so that's a constant process for us. How do we make the [00:45:00] product easier to use? How do we make it easier to deploy these to people in your organization?  Uh, the second piece is pretty obvious, but you know, we're, we're really, you know, focusing on the enterprise and our customers who are really kind of like running large departmental and companywide processes on air table and they get tremendous value from it.

[00:45:18] And so, you know, for them, they, they have just these, you know, really powerful sources of truth in Airtable. And our running mission critical processes. And so there's a lot we have to do around just, uh, you know, larger scale, better permissions, kind of like all the things you'd expect from, uh, you know, scaling into large enterprise, um, you know, kind of processes and departments.

[00:45:40] So that's, that's one thing we're into. And I think  the other one is a big part of what air table does is it breaks down data silos. And so if you look in a modern organization, they all have, um, hundreds of vertical applications that each kind of have their own silos of data.

[00:45:54] And with air table, you can sort of put, uh, a lot of data into this common, uh, kind of data [00:46:00] platform on, on top of which you can, you know, different departments and teams can build their own applications that still connect to that, that same data and keep teams aligned. So that's  something that we're evolving into more and more is like, how do we get that useful data into air table?

[00:46:12] How do we let our customers kind of pull their most valuable data sources or, or store them in their table and then let many different teams kinda build on top. I

[00:46:22] Todd Jackson: So I know you've been successful, you know, over the years and, and recently, especially moving into bigger and bigger companies and having air table be such an integral part of, of how large companies operate. One thing that a lot of startups, you know, run into as, as they move up market, is that you get larger customers, you get more complex use cases, but you still want to keep the product approachable to all your users.

[00:46:42] How do you think about navigating that tension?

[00:46:46] Andrew Ofstad: think there's a couple, couple points there. I think one is that some companies make a product super complex and inaccessible to most end users because they [00:47:00] have maybe the wrong incentives. So I think this happens when a company starts. You know, really kind of selling top down to it.

[00:47:06] And that's kind of like their only way to acquire new customers. You know, you end up building the product  to, you know, check a bunch of feature boxes for it, but it's not, you know, gonna be the friendliest software to end users. That's not the customer you're optimizing for. And so for us, I think it's different because  we very much have like a go to market motion where we land, uh, individuals on teams who are kind of building for  their departments.

[00:47:29] And we that's sort of like the lifeblood of our business and kinda letting people who are, um, not always in the it department kind of build apps and deploy them to their teams. So it's kind of critical for us to continue to make the product easier and easier to kind of adopt those line of business customers.

[00:47:46] you know, all that said, like we are building for it too, so they can, you know, govern, uh, air table and, and sort of, uh, really have it be  something they can use to empower their teams. 

[00:47:56]  I think the second part is  there are a lot of different personas in a large [00:48:00] enterprise, so  for us, there's kind of the person building the application. There's the person consuming. It. There's like the person maybe in IT, who's kind of managing a lot of deployments of Airtable and you can sort of, uh, split the complexity up between those personas and have  separate.

[00:48:14] Surface areas where if you're the end user, like you shouldn't have to see all the stuff that's built for it, or if you're the person building the app, like maybe you don't have to see like all the admin stuff either. So there's just kind of like some information architecture stuff and understanding there's personas that I think helps you, uh, kind of contain complexity for, for, uh, the different audiences within a large organization.

[00:48:36] Todd Jackson: That's a really cool way to think about it.

[00:48:38] Todd Jackson: So  you laid out kind of, you know, some of the big strategic initiatives that you're pursuing or, or where you all are spending your time. How do you decide what those things should be like? You know, you come into 20, 22 and you're like, Hey, these are the big things that we're gonna try to do this year. How do you decide what those should be?

[00:48:56] Andrew Ofstad: It's something we've gotten a lot better at. I would say, [00:49:00] you know, each year and we're constantly refin. But  I think we do a pretty good job of longer term planning. So  we have like a three year vision for the product and, um, we kind of broken down into kind of yearly segments.

[00:49:14] And then each,  half we kind of have a set of OKRs for the company and then teams have like quarterly OKR. So we, we do have like a pretty good cascade at this point, but I think more importantly,  it starts with the customer, like, what are. What, what is the value they get at an air table?

[00:49:27] How can we make it even better? Uh, how do we sort of continue to let them build, uh, useful things in air table and to  scale within their organizations? So  it's very customer focused, spending a lot of time with our sales team, understanding the customer problems, talking to them, ourselves, um, so on and so forth.

[00:49:45] So that's a big component. And then another component is just like, I think balancing the day to day execution. Keeping the broader vision and like that three year,  flag in the ground in mind. So  myself and, and Howie and the rest of the executive team [00:50:00] spend a lot of time thinking about like, what's the vision for the next three years and what's the vision for the next five years, so on and so forth.

[00:50:05] So we're getting, I think more and more deliberate about making sure we make the space for that longer term thinking. And, and we kind of have those flags in the ground, but at the same time are tactically kind of moving and fixing customer problems as much as possible in the, uh, quarter by quarter, half by half year by year, uh, timeframe.

[00:50:22] Todd Jackson: So you got me really excited about the three year vision. What do you think is different about air table three years from now? that

[00:50:30] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah. So  a few things we're thinking of air table more and more as, as a connected to apps platform. And that's the category we're defining, 

[00:50:36]  And what that means is  we wanna give individual teams and departments control over building and deploying their own.

[00:50:43] While at the same time, connecting to  shared data sets and shared tables that really help to break down silos within organizations. So, you know, some of our customers, they have their key products in their table, whether it's like in athletic wear company that has all of their, uh, athletic wear and a [00:51:00] single source of truth.

[00:51:01] And from that individual teams can build their marketing calendar that kind of pulls in all those products in the roadmap or the production team can sort of pull that data set in as well. So I think really, you know, the vision for us is how do we. Let organizations and, and empower people in departments and line of business, uh, kind of owners to build software for the teams that make sense for the processes they're kind of running while at the same time, kind of plugging into the, uh, broader organizational kind of data and breaking down those de silos that we see more and more with, you know, uh, a hundred different vertical applications for each department, none of which kind of connect together.

[00:51:38] So that's really kind of what we're pushing towards and just a, kind of a, a small piece of the, the vision to come.

[00:51:44] Todd Jackson: I think it's incredible. You know, you've been at this for something like 10 years and, and you started with this idea of software creation and, and making that accessible to more people. And now 10 years later, you're on this idea of connected apps platform, which is very true to that same vision. It, it feels like to me.[00:52:00] 

[00:52:00] And I just think that's remarkable that over that long period of time, you've really held true to the vision that you started with. Were there times along the way that that things changed or, or things sort of ended up going a different direction than what you had envisioned.

[00:52:13] Andrew Ofstad: I think for the most part, we've had the vision of letting people build their own software that I think that's definitely been a constant, I would say, you know, pretty early on, we thought that maybe the way customers would adopt the product is that they would use it for a consumer use case. And so, you know, like maybe they'd use it for their, to do app or shopping list on mobile and then kind of bring it to work.

[00:52:34] And that was partially inspired by kind of what were the hot SAS companies at that time, like Evernote and Dropbox, and that was kind of their adoption model. So I think for maybe a year or so, we built a little bit too much for, uh, you know, pure consumer kind of like at home, uh, productivity use cases.

[00:52:51] And then later on kind of realized. , you know, a database and a collaborative database is really useful where you have to run a repeatable [00:53:00] process or coordinate the efforts of many. And those use cases tend to happen in the workplace and people get a ton of value outta them. So we very much shifted our focus towards, um, kinda the work side of things.

[00:53:10] But I would say that was maybe a bit of a misstep that, you know, set us back, um, a few months.  but,  at the time it, it was, uh, a little bit less obvious that you can build a product that really empowers individuals in the team,  for the enterprise. And I think, you know, that that's, uh, the balance and, and sort of the, uh, the thing we're doing now is really bringing this consumer great experience to individuals in enterprise and giving them a power to build.

[00:53:32] Um, and, uh, that that's kind of where the value is for us.

[00:53:39] Todd Jackson: Andrew, thank you so much for being here today. I, you covered so much, you know, and it was really fun  on geeking out with you on the little product details, but, you know, I'm just so impressed with the product that you've built over these 10 years and, and staying true to your idea on software creation and allowing more and more people to, you know, to get the power of programming and just congrats on, on all of our table's success.

[00:53:59] And thanks for sharing that [00:54:00] with us.

[00:54:01] Andrew Ofstad: Yeah. Thanks a lot, Todd. Uh, I've always been a huge  fan of first round and have read a lot of your content. It's been super helpful to us on your journey. So really happy to give back and really enjoyed being on the, the show.