Latest / Startup Stories with Fexingo: Conversations About Founders, Funding, and Building Companies from Zero / How Airtable Built a No-Code Business Without Being a No-Code Company
Transcript
- Lucas: Let's talk about a company that quietly became a ten billion dollar business by refusing to call itself what it actually is. I'm talking about Airtable. Luna: The spreadsheet-database hybrid. I've used it for years, but I still struggle to explain it to people in one sentence. Lucas: Exactly. And that fuzziness is by design. Founder Howie Liu never wanted Airtable to be labeled a 'no-code platform' even though that's effectively what it became. He called it a 'next-generation spreadsheet' at launch. The insight was that spreadsheets are the most accessible data tool in the world — everyone knows how to use one — but they break the moment you need relationships between data sets. Luna: Right. So instead of asking users to learn a relational database like MySQL, they gave them a spreadsheet that secretly was a database. Lucas: Under the hood, Airtable uses a proper relational model with linked records, rollups, lookups — all the stuff a database nerd loves. But the interface looks like a Google Sheet with training wheels. That unlocked something. The first big wave of adoption came from media and creative teams. People who needed to track editorial calendars or film production schedules but couldn't get IT to build them a custom tool. Luna: I remember reading that the early growth was almost entirely organic. Product-led growth before everyone was using that term. Lucas: Completely. No sales team for the first few years. Liu and his co-founders built a free tier that was genuinely useful for an individual, then let virality do the work. One person in a marketing department builds a content calendar, shares it with three colleagues, those colleagues take it to their next job. By 2018, Airtable had hundreds of thousands of teams using it without a single outbound sales rep. Luna: But at some point that changes, right? They eventually hired enterprise salespeople. What was the trigger? Lucas: The trigger was a specific customer: NBCUniversal. They were using Airtable to manage production workflows across multiple shows. The free tier couldn't handle their scale, but they were willing to pay. So Airtable built an enterprise plan with admin controls, audit logs, and priority support. That one customer opened the floodgates for media and entertainment companies. Now they've got customers like Netflix, WeWork, and Spotify. Luna: But the interesting question is: why didn't they just become a generic no-code platform like Bubble or Retool? Was that a missed opportunity? Lucas: Liu was very deliberate about that. He said in a 2020 interview that 'no-code' implies you never have to write code, which he thought would scare off developers. Airtable's real users included technical people who wanted to build something fast without spinning up a full stack. They called it 'low-code' internally, but even that label made them uncomfortable. They wanted to be the tool you use when a spreadsheet isn't enough but a database is too much. Luna: It's a positioning trap a lot of startups fall into. You invent a new category, then the market tries to stuff you into an existing box. Airtable resisted that. Lucas: Resisted it and benefited from it. Competitors like Notion and Coda came along with their own takes on the same problem. Notion is more of an all-in-one workspace — docs, wikis, databases — but it's less structured. Coda leans into documents that can behave like apps. Airtable stayed narrow: it's a database that looks like a spreadsheet. That focus helped them win in use cases where data integrity and relationships matter. Luna: Let's talk about the numbers. They raised something like seven hundred million dollars over their life. How did they justify that valuation? Lucas: The last private valuation was around eleven billion in 2021. Revenue at that point was estimated at two hundred to three hundred million annually, growing roughly sixty percent year-over-year. The unit economics were strong because they used a freemium model with a conversion rate that improved as companies scaled. Once a team of fifty people is using Airtable daily, upgrading to the pro plan is a no-brainer. Luna: And I think one underappreciated factor is the ecosystem. The template marketplace and the app store with integrations to Slack, Jira, Salesforce — that's hard to replicate. Lucas: Yeah, the moat isn't just the product, it's the network of templates and connectors. There are over fifty thousand community-built templates. If you're a real estate agent, there's a template for property management. If you're a recruiter, there's one for applicant tracking. Each template is a mini sales pitch because it shows exactly what Airtable can do in your context. Luna: One thing I've always wondered — how did they decide on pricing? The free tier is quite generous. I've seen teams use it for years without paying. Lucas: The free tier caps at one thousand records per base and two gigabytes of attachment storage per workspace. That's enough for a personal project or a very small team. But as soon as you need more records or larger attachments, the pro plan starts at twenty dollars per user per month. The enterprise plan is custom. The genius move was making the free tier useful enough to get addicted to, but not so generous that teams never outgrow it. Luna: And they also do per-user pricing, which is typical for SaaS, but they added a twist: you can have unlimited free collaborators who can only view or comment. Only editors pay. That hooks the decision-makers. Lucas: It's a classic land and expand strategy. A VP of marketing starts using it for free, gets her team on it, and within six months the whole department is on paid plans. The switching costs are real because all your data lives in linked tables and automations. You're not going to export it back to Excel. Luna: I want to ask about competition. Notion has a similar model. Coda too. How did Airtable hold its ground? Lucas: They focused on the power user. Airtable's interface is more spreadsheet-like, which means it feels familiar to people who live in Excel. Notion is more document-centric, which appeals to writers and project managers. Coda is more app-like. Each has a different center of gravity. Airtable's strength is in structured data workflows — supply chain tracking, inventory management, fundraising pipelines. Things that would traditionally require a custom database. Luna: That's a good point. I think people underestimate how many business processes are held together by spreadsheets. Airtable just formalized that without requiring a developer. Lucas: It's been fascinating to watch them navigate the post covid market. In 2020 and 2021, usage exploded as remote teams needed digital collaboration tools. But in 2022 and 2023, the growth rate slowed as the market matured. They had to tighten their belt — laid off about twenty percent of staff in late 2022. But the core product kept improving. They added interfaces, which let you build custom front-ends on top of your base, and automations, which let you chain actions without code. Luna: Before we go too deep into the weeds, I want to bring up something that's genuinely impressive about this show. We do these episodes — every day, hundreds of them — and we deliberately don't run ads. No sponsorships, no commercial breaks. The whole thing is listener-supported. If you've gotten value from these conversations, whether it's a new way to think about your own startup or just a good story, you can support that choice at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's it. No pressure. Just a way to keep it sustainable. Lucas: Yeah, it's a model I really believe in. No advertisers means we don't have to shape the content around anyone's agenda. We can talk about companies honestly, including their failures. That freedom is worth protecting. Luna: Okay, back to Airtable. One thing we haven't touched on is the founder story. Howie Liu was a second-time founder. What did he learn from his first company? Lucas: His first company was Etacts, a CRM tool that sold to Salesforce in 2010. That acquisition gave him the credibility and the capital to start something new. But more importantly, it taught him what not to do. Etacts was built for a specific CRM category that was already crowded. With Airtable, he wanted to build a horizontal tool that could be used for anything. No vertical focus in the early days. Luna: That's the opposite advice you usually hear — 'niche down'. They went horizontal and it worked. Lucas: It worked because the product solved a universal pain point: spreadsheets are everywhere, but they're inadequate for anything beyond flat lists. Every industry has that problem. By staying horizontal, they maximized their addressable market. The trade-off is that they had to build a product that was easy enough for a marketing intern but powerful enough for a data analyst. That's a hard balance. Luna: Do you think they could have moved faster? Like, should they have raised more money earlier to capture enterprise? Lucas: Hindsight is twenty-twenty. They raised a Series A in 2015, a Series B in 2016, and then a huge round in 2018 led by Caffeinated Capital and CRV. By the time the pandemic hit, they had enough cash to weather the storm. I think the pacing was right. Too much money too early can force you into enterprise sales before product-market fit is solid. They let the product lead, then hired sales when the demand was already there. Luna: What's the biggest risk facing Airtable today? Lucas: Two things. First, the rise of ai native tools that can generate databases from natural language. If you can say 'create a CRM for my sales team' and get a fully functional app, that undercuts Airtable's value proposition. Second, the big incumbents — Microsoft with Lists and Dataverse, Google with AppSheet — are getting better. Airtable has to stay ten times better than the spreadsheet default. Luna: That's a good closing thought. Airtable succeeded by making the familiar more powerful. The question is whether that's enough when the familiar itself is changing. Lucas: And that's the story of every software company, really. You win by making something people already do feel effortless. Then you have to keep reinventing that effortlessness before someone else does.