Latest / Startup Stories with Fexingo: Conversations About Founders, Funding, and Building Companies from Zero / How Airtable Won Spreadsheet Users Without Being a Spreadsheet
Transcript
- Lucas: Every office worker has had this moment — you inherit a spreadsheet that someone built five years ago, it has macros that nobody understands, columns that don't line up, and someone's been manually copying data into it for months. That frustration is exactly what Airtable set out to solve. Luna: And they did it without ever calling themselves a spreadsheet killer. Which I think is actually the smartest part of their strategy. Lucas: Exactly. Because if you position yourself as 'Excel but better,' you're fighting a forty-year incumbent that ships with every PC. That's a losing battle. So instead, Airtable said, 'We're a database. But one that looks and feels like a spreadsheet.' Luna: And that framing let them sneak into companies through the side door. A marketing team could adopt it without needing IT approval. Lucas: Right. The founder, Howie Liu, had this insight after his first startup — a company called Etacts that sold to Salesforce. He saw how much friction existed inside businesses trying to track things that didn't fit neatly into Salesforce's rigid objects. So he built a flexible relational database that anyone could customize. Luna: It wasn't his first try, though. Airtable actually started as a gaming company called Formagrid. They built a game called 'Hustle' — a fantasy sports type thing — and it failed. Lucas: Yeah, the pivot is a great part of the story. Liu and his co-founders realized the internal tool they'd built to manage their game data was more interesting than the game itself. So they scrapped the game in 2014 and rebuilt the whole product as Airtable. Luna: That internal tool had a spreadsheet-like interface but with the power of a database underneath. They basically stumbled into product-market fit. Lucas: Let's talk about what made it click. Spreadsheets are great for two-dimensional data — rows and columns. But the real world is relational. A customer has multiple orders. An order has multiple line items. A line item has a supplier. Spreadsheets force you to duplicate that data or write complex VLOOKUPs. Luna: Airtable lets you link records between tables. So you have a customers table, an orders table, and a products table — and they talk to each other. It's like having a miniature Salesforce without hiring an admin. Lucas: And they made it visual. You can view the same data as a grid, a calendar, a kanban board, a gallery, or a form. That was huge for adoption. A project manager sees a kanban view and thinks, 'Oh, this is Trello but better.' A marketer sees a calendar view and thinks, 'This is my content calendar.' Luna: But they didn't build all those views at launch. They started with the grid and added views gradually based on user requests. That's a classic product-led growth move — ship the core, then listen. Lucas: The growth engine also relied heavily on templates. When you sign up, Airtable offers you hundreds of pre-built bases — for content calendars, CRM, inventory, event planning, even a base for tracking Game of Thrones episodes. That lowers the activation barrier enormously. Luna: And each template is a miniature use case. A user who downloads the 'Content Calendar' template gets immediate value. Then they start tweaking it, adding fields, linking tables. Suddenly they're using a relational database without realizing it. Lucas: It's the 'bait and switch' of no-code. You come for the spreadsheet, you stay for the database. By 2024, Airtable had over 300,000 paying organizations and was valued at about eleven billion dollars in its last funding round. Luna: But it's not all smooth sailing. They face real competition now. Notion has a similar database feature and a huge user base. Smartsheet is more enterprise-focused. And Microsoft is adding relational features to Excel through Power Query. Lucas: Airtable's response has been to move upmarket. They launched Airtable Enterprise with advanced permissions, audit logs, and integrations with tools like Jira and Salesforce. They also built a robust API and a marketplace for extensions. Luna: That API is key. Companies like Netflix, Tesla, and Apple use Airtable internally — not just for lightweight project tracking, but as a backend for custom apps. That's a very different value proposition from a spreadsheet. Lucas: Let's look at a specific example. The New York Yankees use Airtable to manage scouting reports. They have a base with tables for players, games, stats, and medical records. Scouts enter data on iPads in the stadium, and the front office can run queries in real time. Luna: That's a use case that would require a custom database build — or a massive spreadsheet — before Airtable. And they built it in days, not months. Lucas: And that's the core pitch: Airtable lets non-developers build applications. Howie Liu has said he wants to 'democratize software creation.' The idea is that every team should be able to build the tools they need, without waiting for engineering. Luna: It's a powerful vision. But it also creates a challenge. If you're a developer, you might look at Airtable and say, 'Why not just use a real database?' And the answer is speed and accessibility — but that doesn't always scale. Lucas: Right. Airtable has limits. You can't run complex joins across hundreds of thousands of records without performance hits. They've improved with things like Airtable Sync and the scripting block, but it's not meant to replace a data warehouse. Luna: So the positioning is really careful. They're not trying to be a database for engineers. They're a database for the rest of us. And that's a huge market. Lucas: One of the smartest things Airtable did was embrace the spreadsheet metaphor in their UI. The grid looks like Excel. The formula field uses a familiar syntax. They even have a 'rollup' field that mimics SUMIF. The learning curve is almost zero for anyone who's used a spreadsheet. Luna: But underneath, it's all relational. And that's the magic trick — they hide the complexity until you need it. When you first link two tables, there's a little animation showing the connection. It's delightful. Lucas: We spend so much time on this show talking about founders who built billion-dollar companies by finding a wedge. Airtable's wedge was the spreadsheet — the most ubiquitous business tool. They didn't try to replace it; they just made it smarter. Luna: And in doing so, they created a whole new category: the no-code database platform. That category is now worth tens of billions, with competitors like Notion, Coda, and Monday.com all offering similar features. Lucas: If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way — maybe you tried a new tool, or pitched a project differently, or just saw your own work through a founder's lens — that's exactly why we make them. Luna: We deliberately don't run ads on these episodes. If you want to support that choice, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: It's a simple way to keep this exactly what it is: a conversation between two people who are curious about how things get built. No sponsors, no mid-roll interruptions. Luna: Alright — back to Airtable. One thing I find fascinating is how they handle pricing. They have a generous free tier, but the paid tiers are where the real value lives. Lucas: That's classic land and expand. You start with a free base, share it with your team, and soon you need more records, more attachments, more automations. The free tier is a growth engine. Luna: By the time a team hits the limits, they're already dependent on the tool. Switching costs are high because all that relational data is locked inside Airtable. That's a deliberate moat. Lucas: And they've invested in ecosystem lock-in too. The Airtable Universe lets users publish and share templates, creating a community-driven library. The API has deep integrations with Slack, Zapier, and even Tableau. Luna: So the question is: can they keep growing at the same rate? The no-code market is getting crowded. Notion has a similar product and a cult following. Smartsheet is more enterprise. Monday.com is more project management. Lucas: Airtable's bet is that their database-first approach gives them an edge. Notion's database is an add-on to notes. Airtable's database is the core. That makes it more powerful for data-heavy use cases like inventory, CRM, and operations. Luna: We'll see. But for now, Airtable is a great example of a startup that found product-market fit by solving a universal pain point — the frustration of spreadsheets — without ever badmouthing the incumbent. That's a classy move. Lucas: It really is. And it's a reminder that you don't have to disrupt a category to build a big company. Sometimes you just need to make something people already use work a little bit better. Luna: And then make it relational. That's the Airtable story in a nutshell.