Airtable is clearly not your average productivity company. In fact, it may not be a productivity company at all. Years ago, when Airtable was dubbed in the press as a “steroid spreadsheet,” CEO Howie Liu wasn’t exactly thrilled, as he felt the company had a lot more to offer than that.
To this day, Liu eschews comparisons to productivity apps like Asana, Trello, Notion or Monday.com. Instead, he wants people to make comparisons between Airtable and enterprise software giants like his former employer Salesforce, or even ServiceNow.
“We’re trying to position ourselves more against ServiceNow or Salesforce, not from a CRM standpoint, but from a platform standpoint,” says Liu. “Our intention was always to be an app builder,” he says.
Today, Liu wants Airtable to shift from collaboration and productivity tools to an application development platform that companies select as the backbone of their business workflows. But to do that, Airtable will have to prove to companies, investors and analysts that it is much more than a productivity company.
Making software from software
Howie Liu has always been interested in the power of software. At age 13, Liu taught himself to code using his father’s old textbook, and shortly after college, he built his first company, a CRM system called Etacts. At the age of 22, he had sold that company to Salesforce.
That was the unlock for me… it’s like the software other software can make.
While working at Salesforce, Liu realized that the underlying data model was not as rigid as other CRM systems, which gave customers a lot of flexibility in customizing the software. “It was a metadata-driven platform, meaning that instead of hard-coding their business objects into one form, each customer could define their own relational data structure and all their functionality would work regardless of how the customer defined their business objects,” said Liu. .
In other words, because everything could be changed in Salesforce, companies and individuals could build their own applications. That’s why Liu saw Salesforce more as an application platform than a CRM giant. “That was the unlock for me…it’s like the software that can make other software,” he said.
But Liu also acknowledged that Salesforce’s user interface wasn’t the best, and he felt he could do better. “Building a platform to make apps, or software to make other software, is a really interesting problem, and I think I can put my own spin on it,” he said.
That twist came in the form of startup Airtable, which Liu left in 2013 to build Salesforce, just two years after joining the company. Together with some friends from college, Liu started building Airtable as a super-powerful spreadsheet on top of a relational database, just like Salesforce.
The company quickly found rapid acceptance among designers and developers, building an almost cult following among productivity enthusiasts for its 21st-century take on the spreadsheet. At the end of last year, Airtable reached more than 300,000 customers and $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
Despite notable success in the consumer world, Liu has always dreamed of serving large enterprises. From the outset, Liu said he and his co-founders designed the product with scalability and complexity in mind. Today, Airtable has landed a number of major enterprise clients, from Netflix and Shopify to Intuit and Autodesk.
But Liu isn’t satisfied with just being seen as a productivity software company. Instead, Liu wants to turn Airtable into an application development platform that can serve large enterprises and compete with companies like Salesforce and ServiceNow.
Airtable’s ability to land enterprise customers, where other productivity software struggles, is thanks to the company’s database, Liu said.
“Because we have a relational database foundation, we are more scalable. For example, we can just scale up, not just in terms of sheer record capacity… but also the complexity of the implementation,” said Liu.
Not only can Airtable’s database hold more rows than its competitors, but the company also has the ability to script more robust APIs and native connections to records like Salesforce, Liu said.
While Liu believes competitors like Monday.com, Asana and Smartsheet will continue to grow in a multi-billion dollar multi-company market, he still doesn’t see them as direct competitors.
In fact, Liu thinks none of those productivity companies can ever really become application platforms precisely because they’re not sitting on top of a robust relational database. “To be a true app platform, you need to have an underlying database,” he said.
But to build an application development platform that can compete for deals and even win against established enterprise tech vendors, Airtable will not only have to deliver from a product standpoint, but also shift the industry’s perspective that it’s just good productivity. or project management. software.
In some ways, Airtable is on track to do just that. Airtable is already in some of the same conversations as ServiceNow as buyers evaluate application development platforms, and the company has already beaten Salesforce in at least one deal, Liu said.
The company also finds itself in large enterprises such as Netflix, which chose Airtable over other suppliers because the implementation process took less time. In fact, a member of the Netflix team discovered Airtable by accident, built a prototype of what they needed pretty much overnight, and kicked off the partnership between the two companies, Airtable said.
Undercover threat
Despite the prowess and financial strength of Salesforce and increasingly ServiceNow, Liu is confident Airtable can beat them in at least some deals. Airtable’s cloud-native background, ability to sit on top of a CRM or ERP, and easy-to-use interfaces are all key competitive advantages from his perspective.
The fact that Airtable doesn’t need to have a CRM or ERP system and has never been on-premises means it can deploy much faster and easier than other business software — sometimes in hours or days, rather than months.
Airtable’s roots as a consumer-oriented company also translate into a major competitive advantage. Airtable arguably has a better user interface than Salesforce, and maybe even ServiceNow, and is well-versed in organic bottom-up adoption. As more apps are built by business users rather than IT, user-friendly interfaces will become increasingly important.
While IT should always be involved with application platforms to handle due diligence, security, and data management, it is critical that business users use them. “You Don’t Want To Have” [IT] come in to help you build the stuff. You’re trying to create an end-user environment where they can extend it themselves,” said Gartner VP analyst Mike Gotta.
But despite Liu’s desire to compare Airtable to Salesforce and ServiceNow, he has no intention of replacing them. Instead, Liu wants Airtable to become its own “source of truth” (as the business software buzzword goes) for business objects, data, and processes that are not currently in a CRM or ERP system, such as production processes or content management.
“To have lasting value, we must, and become, the source of the truth, the source of the record, for new business objects that are not the customer record, that are not the developer issues in Jira, that are not the employee record,” said Liu.
But to become a source of truth, Airtable needs to be used more widely in all enterprises.
The challenge is, “CEOs don’t say, ‘I want Smartsheet everywhere, I want Airtable everywhere,’ that’s not what we’re seeing,” Gotta said. Instead, a bottom-up approach leads individual departments to use different productivity tools, creating silos. If Airtable succeeds in adopting the business divisions, connecting cross-functional processes and linking the data together, they could seize an opportunity, Gotta said.
However, the real test for Airtable will convince companies to take a chance on an outsider.
Airtable’s true value proposition still doesn’t seem widely understood, and the application development platform market itself is still quite in its infancy. “I don’t think we’re understood for everything we really are and want to be, but we’re working on it,” Liu said.
Therefore, the company plans to strengthen its marketing. Rather than seeing app development as a nice addition, the company plans to be at the forefront of its posts with it. Airtable is also shifting from the more organic discovery process it has relied on in the past to directly pursuing large enterprises.
Analysts agree that Airtable needs to work on its presence in the market with both companies and investors. “Finding out why customers should choose Airtable over the many other options out there, and then double down on those messages, is the best path to success in my opinion,” Futurum’s Kramer says.
In many ways, the market’s misunderstanding has created a bit of air coverage as Liu plots the next phase of Airtable. For now, Liu is happily flying under the radar. But that could change if he thinks about making Airtable public in the future.
Given the macroeconomic environment, an IPO isn’t on the horizon anytime soon, but Liu is still preparing. Airtable is in an enviable position: With millions on hand after a huge round last December, the company has less pressure to cut costs or scale back investments. Still, the company is conservative and keeps the money in reserve to weather the uncertainty.
However, Liu is not concerned about the demand for Airtable’s products and services. In his view, Airtable allows companies to “do more with less” and deliver value faster – coincidentally the same phrasing competitor Bill McDermott uses to describe ServiceNow’s effect on customers.
To beat Salesforce and ServiceNow in the long run, Liu knows Airtable needs to leverage its consumer interface, relational database foundations, and relationships with business users to convince companies it can meet their more complex needs. If Airtable can achieve all of that, it just might give Salesforce and ServiceNow a run for their money.
.