The Vision of Connected Aps Platform

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D, 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 things changed or ended up going a different direction than what you had invisioned? For the most part, we've had the vision of letting people build their own soft ware. That's nothing been constant. We built bit too much for pure consumer at home productivity use cases. Later on, realize that a data base, in a claborative data base, is really useful where you have to run a repeatable process or coordinate the efforts of many. And those use cases tend to happen in the workplace, and

Todd Jackson’s filling in as host again this week. (As a reminder, he’s hosting a few product-focused episodes this season — all about finding product-market fit.)

Today, Todd chats with Andrew Ofstad, co-founder of Airtable. In our conversation, we go deep into Airtable’s early days, and how they navigated the journey of finding traction and scaling.

Here’s a preview of what Todd and Andrew cover:

How the founders came together, their vision for the product, and what the initial prototypes looked like.

Airtable’s alpha, beta, and launch timelines, as well as their early traction.

The challenges of creating a horizontal product that can do many things, including identifying initial use cases and figuring out how to describe what they were building.

How to approach pricing and competition, as well as their early go-to-market strategy.

What the next 3 years will look like for Airtable, and how they’ve navigated scaling while staying true to their vision.

Whether you’re a founder validating your own idea, or a product leader looking for growth advice, there are tons of tactics here that go much deeper than the typical founding stories you hear.

You can follow Andrew on Twitter at @aofstad. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @tjack.