Air table is this very horizontal product. It can serve a million different use cases, all kinds of people. How did the horizontal product strategy effect your go to market gy, as you thought more about growing? The first answer is, tats pretty hard. Most companies start with a super niche audience and expand to new market. We had the opposite approach, where we started completely horizontal with a blank slate product. More or less, we got more and more narrow with our s in terms of how do we land customers overtime.
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.