Air Table - Horizontal Product Strategy vs Vertical Product Strategy

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.