This Week in Startups

Airtable CEO Howie Liu on pivoting from blitzscaling to profits, AI applications, and more | E1838

Nov 1, 2023

57:34

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Airtable CEO Howie Liu joins Jason to discuss his philosophy of product-led growth, bridging the gap between spreadsheets and purpose-driven apps. They also explore transitioning from hyper-growth to profitability, hiring strategies, blitz scaling, connecting kitchen staff with customer reactions, pricing, SSO, AI integration in product development, using AI tools to enhance writing skills, and the convenience of modern products and starting a business.

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Quick takeaways

Airtable focuses on product-led growth to drive organic virality and empower companies and individuals to build useful business apps.

After blitz scaling, Airtable adopted a lean and focused approach, aligning product pillars with revenue-generating segments to build a high-quality business.

Airtable aims to incorporate AI into their app platform, offering features like AI fields and data-driven question asking to enhance user experience and attract higher-paying customers.

Deep dives

Airtable: Building a Lego Kit for Business Apps

Airtable is a platform that allows users to build useful business apps in a Lego-like fashion. The company focuses on product-led growth (PLG), which involves building an awesome product that can drive organic virality. While PLG was initially met with skepticism, Airtable has seen success with bottom-up adoption and organic growth. The company's goal is to empower every company and individual to build useful business apps with their platform. They aim to provide AI-enhanced features and make the product as easy to use as a spreadsheet while offering more value for building workflows and managing data. Airtable has seen high double-digit growth, and is now profitable with a significant amount of funding in the bank.

Introduction

2min

Building Business Apps with Airtable: A Lego Kit for Empowerment

10min

Transitioning from Hyper-Growth to Profitability and Managing Late-Stage Investors

6min

Hiring Strategies, Blitz Scaling, and Lessons from Layoffs

7min

Connecting Kitchen Staff with Customer Reactions and Scaling Customer Support

2min

Pricing, SSO, and Company Valuation

9min

Convenience of Modern Products, Starting a Business, and Introduction to Northwest Registered Agent

2min

AI Integration in Product Development

17min

Using AI tools to enhance writing skills and the importance of understanding the essence

3min

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Today’s show:

Airtable CEO Howie Liu joins Jason to discuss his philosophy of product-led growth (1:35), the current explosion of AI (36:37), and much more!

Time stamps:

(0:00) Airtable CEO Howie Liu joins Jason

(1:35) Howie’s philosophy on product-led growth

(5:05) Bridging the gap between spreadsheets and purpose-driven apps

(7:12) Tweet storm referenced on the All-In podcast

(13:19) ⁠Lemon.io⁠ - Get $2000 off your first hire at ⁠https://lemon.io/hire

(17:13) Blitzscale hiring

(24:28) InTouchCX - Get started with a free consultation at ⁠https://intouchcx.com/twist

(26:18) Charging per-seed basis and revisiting Airtable on E814 in 2018

(30:36) Jason shares two successful use cases utilizing Airtable