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Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
Many founders might be tempted to cast a wider net and get more users onto the product — but Ofstad again cautions against moving too quickly here. With just pockets of those click-into-place customer moments, the Airtable team knew it would be an unusually slow path to launch.
First Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
Alpha: Stay lean while you de-risk your biggest hurdle.
Beta: Test, test, test — but push to go faster.
Beta: Test, test, test — but push to go faster.
First Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
If you’re building a similar type of product, Ofstad’s advice is to keep the feedback loop extremely tight and loosen your expectations around what your MVP “should” look like. “We'd sit down with our customers to see what they were using the product for. With horizontal products, you build this very generic thing and the cool part is seeing how pe... See more
First Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
How Product Market Fit evolves in horizontal products
But that path to figuring that out wasn’t easy. Here’s Ofstad’s advice for fellow horizontal product builders:
1. Double down on early traction (carefully).
2. Blend the functional and the aspirational.
3. Map out your adoption.
4. Think about pricing as positioning early on.
First Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
The early vision was to democratize software creation. We all felt we had this crazy superpower of being able to build software, which had given us these advantages in our careers. You can have tremendous influence in an organization — even if you’re not in leadership — by building software and deploying it to people. So broadly, we were exploring
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4. Think about pricing as positioning early on.
“We thought about pricing from the earliest days. Even during our alpha with our first pockets of users, we had a pricing page with a few different plans. It mostly described features we hadn't built yet, but we at least wanted to frame that this is a product we're going to charge for,” says Ofstad.
“W... See more
“We thought about pricing from the earliest days. Even during our alpha with our first pockets of users, we had a pricing page with a few different plans. It mostly described features we hadn't built yet, but we at least wanted to frame that this is a product we're going to charge for,” says Ofstad.
“W... See more
First Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
Brush up on the prior art: “We were intellectually excited about going down that path of this general space of software creation. So we spent a lot of time doing research. It was almost like being on a sabbatical, reading all this prior art of old computing pioneers, like Douglas Engelbart and Bill Atkinson , and even conte
... See moreFirst Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
I think of product-market fit as the transition moment you feel as a founder when you go from "pushing" your product on people to them "pulling" it out of your hands. But the path to get there is deeply personal. One founder’s journey to product-market fit may look totally different from another’s, and yet both paths could be completely valid — wh
... See moreFirst Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
Early on, the way we approached our go-to-market was opposite of what most companies do, which is start with a super niche audience, find them, target them and expand to new markets
We started completely horizontal with a blank-slate product, and we got more and more narrow with our focus on landing customers over time. We started seeing organic ado
... See moreFirst Round Capital • Airtable's Path to Product-Market Fit
Assess the potential and spot the openings: “We spent a lot of time thinking about ‘What is the market for this?’ Spreadsheets have been around forever, but most of the time, people use them to track objects: people, companies, simple tables. They're not doing modeling and number crunching, which they were invented for,” says Ofstad. “And wh
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