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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
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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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
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
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
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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
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
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Don’t follow the fad: “We were a bit contrarian. At the time, it was all about the Lean Startup, getting early customer validation and failing fast. This book making the rounds called ‘ The Four Steps to the Epiphany ’ espoused this lean company development model, where you put out a super rough prototype to get to know the customer and quic
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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.