Unlocking Practical Data
Understanding Airtable’s Market Opportunity (Part 1)
Disclosure: I am an Airtable shareholder. These thoughts are 99% human and 1% machine.
Work management and collaboration are ultra crowded software categories. There are countless tools employees can use today to be more productive at work and “do more with less.” Because these markets are so noisy, it can be hard to understand the opportunity for a significant player like Airtable.
This story is one in a series where I’ll try to explain my point of view on what Airtable is and help you understand the potential of the business, whether you’re an investor, a customer, or a curious tech person. But first, let’s take a step back and discuss a positioning problem Airtable has in the market.
Airtable is used by hundreds of thousands of organizations and has nearly infinite use cases. It’s been described by customers and employees as a flexible database, spreadsheet on steroids, project management tool, app-building platform, and more. My favorites are “a hammer for all nails” and “a CRM for everything.”
But having ten equally valid ways to describe your product is a problem—especially for employees at social gatherings.
“So, where do you work?”
“I work at a company called Airtable.”
“Oh, cool, what’s Airtable?”
“…um…well…erm…[squirrel in the headlights].”
This fleeting moment of discomfort is often felt by employees and Airtable builders alike. Untangling this knot in the throat is the key to understanding why Airtable is not like Smartsheet, Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Notion, Coda, and all the other work management collaboration doc tools on the market.
At the same time, telling someone Airtable is a low-code application platform makes people think of Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Quickbase, Mendix, and many other IT-first app platforms. So Airtable is caught between two imperfect software categories.
To understand Airtable’s market opportunity, we have to start with data. Every Airtable builder also begins here, so it makes a lot of sense to discuss a major data blindspot festering within every enterprise.
In 2013, we began comparing data to oil. Back then, big data was everywhere and gave rise to Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, and other data warehouse platforms. Suddenly, data science was all the rage, and every business began deeply investing in insights teams to glean every possible strategic advantage from massive data sets.
While everyone has been paying attention to big data, Airtable has quietly given a voice to big data’s little brother and sister: practical data.
This is a name I came up with because I wasn’t a fan of the name “small data” or “medium data.” Practical data sounds more useful and cute.
Practical data is different from big data. It’s day-to-day stuff that doesn’t live in a warehouse or get managed by IT and data engineering teams. To help you understand what practical data is, I’ve created a public Miro board with examples for you to explore (click the image below):
Practical data is shared, accessed, and edited by multiple teams simultaneously throughout the day. It’s the lifeblood of day-to-day work and has been buried in spreadsheets, docs, Slack, and vertical software solutions for most enterprises. This is a big problem for lines of business.
Meanwhile, IT teams are stretched thin and can’t possibly operationalize every practical data set across every team. So, over the past ten years, we’ve seen a rise in no-code software tools designed for “citizen developers” to address the IT resource gap by just letting capable people build their own stuff!
The co-founders of Airtable spent two years agonizing over every tiny UX detail of the grid view. It paid off because they surreptitiously trained a generation of business users on how to be junior database designers.
One of the first a-ha moments for an Airtable builder is when they figure out how to use a linked record (the relational part of a relational database). They realize they no longer need to duplicate data to allow someone else from another team to make edits or additions.
This is the moment when a practical data set is brought to life. Now imagine how significant this problem is across every industry and segment, and you’ll begin to understand the potential of platforms like Airtable.
I believe Airtable inspired tools like Notion, Coda, Microsoft Lists, Google Tables, and many other user-friendly databases now give life to practical data.
Read Part 2, The Age of Vertical Saas.
If you need to take your company story to the next level and accelerate your GTM motion, please contact me: harmonicmessage.com. I’m here to help.
