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When the product was free, there were a lot of early adopters. For example, instead of excessive parties, we’ll do cakes and cupcakes to celebrate big milestones. We’re not curmudgeonly, but we do try to eschew Silicon Valley excess.

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As with all software startups, our headcount is a big cost so when we started, we tried to do more with less. What that means, is that I think you can do just as much with a very small, but very aligned small team as you can get with a big team. I strongly believe in creativity and keeping costs low. That said, what advice would you give other founders?

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My cynical view is that advice very cheap and one of the best skills an entrepreneur can build is creating a “neural net” for advice-that is, learning how to process the right advice and when to apply each piece of wisdom. If you listen to every piece of advice, you’d be running in zigs and zags. All products should be launched in a balanced and deliberate way.Īs a younger founder, I’m sure you’re inundated with advice. So if you can push even a little bit harder when it comes to product, you should do it-but not in a sloppy way. It’s not even that important what your linear progression rate is. If you build a product, then you can launch it, which allows you can hire more people, which allows you to build more products. In my early startup days, I didn’t fully appreciate the importance of compounding effects. After that particular use case took off, we started building out other templates and offering them on our site.Īs a two-time founder, what do you wish you knew back when you started that you know now? Other media customers found us through word of mouth. When we started, we didn’t have many templates for this vertical-and it was more by accident that many media companies discovered our product early on, loved the interface, and then built their entire digital plan into the platform. Howie Liu: Media companies like the ones you mention often use Airtable for content production and editorial calendaring, and to be honest, the use case fell into our laps. Given that media is a sector not commonly served by startups, how did breakthrough? We spoke to Liu about how he’s embraced unintended customers, lessons he’s learned as a two-time founder, and Airtable’s plans for 2018.ĪWS Startup Stories: Your product is used by a lot of media companies like Buzzfeed, Group Nine Media, and Condé Nast Entertainment.

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They launched in 2015 and later raised a subsequent round of Series A financing. He also wanted to stick to the world of software platforms, and spreadsheets seemed a natural place to start.Īfter raising $3 million from a consortium of financiers including Freestyle Capital, the Box Group, and actor Ashton Kutcher (who also invested in Etacts), Liu and his team spent most of 2012 conducting user research and working on a prototype of what would become Airtable. Liu says that while at Salesforce, where he worked for a year following the sale of his startup, he realized he was more interested in developing toolkits, as opposed to the tools themselves. Instead, he decided start Airtable, a collaboration platform that essentially modernizes one of the least sexy products around: spreadsheets. After selling his first startup, the CRM company Etacts, to Salesforce when he was 21, Liu could have focused his efforts on any number of subjects. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harvard Business Review or its affiliates.While entrepreneurs, financiers, and reporters tend to flock to “hot” sectors, like AI, autonomous driving, or cryptocurrency, the truth is, companies built around “boring” topics, like human resources or small business loans, are often the ones still standing in the long run. HBR Presents is a network of podcasts curated by HBR editors, bringing you the best business ideas from the leading minds in management.

“ 100 People Transforming Business“ ” (Business Insider, View newsletter.

“ No-one understood our idea, but now it’s worth over $1bn“ ” (BBC, Nov.

“ Move Slow and Make Things: Airtable’s Howie Liu Built A $1B Software Giant Emphasizing Substance Over Speed” (Forbes, 2018).

How Airtable treats its competition, including the tech giants.

Why investors were initially skeptical, and how Howie got them on board.

How Airtable is democratizing software development.

The founder of Airtable, Howie Liu, joins Azeem Azhar to discuss what creating a new market category looks like in practice. Airtable, valued at $1.1 billion, is carving out a new product category that could compete with cloud computing in value.

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