🏔️ Airtable Growth

Hey there,

Welcome to the SaaS Hill 🏔️, a weekly newsletter that tries to predict the future of SaaS.

This month the newsletter just crossed 500 subscribers. Thank you everyone for your support: it means a lot 🖖

As we grow together, the newsletter will cover 4 topics:

1. SaaS category breakdowns (e.g. Workflow automation software)

2. SaaS growth tactics (e.g. Sidecar Products)

3. Trends in SaaS space (e.g. PLG)

4. 🆕 SaaS GTM breakdown (e.g. how Airtable grows)

It's all about learning which SaaS categories are experiencing growth, how specific SaaS companies are growing, and what growth strategies they are implementing.

This week we will take a closer look at the Airtable GTM breakdown 🚀.

⭐️️ Intro

It’s hard to believe, but Spreadsheets are everywhere. Ross Simmonds twitted this post a few years ago:

It's not surprising that there are numerous new-generation spreadsheet-like tools that offer advanced features such as collaboration, no-code functionality, AI, and an enhanced user experience. Airtable is one such tool.

🔢 Metrics

Airtable is a company with a valuation of $11.7 billion that has raised $1.4 billion in funding, generating an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $142 million from 300,000 customers and maintaining an average revenue per account (ARPA) of $39, supported by 984 employees with an ARR per employee of $144,000.

📈 Trend Chart

Airtable revenue growth (Source: Latka)

🚀 How Airtable Grows

Here are some growth strategies and GTM ideas that fuel Airtable growth:

1. Templates

2. Billboards

3. Multiple SKUs

4. Community

5. Partnerships and Integrations

Templates

Templates are pre-designed, customizable frameworks or layouts provided by SaaS products, such as Miro, Notion, Airtable etc, allowing users to easily create and tailor specific documents, projects, or data structures to their unique needs without starting from scratch. Templates are commonly used across PLG companies.

These templates help with both:

• User activation (it’s easy to find a template for a specific use-case)

• SEO (each template is an optimized search term that drives website traffic)

Billboards

Airtable ran a quite successful marketing campaign with billboards

• Airtable figured out HQ locations for their Enterprise accounts

• Airtable placed billboard ads near the offices of their prospects

• The campaign cost apx. $300k

Sometimes these billboards are super creative 🙂

Multiple SKUs

Airtable added multiple products to drive revenue growth and compete with other no-code products like Zapier and Retool (all three are unicorns):

• Tables - store structured data

• Workflows - automate this data

• Interfaces - visualize this data

• Extensions - integrate this data

Community

Airtable has a thriving community that plays a significant role in its growth.

The Airtable community includes a variety of elements, including forums, user-generated content, user groups, educational resources, and events.

Partnerships and Integrations

Airtable added a few layers to their partner-led growth:

1. Airtable app marketplace

2. Airtable API

3. Airtable scripting language

4. Airtable templates

5. Airtable service partners

6. Airtbable community

Thus, they open Airtable-focused consulting agencies and businesses, they create micro-SaaS products on top of Airtable API or scripting language, and create their own templates.

🖼️ Pitch Deck

Howie Liu, Co-Founder and CEO of Airtable, presented at Data Driven NYC in April 2015 on the story behind founding Airtable.

🔗 Useful Links

1. Heir to the tables: The Airtable story

2. Lenny’s Podcast > Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy with Zoelle Egner

3. Sacra > Airtable: The $7.7B Roblox of the Enterprise

4. Getlatka > Airtable report

5. OpenView > Airtable and the Low-Code/No-Code Future of Software

6. 5 Onboarding Tactics of Airtable by Maxim Poulsen

🤝 Related SaaS Trends

1. 🏔️ Airtable Ecosystem > a no-code tool for everyone

2. 🏔️ Workflow Automations > automate repetitive and annoying tasks

3. 🏔️ No Code > how we will write software soon

4. 🏔 New Generation Spreadsheets > and how it changes no-code landscape

5. 🏔 Internal Tools > create internal tools, apps and products without code

Thanks for reading. See you next time 👋
Best, Vlad

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