Founder here! Happy to answer any questions people have. I'm also building in public here: https://twitter.com/clokehead
A couple of people have been confused by 'on Airtable' in the title. Data Fetcher (https://datafetcher.com/) is an extension built (with code) on Airtable's marketplace in the same way you'd build on the App/ Play Store. It's not a no-code app built using Airtable.
MRR is up to $9400 since I did this interview, and should hit $10k in the next month.
Do you handle payments outside of Airtable? Just curious how the payment system works and who controls the customer relationship and what Airtable takes as a cut, who handles the recurring payments, etc.
How does the subscription / onboarding process work, especially if they cancel their AirTable, etc? Did you already write any posts about how that flow works?
- right place at the right time (almost certainly a factor here)
- actually building and releasing something
- promoting it, letting the world know about him/it
These success stories are really nice, but it's important to recognize that it usually takes all three of these key elements to be successful.
Obviously if you don't do anything, you cannot get success. But if you do something, and the timing or market is wrong, you may not get much or any success. And if you do something but never make an effort to let the world know, then you may get a little growth but not real success.
We can't control the market timing so much, mainly because we can't accurately predict the future. With some research, maybe we can improve on this, but it's still no guarantee.
So, the best policy is to just stay in forward motion. Built a thing, promote it, and repeat. Maybe with 5 things in current operation, one of them catches.
Perhaps, but some of those courses are actually useful; and some of the creators build solid businesses.
What is becoming a problem is the super low quality, autogenerated derivatives. But those are more a symptom of a broken internet (youtube/google search) than anything else. Now that garbage on youtube cannot be downvoted, and since youtube does not (has never?) shown up/down rating numbers on content before you click to view it, it's exceedingly difficult for the viewers to find the good stuff.
I think this is mostly right, but it makes it seem like successful apps are more of a crap shoot than they really are.
Too many (most?) apps are built without spending any time researching whether it solves a real problem people have (and are willing to pay for). I get it, we want to build things, not do market research.
Most people think that to build a successful app, you just have to "come up" with a brilliant idea and then go build it. That's not the case at all (while it does occasionally work, THAT is pure luck). Successful apps usually happen because the founder(s) saw a real pain point or gap in the market, and then build something to solve that.
You'll notice that the approaches are almost completely opposite:
- Build something and hope that people need it
- Find a problem that people actually have and build a solution that solves it well
Of course, this doesn't guarantee success (nothing does), but it vastly increases your chances of not wasting time building something nobody wants.
Also, I'm not naive about the different backgrounds/privileges people have; of course luck plays a factor here. I'm speaking directly about people who are already in a position to create an app (i.e. a lot of HN readers)
> So, the best policy is to just stay in forward motion.
forget who said it, but I like the quote "Action produces information". If you just try a lot of stuff, at the very least you will learn what works and what doesn't.
I'm curious how much time customer support takes for products around this price and how much impacts the viability of a business this size.
At $8600 MRR * 12 ~= $103k. Obviously some level of expenses here but let's assume very high margins.
$8600 / $40 plan = 215 customers.
Given all that, how much time does it take to service 215 customers' support needs? Assuming profit would be in the $80-90k range, that's multiples lower than what a developer could make in a job, so is this a full-time work load or is it pretty minimal and could operate as a side-gig? It sounds like the plan here is to continue to grow well beyond the current state but just curious about this particular moment in the business and how sustainable it is if it doesn't grow.
Support is roughly 10 hours per week and we're now up to 270 customers. The rest of the time is spent on product, reviewing marketing content and occasionaly sales. I've been full-time since $5k MRR as trying to juggle all this with a full time job was miserably + slowed down growth.
$80-90k isn't actually that much less than a developer salary (in U.K., not U.S.), but it's an interesting question what I'd do if it didn't grow any more.
I'd probably put it into maintenance-mode, and start another micro-saas, as I love the freedom of working where/when/how I want. I'm hopeful of hitting $150k ARR by end of year though, and $250k next year.
super cool to see the maturity in knowing what you want. i realize now that i was wayyyyy more profitable (cash money in my pocket) when my startup was literally 10x smaller. for those aspiring to be the next big blow up, as you grow/scale, overhead and the need to manage your own people start taking over from building product and supporting/making your customers happy.
for context, i'm at ~$400k MRR/just shy of ~$5M ARR and i make way less (in cash) now than i did at $40k MRR. don't get me wrong, the enterprise value has supposedly gone up but that's a lottery ticket versus the consistent cash in your pocket.
Thanks! Super interesting example. Do you prefer the day to day challenges now or when you were at $40k MRR?
I basically look at entrepreneurship as trying to create my perfect job: make $200-500k/ year, work on what I want with smart people, don't have a boss etc. So a lifestyle business. But maybe I'll get bored and want to take a bigger swing, who knows.
What customer support needs generally take up the most of your time? By rest of your time, are you talking 40 hour weeks? 60 hr weeks? Just trying to understand the time commitment for this amount of MRR
People finding bugs - it's a super flexible tool so lots of edge case bugs. Helping people set up their requests (e.g. no-coders who don't totally understand APIs or DF). Then boring stuff like billing queries/refunds etc.
> Assuming profit would be in the $80-90k range, that's multiples lower than what a developer could make in a job
HN really lives in a bubble. $90k USD per year is more than double the median income in the highest earning countries in the world [0]. There are very few places in the world you could not live extremely comfortably on that income.
Even for software engineering specifically, there are only two countries where the median is > $90k USD. [1]
I’m curious if you worry about Airtable incorporating your add on into their core offering? I feel that’s always my worry about building on top of someone else’s platform.
That's definitely the biggest risk to the business (other than competition).
Airtable seem committed to being a platform that third-party developers can build businesses on, in the same way Shopify are. So I think (hope) they'd acquire me, rather than just cloning it, to maintain their reputation as a platform. But they definitely could do this and it's pretty scary!
For now, my strategy is to try and grow to $350k+ ARR and diversify the profits into index funds etc. I also have a couple of other micro-saas ideas that aren't platform-dependent that I'll launch in the next couple of years.
you can probably worry about this less. I had the same worry when building seekwell.io and it turned out to not matter at all. Google did eventually launch some things you could use instead of us, but they sucked and by the time they launched it we were way ahead in features.
They also had a ton of restrictions that made sense for Google (e.g. mostly only supporting their own cloud products as a source), but didn't make sense for most customers. Not a single one of our customers has said "we're using the built in Google features" as a reason for cancelling.
Airtable is likely better then Google is this respect (will listen more closely to their customers), but probably not much. They are still a big company and you can do better.
Probably not going to charge more any time soon. I'm in the prosumer space, not B2B, and people are more price sensitive than you might expect.
Raising prices from $18/mo to $24 has massively reduced support, but we get a fair few people cancelling due to price, so any higher would probably be pushing it.
Every business has external threats that you have no control over. Is it really sensible to give up "$8600/month * how long Airtable take to implement the feature" due to that concern, or should you move fast and execute to maximize the time you're making that money?
I'd be interested in the IPO alerts newsletter he mentioned at the beginning. I was recently thinking about building an IPO prediction website and newsletter, where users could vote on the probability that startups will have an IPO during a given year. (e.g. Q1 2023, Q2, Q3)
It could be interesting to integrate a prediction market like PredictIt [1] (although I heard they got into some trouble recently.) I also started to worry about getting in trouble with the SEC, in case people start to win bets by using insider information.
Anyway, does anyone have any predictions about the next IPO window? E.g. When do you think Stripe might have an IPO?
Not sure how that is different from a 8600 mrr business running on postgres; seems putting airtable in the title is just for clicks? It would be very interesting to read about someone building a $$$$ mrr business on just airtable; no programming.
Not that it is not impressive getting up a 8600 mrr business, so congrats.
I also got tricked, but it seems that "on Airtable" doesn't mean it's built on top of Airtable and is a "no-code business". It means built to interface with Airtable, as in "a tool for Airtable", for other no-code users. This is a very-much-code business.
You haven't read the article! He has made a no-code tool to import data from anywhere into Airtable! The backend is written in Node.js, TypeScript, PostgresQL, GraphQL and hosted on Heroku. The frontend is React.js, TypeScript and Airtable's Blocks SDK.
After the initial publicity on HN and Reddit, what did the founders do periodically for marketing? Specially for a developer or tech savvy targetted product like this.
Some people's firewalls. It prevents a lot of crypto scams and malware.
i.e. https://nextdns.io/ gives the option: Block domains registered less than 30 days ago. Those domains are known to be favored by threat actors to launch malicious campaigns
Equivalents exist on corp firewalls, etc. Something like 70% of malware and phishing points to domains registered in the last 30 days. So it is an easy way to mitigate the risk of the majority of attacks.
What are the costs for airtable specifically? I checked it out a few times but even for toy projects it seems to cost a kidney if you have a tiny bit of traffic.
Founder here. Airtable have a pretty generous free plan. In January, they changed it to let you install extensions (like Data Fetcher) on the free plan.
It does get more expension if you have lots of collaborators ($24/ month/ user), but if you can use a tool like Softr to build user-facing portals without adding all your end-users as Airtable collaborators.
It seems like there is definitely an advantage to getting apps on these "stores" early in their lifecycle, though I never even hear about their existence until much later. Does anyone know a way to learn about new app stores/marketplaces early on, besides obsessing over tech news constantly?
I have always wondered how does one go about restricting user actions based on which pricing plan they have selected? Do they have to code it manually or is there a SaaS / library that does the job?
For the obvious reason: there are things Airtable can do that excel can't.
For example, I'm using airtable to track my job applications. I save the job ad, my cover letter and the resume I used as a pdf and attach them to the row in a column designed for attaching files. You can't do that in excel (at least not that I've seen).
> If it was reproducible, then every VC would be doing this.
No they wouldn't. $8600 MRR is a lifestyle business, not a startup that can potentially 100x. To borrow an old Google saying, VCs have forgotten how to count that low.
There's a lot of space for bootstrapped independent entrepreneurs at that level because VCs just don't care about a business that small. It's pocket change. The VCs will be focusing on finding the next platform (AirTable), not add-ons for existing platforms (this).
Find 1,000 half decent devs. Fund them for 1 year at 50K or so, with promise of 60% of company. Sprinkle over decent marketeers / designer / product mgrs.
Cost is now 50M USD + change.
Get to 10K MRR and its 120K pa, maybe 20-30K profit.
Does it matter which ones are just paying back their investment over two years, and the 1/1000 that might be a unicorn?
So nobody should try anything that anyone else has had success with? An awful lot of successful companies wouldn't exist if people followed your thinking. These aren't the kind of numbers VCs like, anyway.
A couple of people have been confused by 'on Airtable' in the title. Data Fetcher (https://datafetcher.com/) is an extension built (with code) on Airtable's marketplace in the same way you'd build on the App/ Play Store. It's not a no-code app built using Airtable.
MRR is up to $9400 since I did this interview, and should hit $10k in the next month.