Airtable's Hidden Power Users
Zoelle Egner, early Airtable employee, on customer success for product-led companies
Airtable’s strongest growth came from people who used it as quiet infrastructure, not as an identity badge. The most valuable users were often operators, coordinators, and internal system builders who ran content pipelines, research, and cross functional workflows inside companies. They got deep utility from Airtable because it let them build a working system around messy processes, but those users were less likely than marketers to post tool hot takes online or make the product look like a social media phenomenon.
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Airtable did get visible Twitter buzz early on, especially from marketers and no code builders sharing templates and public bases. But internal research also shows marketing was unusually social compared with other core Airtable personas, so Twitter conversation overstated one slice of the user base and understated operations heavy adoption.
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The users who often drove expansion were people sitting between teams, the translators and ops leads who built systems, trained coworkers, and carried Airtable into bigger deployments. That made the product sticky inside companies, even when the loudest online audience was somewhere else.
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This is why Airtable could feel underrated in public while still compounding in revenue, from about $156M ARR in 2021 to about $478M by the end of 2024. Public enthusiasm was an imperfect proxy for business value because much of the product’s usage lived in private company workflows, not public creator communities.
Going forward, workflow software will be judged less by how often it trends and more by how deeply it disappears into day to day operations. The winners will turn private, high value usage into broader enterprise adoption, with clearer packaged solutions and customer success that helps invisible champions spread the tool across the company.