In which specific verticals has Airtable seen successful bottom-up adoption, and what factors have contributed to this success?

I would actually disagree with that. Or rather, I would say that I think project management is not a useful frame because it means so many things to so many different people.

What you're seeing when you see us compared to something like Asana or whatever else is that it's the closest horizontal analog that people understand.

And because they're thinking there's only either super vertical tools or horizontal tools, they're like, "Okay. Well, I guess the horizontal thing. Sure, everything could be a project. Fine."

But those products are not actually designed for the way that work actually gets done anymore. In a lot of cases, they're more narrow than they are willing to admit to the market. And so it's just a bad proxy from my perspective.

Marketing is definitely one of the use cases we focused on.

There are two types of content use cases that were particularly compelling. One of them is marketing and one of them is not. So content marketing is one. Content as marketing.

The other is content production where content is the product. So that might be managing your slate of shows for your streaming provider. That's very different. Even though they're both content calendars, totally different use cases it turns out, fun fact.

There are three things that made marketing really, really interesting besides that it was not a well-solved problem.

One, content marketers love to talk.

They're all over Twitter talking to each other. They're constantly talking about their tools. There's a really strong community of people who are trying to improve their career prospects by talking about their tools. And that is super useful if you are a tool that is improving their career prospects, right?

So that was number one. Just chatty content people. I love them. I guess I'm one of them, but whatever.

Number two is content people tend to move around a little bit more.

There's a huge freelance community that's constantly bopping between different places. It's an evolving field, so everybody's trying to steal talent from each other and talent brings tools. So you get this really interesting viral adoption throughout the entire industry fairly quickly because the tool is being brought by the people who are doing the work.

You see that a lot as well in media and entertainment, which is why we're so successful in that particular vertical, right? If you're working on a movie, everybody's together for a bit, and then they separate. Same thing happens on TV, same thing happens... all of the talent is constantly moving.

That's very helpful if you're a tool that's trying to have viral adoption across many companies. You just get the seat in, they prove that it's super valuable for one thing and then everybody uses it for the next thing. Works great.

Then the final thing is that there were such huge market pressures on content, especially content as product. It's changing so quickly. The state of the art is not the same. There are new platforms every day, which means your playbook has to change every day. And in that context, anything that's super vertical specific cannot possibly keep up.

The process is always going to have to look really different for any given project. And that's where Airtable really shines: in places where everything is evolving too fast for you to have just one way of doing work.

So that was why those use cases were great. I say all that because you can imagine that I said the exact same things about several other industries.

UX research is actually one that we were super successful in. Product management was actually pretty useful for us. Generally with smaller companies.

When you get up to a bigger company size, product management  is usually a more static process where there are more evolved tools. And at that point, people will have lots of strong opinions. So smaller companies, product management; bigger ones, less so.

And then there were a broad set of use cases that are hard to characterize so I'm going to call them operations. Like a rideshare app opening up new markets, right? It's a template they have to move to every new market. There's a whole run book that's very complicated and it's kind of being tweaked every time they run it.

That's something that Airtable is really, really good at because there's a set of data that has to go with it. There's a set of actions that have to occur.

Those things are very closely connected to each other. So you don't want to have to do meta work about the thing that's already in your system because that's going to have to change a lot. And you need a lot of visibility from a lot of different people.

Those operations use cases look different across every single industry. We had them in oil and gas. We had them in everything, you name it, but ops was always the best because ops people have their tentacles in every part of the company. They get to swoop in and look like a hero when they fix the weird, hard problems. 

Our best evangelists were people who thought they were going to get ahead in their careers by being the ones who solves other people's problems, either by providing them with the tool or building the system. Over and over again, if you could find that person, they were the perfect first mover.

And then, once you got them, the person who was actually going to get you the lucrative enterprise contract are all of the people who are what I would call translators.

They sit between people doing work and people who want results and they manage the process and make sure they translate between the two. And those are the people who are building systems. Those are the people using Airtable. Those are the people who can make an argument for budget in a way that a tinkerer who's sitting around drinking wine on a Tuesday playing with Airtable is not always going to get you budget.

They will get you in front of the right people who can, but they're not going to do it themselves.