What drives the success of Notion and Airtable over free and bundled software such as Google Sheets and Docs?

I think it's different for both Notion and Airtable. For Notion, I think a lot of their early adoption was around individuals just gravitating towards something different, and there's a new set of building blocks that you can play with that isn't available in Google Docs.

But more importantly, they have a really powerful organizational hierarchy. When you think about their tree structure to the left -- and I think people have been complaining forever about how with Google Drive and Google Docs, you can't find anything, it's hard to organize, creating folders is painful -- they've really nailed it with something that is intuitive enough, where people that gravitate towards Notion’s way of writing are like, “Okay, all of a sudden I can create a really powerful system, even if it's just for myself to be able to organize all of my thinking and all of my work, and it all eventually can be interlinked.” You no longer have 50 different tabs open with individual Google Docs and Google Sheets. It's essentially all-in-one: all the things you might have done in a Google Sheet to track certain things and a Google Doc to write up things can be combined into one tool. I think people just love the ability not to have to waste time sifting through the noise in GDrive. And, of course, being free in the beginning for initial users was a great way to get adoption.

With Airtable, I think it's slightly different. I think most of their power is around automation and workflows. It's really about: if you understand how to get a base set up, then basically you can save yourself so much time. All this time that in the past used to be wasted in terms of getting all the content and organizing it -- it's all done for you. And it's highly usable. You just spend a little bit more time upfront, but you save a ton of time once the automation is set up.

For us, at Gamma, we use it to collect all of our signups. When someone signs up for an account for beta access or we have survey responses -- all that's easily captured. We throw that into one place. Our team can then go through it, and mine it for helpful insights or segment users based on the use case, so that we can bundle that up in terms of how we might get user feedback and user research. It’s just so easy, whereas trying to track that in a spreadsheet or set of spreadsheets would be impossible or very cumbersome. They've really nailed the automation piece.