What is Airtable's strategy for approaching competition in a market where its product has an underdetermined use case?

I think that the reality is that because of how horizontal Airtable is as a product, Airtable has both a ton of competitors and no competitors. It just depends on how you want to look at it.

I would think of it as horizontal and vertical. So you can look, there's a few horizontal competitors out there that are also somewhat generic, broad. The best example of that would be just spreadsheets in general. People use spreadsheets to solve countless problems. A lot of those problems are probably better solved with a database, but previously it was just really hard to just spin up a database, so you used a spreadsheet instead.

So Airtable has a lot of work to do on educating the general public, the knowledge worker public, on the value of databases in a way that doesn't scare people, which has always been the challenge.

Then I think that there's a lot of vertical specific or use case specific competitors as well in the project management space. Which in and of itself is pretty broad, but yeah, Airtable very often is competing with Smartsheet, and Asana, and Monday, and all these other classic project management SaaS platforms.

But you could say the same thing, just going down a list of content calendars, or product road mapping, or tools, or bug tracking tools, there's a long, long list of these and there's competitors in each of them.

That being said, what I think is really exciting about Airtable is it's easy to think about the B2B software market as being a bunch of verticals. There's the CRM, there's the ERP, there's the content calendar, social media marketing system, whatever.

And it's easy to think that you're entering that market, that is the market that you're competing with, each of them is a circle that's a pie. You're competing for market share within that pie, and CRM is way bigger than social media marketing whatever.

Realistically, Airtable is going to take a little piece of all of those pies, because you can use Airtable to be an ERP. And I know countless small businesses that are basically just running everything on Airtable now, because it's flexible enough to serve that purpose. And it could be a CRM, it could be any of these things.

I think the real opportunity for a product Airtable is actually all the white space in between all of those markets. What are all of the pieces of software that heretofore went unnamed or unbuilt because people didn't have the tools to do it?

They just hacked something together with spreadsheets and email and a few other things, and they called it a process or a system, but actually it could be software if they had just known how to turn that process that they had designed into something like software with code. But with Airtable, now they can turn that into something.

So I actually think that is the real opportunity. And my guess is the white space in between all the other markets dwarfs the size of those markets themselves. So despite the competition, I think there's a lot of upside there.