Who were the early customers of Appsmith, how did they use the platform, and how did the company find its initial product-market fit?

All our first customers and users actually came after we wrote a blog post announcing that the project was launched. In our first week, we had users from 30 countries. So, we launched the project and it just took off. None of these early customers or users were people that we knew of. We hadn't spoken to them before. 

The early use cases were simple CRUD applications where somebody was displaying data from their database in a table and then providing a form to edit and update that data or add new data. The early applications were very simple because the platform itself was quite simplistic. It would let you do simple tables and forms. We also had charts so, basically these three things were the most common use cases of Appsmith.

Over time, we realized that the use cases could focus on customer related operations—customer onboarding and customer support. It could be you're running a marketing campaign and you need a way of generating coupon codes, it could be something ad hoc like that or could be something like you're a fintech startup and you're doing a KYC process for your customers, which is an onboarding process, but it's one which has multiple people and multiple steps involved. So, the majority of our use cases, and by majority, I would say about 60% of our use cases, are related to customer operations. That's basically our focus. 

The other 40%, tends to be a long tail. We have a lot of users who just build things for their engineering processes. They build UI for their CI/CD pipeline for something that helps the DevOps team, something that helps them generate sales demos, mock data for sales demos, and all sorts of long tail use cases. The long tail is really long because we have users who are in the automotive industry, healthcare, fintech startups, manufacturing industry, fire departments, universities, schools, and all sorts of companies that I wouldn't have ever accounted for in our early target total addressable market calculations and stamp calculations. 

It's a really long tail of use cases that we end up seeing, but the bulk of use cases tend to be around customer operations.