Good morning. Today, we’ll examine how unconventional methods can be a better path to success. It's not like the Australian Breakdancer's routine, though. Here, the unconventional way was not the path to Olympic success—but hey, if it goes viral, she was doing something right, wasn’t she?

Too often, we hear that a startup has to define a very narrow market with a specific use case and narrow down the problem it is solving. However, this approach holds us back and can be a big mistake, especially when working on game-changing new technologies.

We discussed this in our strategy deep dive on Wiz: Instead of a small, single-point solution, they built an enterprise-grade solution that addresses a broad set of use cases. And that was their differentiation and the key to their success.

Rippling CEO Parker Conrad also mentions this in a recent interview. Hinting in a similar direction:

TL;DR from the article - many software applications SaaS startups have been building are too narrow for most customers. They don’t want to buy a new type of software for every new problem they have.

Software consolidation is the trend, and startups with single solutions will be phased out and replaced.

Startups that can solve a wider problem set have a higher chance of success, especially when developing new technologies, when we don’t yet know the exact problems that can be solved.

That’s why we talk about Airtable today.

They had a cool idea for a no-code database builder but didn’t know who would use it, what they would use it for and how they should market it…

This was in 2013; today, it is valued at $11 billion - in 2023 their ARR grew 50% YoY to 375 million.

Here is how they pulled it off…

6-minute-read

Database Power for Everyone!

When everybody is talking about “breaking down silos” to a point where you want to break more things, the more you hear the phrase… Airtable is the actual enabler.

Why? Because they enable non-programmers to understand how a database works and even how to create them themselves easily.

However, the challenge is that they built a product that would naturally enter the domain of programmers, but they are now looking for a fit with a non-programmer customer.

You try to get them excited about the ability to create their very own database schemas. It’s like launching a new running shoe for someone who never goes outside. So, how do you best do that, and how do you find product-market fit in this situation?

Finding Product-Market-Fit

When starting with their vision around creating a product that enables “software creation for everybody,” they, out of the gate, had set out with a set of hard challenges to overcome:

Here is what their CEO, Andrew Ofstad said in an interview about how they approached finding product-market-fit:

Find and eliminate your biggest risk

• Early on, they focussed on identifying and eliminating the biggest risk for the company: “How do we actually make this database accessible to non-programmers?”

• This specifies the goal - simple UI and the target audience: non-programmers.

• Now, they knew what their prototypes would need to bring across.

Dedicated to digging in

• Not just the mindset but the financial situation that determines how long you can keep digging - “stay lean while you de-risk your biggest hurdle”

• It took them 2 years from idea to 100 users that they felt were engaged

Horizontal positioning may bring out new, unexpected use cases

• This goes against the Lean Startup approach. You are not going after a very niche/narrow problem to solve - you keep it broad and discover use cases based on the new features you are adding - the reverse

A trip back in history - how electronic spreadsheets got invented

Imagine how Microsoft built the first version of Excel. Nobody could have foreseen all the use cases that resulted from it.

The original inventor of the electronic spreadsheet, Dan Bricklin, had a very specific vision for the technology itself and what it should do. In his TED talk, he describes daydreaming about this “magic blackboard”…

So he had this vision but I doubt he had an idea of all the use cases that would come out of this breakthrough invention. Since then, the features added to his idea have evolved, and some people manage their whole company or life in Excel.

A reverse Go-To-Market

If that’s the plan, you better keep the teams lean and have sufficient financials and belief to make it through a long exploration period.

The viral growth stories of startups killing it with one feature are not the norm. Finding traction often takes a lot of exploration and tweaking; even then, it might just be one piece of the puzzle.

What are the advantages of a broad launch?

• Explore the market: Let the market speak to you by revealing where the technology is most valuable.

• Gather data: Identify a broad range of pain points or areas where the use cases aren’t immediately clear. This is something I saw when VR came out. Aside from gaming, there was a broad exploration happening to gather feedback on other commercial opportunities.

• Brand awareness: You can reach a broad audience that will associate you with this new technology. A good example were all the new crypto brands that started to pop up everywhere and wanted to become the household name for all things crypto.

When is this a good strategy?

• Nascent technologies and markets where use cases aren’t clear - a broad launch can help with discovery.

• Platform technologies - enable the platform to be applied in many different ways and discover the most promising applications.

• Market leadership - We have seen this with Wiz - directly combining many single-solution systems into their enterprise offering from the start.

What are the drawbacks?

• Resource intensity - launching broad and narrowing down later takes resources because you will burn more cash and it might take longer to find product-market-fit

• You must create a broad marketing and brand awareness strategy in different segments and infrastructure.

• Risk of loss of focus - if you are lucky you’ll find too many opportunities that can be distracting

Community Guided Development

So, Airtable had a vision for the product and a broad launch strategy. The next piece for them was the community-guided development.

It was the community that discovered and validated their use cases.

They empowered users with the functionality of their platform and then let them run with it. Before too long, groups of enthusiasts started to build databases for anything.

To nurture their community, they created a very active and well-managed Community Forum on their site. The forum engages users with categories like “Show and Tell,” “Submit Ideas,” and an Airtable Universe where they can share template databases.

Only a strong, engaged community can facilitate this process. Users feel like co-creators, and the community becomes a testing ground.

A very useful side effect

This feedback not only feeds into the roadmap but also provides data about the user personas, industries, and types of companies that could become paying customers.

Through this analysis, a team can define a pricing structure for their products

• Analyze the types of users

• Understand their paying power and usage frequency

• Map these to pricing segments

• Get feedback about willingness to pay

• Create value-based pricing

Content marketing as activation

One of their product marketing strategies to activate a broad set of users was YouTube. They ran a “This is how” campaign, creating 15-second videos that showcased examples across different industries of how Airtable is being used.

Conclusion

There isn’t just one strategy for building an MVP. In fact, if everyone follows one path, we now have three examples of how the exact opposite can succeed as well.

However, launching broad might take more time to product-market fit, so you need to prepare your company and teams for it.

Broad doesn’t mean not staying focused. There still has to be a vision to stay focused on and be prepared to dig deep. It might require much exploring an area where technological viability—aka, can we even get this to work - and the market are completely unknown.

From personal experience, building broad can often tempt you into also hiring broad, especially if you have found product-market fit and the sky seems the limit.

Stay lean on the headcount and only hire what you need to reach the next milestone.

Lastly, if you can get other enthusiasts outside your company excited about the journey, you might have the right ingredients to build and nurture a community. And its participants will gladly tell you about all the cool ways they use your technology.

More content sources for your deep dive needs

The tweet

This chart grabbed my attention. The image is based on a study of how satisfied people are with their lives and which factors contribute in either direction.

I hope you find yourself on the blue line most often and I wish you an amazing rest of the week.