Growth Insights from Airtable
Airtable is a Series F $11B company, a testament to its impressive growth over the years. But Airtable's success didn't happen by accident.
The company has deliberately and strategically built its platform as customer focused to drive product led growth. They don’t even have outbound sales motion, all growth has been acquired through product.
Growth is built on loops, not funnels, as I explained in my previous post.
Here are the most powerful growth loops that helped Airtable grow exponentially:
(Glossary: UG - user generated; UD - user distributed; CG - company generated; CD - company distributed)
1. 🌱🌱🌱 UG - SEO via Templates: User creates a template that Google indexes, bringing in more users.
2. 🌱🌱 UG - UD Base: A user shares a base with a teammate.
3. 🌱 Sales Loop: Sales team services inbound leads.
4. UG - UD Embed: A user embeds Airtable on their site.
5. Casual Contact Loop: Airtable’s logo is placed on the embedded app.
6. Viral Incentivized Loop: A user invites a new team and gets a $ credit.
7. Viral Organic Loop: Airtable superfans tell others about the product.
8. UG - CD Content Loop: User notifications.
The highest impact loops are 1, 2, and 3. The first loop helps with activation energy, increases time-to-value, and feeds the second loop.
The third loop focuses a lot on enterprise customers to capture the highest ARPU (average return per user) opportunities.
UG-UD forms loop, in particular, is a high-impact content loop that leverages the context of a user's Airtable experience to drive conversions.
Contextual Conversion
Ask users to give Airtable a try at the moment they’re receiving contextual value (received a copy with their form responses).
By introducing Airtable at the moment they're receiving contextual value, Airtable's signups are pacing to grow by 100%.
It will be interesting to see how this content loop contributes to Airtable's long-term success and whether activation metrics will remain high as user’s intent changes.
How does Airtable currently measure success?
There are 3 activation metrics the team cares about:
Retention Metric: W2 Active Users. Did they build a habit and come back on week 2?
Team Activation Metric: W4 Multi-User Active
Sophistication Metric: Build. Have they built something meaningful an sophisticated in the last month?
In conclusion, Airtable's impressive growth as a Series F $11B company can be attributed to its customer-focused approach and effective use of growth loops.
By building a platform that meets the evolving needs of its users and leveraging strategies like UG-UD forms loop, Airtable has been able to drive product-led growth and acquire new users through its product rather than relying on outbound sales efforts.
To measure its success, Airtable tracks retention, team activation, and sophistication metrics, including W2 active users, W4 multi-user active, and build.
The highest impact loops for Airtable's growth have been those focused on activation energy, shorter time-to-value, and focusing efforts of the inbound sales team on enterprise customers.
The UG-UD forms loop is a brand new and potentially high-impact content loop that leverages the context of a user's experience with Airtable to drive conversions.
Airtable tracks retention, team activation, and sophistication metrics to measure its success, including W2 active users, W4 multi-user active, and build.
Will the UG-UD forms loop continue to contribute to Airtable's long-term success and maintain high activation metrics as user intent changes? Only time will tell.
Credit: Reforge webinar with Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)