
Etacts was a CRM for email contact management. Liu’s first startup was Etacts, which he founded in 2010. Years before his second company (Airtable) reinvented the database, Howie Liu wanted to make email a more useful tool for salespeople.
#AIRTABLE APP SOFTWARE#
To understand Airtable, we need to understand the landscape of productivity software in 2012––and why such a gaping hole in that market created a unique opportunity for Liu and his team.
Why the diversity and flexibility of Airtable is as much a liability as an asset. How Airtable quickly found its place in a competitive market dominated by large, legacy players. How Airtable empowers non-technical users to create engaging applications without writing code. Here are a few things I’ll be taking a look at in this article: According to Liu, spreadsheets are powerful tools, but they simply weren’t designed for the kinds of things most people use them for. Despite the countless applications of spreadsheets in almost every aspect of everyday life, Liu felt that most people were using them in ways spreadsheets were never meant to be used. Liu’s vision was to empower people to create what are essentially applications without writing a single line of code. He wanted to reinvent the spreadsheet entirely. These products might not be as interesting as the latest machine-learning startup, but they’re the products that solve difficult problems and make people’s lives better.įounded in 2012, Airtable is an alternative to one of the most critical, yet often overlooked, software tools upon which much of society relies-the humble spreadsheet.Īirtable’s founder, Howie Liu, didn’t want to make a better spreadsheet.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the most exciting software products aim to solve the most mundane problems-problems that millions of people wrestle with every single day.