[andycloke]

(Founder here)

That's definitely the biggest risk to the business (other than competition).

Airtable seem committed to being a platform that third-party developers can build businesses on, in the same way Shopify are. So I think (hope) they'd acquire me, rather than just cloning it, to maintain their reputation as a platform. But they definitely could do this and it's pretty scary!

For now, my strategy is to try and grow to $350k+ ARR and diversify the profits into index funds etc. I also have a couple of other micro-saas ideas that aren't platform-dependent that I'll launch in the next couple of years.

[mritchie712]

you can probably worry about this less. I had the same worry when building seekwell.io and it turned out to not matter at all. Google did eventually launch some things you could use instead of us, but they sucked and by the time they launched it we were way ahead in features.

They also had a ton of restrictions that made sense for Google (e.g. mostly only supporting their own cloud products as a source), but didn't make sense for most customers. Not a single one of our customers has said "we're using the built in Google features" as a reason for cancelling.

Airtable is likely better then Google is this respect (will listen more closely to their customers), but probably not much. They are still a big company and you can do better.

ps - charge more!

[andycloke]

Interesting, thanks!

Probably not going to charge more any time soon. I'm in the prosumer space, not B2B, and people are more price sensitive than you might expect.

Raising prices from $18/mo to $24 has massively reduced support, but we get a fair few people cancelling due to price, so any higher would probably be pushing it.