Brush up on the prior art:  “We were intellectually excited about going down that path of this general space of software creation. So we spent a lot of time doing research. It was almost like being on a sabbatical, reading all this prior art of old computing pioneers, like  Douglas Engelbart  and  Bill Atkinson , and even conte

Assess the potential and spot the openings:  “We spent a lot of time thinking about ‘What is the market for this?’ Spreadsheets have been around forever, but most of the time, people use them to track objects: people, companies, simple tables. They're not doing modeling and number crunching, which they were invented for,” says Ofstad. “And wh

But that path to figuring that out wasn’t easy. Here’s Ofstad’s advice for fellow horizontal product builders:

1. Double down on early traction (carefully).

2. Blend the functional and the aspirational.

3. Map out your adoption.

4. Think about pricing as positioning early on.

The early vision was to democratize software creation. We all felt we had this crazy superpower of being able to build software, which had given us these advantages in our careers. You can have tremendous influence in an organization — even if you’re not in leadership — by building software and deploying it to people. So broadly, we were exploring

Don’t follow the fad:  “We were a bit contrarian. At the time, it was all about the Lean Startup, getting early customer validation and failing fast. This book making the rounds called ‘ The Four Steps to the Epiphany ’ espoused this lean company development model, where you put out a super rough prototype to get to know the customer and quic

Early on, the way we approached our go-to-market was opposite of what most companies do, which is start with a super niche audience, find them, target them and expand to new markets

We started completely horizontal with a blank-slate product, and we got more and more narrow with our focus on landing customers over time. We started seeing organic ado

Many founders might be tempted to cast a wider net and get more users onto the product — but Ofstad again cautions against moving too quickly here. With just pockets of those click-into-place customer moments, the Airtable team knew it would be an unusually slow path to launch.

I think of product-market fit as the transition moment you feel as a founder when you go from "pushing" your product on people to them "pulling" it out of your hands. But the path to get there is deeply personal. One founder’s journey to product-market fit may look totally different from another’s, and yet both paths could be completely valid — wh