Cracking growth: build fast, learn fast and iterate faster with Airtable prototypes
We've all heard it: Product market fit is elusive. Most startups never truly get there. It's really hard. Everything else (even distribution!) is easy by comparison.
For software startups, you can increase your odds of reaching PMF by rapidly prototyping and iterating your product. It helps you learn what is and is not working as you try to solve problems for your customers.
But even building prototypes can be slow and expensive if you are not careful.
So in this post, I wanted to share an approach that is working for a bunch of our customers - build your prototype on a tool like Airtable so you can build, learn and iterate ridiculously fast.
Here is why:
Flexibility
Airtable allows you to create your schema, add data, and construct relationships in a couple clicks. And because Airtable supports all sorts of fields types, you can store all sorts of data - even media - right in your base.
Of course, this flexibility can be a double edge sword. A missing column from Airtable can create downstream headaches in your prototype. But if you make your data easy to read by using new tools like, Sync Inc, you’ll find managing this flexibility is relatively easy.
Accessibility
Anyone familiar with a spreadsheet can use Airtable. This ease of use paired with Airtable’s table and column level permissions means your team members can help manage the data in your prototype with confidence.
When you build a prototype on Airtable, you get a fully built out internal tool out of the box. The simple CRUD tooling Airtable provides helps your team manually perform tasks that could take weeks to code. This tooling also helps your business and ops teams work with prototype data and the customers it serves in real time.
It’s hard to overstate the value here.
Integrations
Airtable comes ready to integrate with all sorts of third party services. You can connect forms, slack notifications, email services, webhooks and more in just a couple clicks. This increases the leverage of your prototype.
Scripting and Automations
Last but not least, you still have JavaScript in your back pocket to customize your use case.
With Airtable’s scripting block you can write JavaScript functions to create business logic right in Airtable. In fact, Airtable can reliable serve as your complete backend - no express server in the middle. And if you need to add something more complex, you can always use AWS lambda to fill in the gaps.
If you are struggling with PMF, I hope you take a step back and start building your prototype on Airtable now.
Once you do, check out these 6 best practices for prototyping on Airtable so you can skip the pitfalls and move even faster.
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