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Comment by nkg | Hacker News Reader

I understand it's some kind of killer app, but I still don't get it.

The tl;dr for a more technically-minded person:

It's a database primarily operated upon using a spreadsheet interface. You can create different representations (literally Views) of your data / rows. You can add custom logic "blocks" to rows / entries / tables that, for example, send a text message to a customer in the table.

You can arrive at Airtable as a product from first principles by basically just saying: most applications are CRUD apps atop a database with some custom callouts to external APIs. What if the database was super easy for a non-technical person to manage, we could provide data insertion / retrieval in a few standardized views, and there were integrations for the most popular 3rd party services upon record creation / editing / etc.?

You're not going to build a brand new consumer app on Airtable, but all of the backoffice and internal crap we write over and over and over again... it's a really good option for simplifying those processes and is accessible to non-developers.

It's FileMaker pretty much?

Plus a sales and applications team that apparently doesn't suck.

Don't underestimate that.

Thanks for this explanation. Serious question, though - what is the core benefit over using Google Sheets + Apps Script? Is it just a better UI layer and baked-in API access, or is there an underlying structure of some sort that's superior?

Composing views and dynamically linking sheets (tables) together through information. Again, it’s a full database with a spreadsheet view / control on top, not a spreadsheet that can act like a database.

By playing around with the app, I can totally see that this supersedes Google Sheets and Apps Script by a long way. Yes, the UI layer and the API accesses. In the backend, I feel a lot of interesting things are going around - their relational engine natively supports collaboration, type support, revision history. All your mini blocks can be packaged into one big "base" which forms your workspace.

All of this can be done ... without writing a single line of code, which is impressive!

It's funny how people say things like "just a better UI layer", when to non-techies, the application IS the UI, and the only thing that matters (as long as the performance is acceptable) is features and ease of use.

More obvious third party integrations, and explained workflows and presets for common tasks non techy people doing business on the web have to deal with.

The difference is that Airtable's core data structure is a relational database whereas Google Sheets' core is a spreadsheet. It's very easy to link to records in other tables in Airtable. Google Sheets does not have the concept of records. You could hack something together, but it just works in Airtable. Airtable shines when you want to have a list X, and then for each item in X, have a list Y. X could be homes, clients, or events, and Y could be rooms, tasks, or guests. In Google Sheets, these types of relationships are awkward to represent.

MS Access, online?!

OK, thank you for the explanation. As a developer, I was thinking "It's a phpmyadmin with a spreadsheet UI". Never would I have had the balls to sell something like that. But... I am $1.1B wrong!

"Yay! RAD is back!"

What's old is new; what's new is old.

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