One of the things that bothers me most (I often can’t sleep at night thinking about it) is a missed opportunity. Not my missed opportunity, but someone else’s.

The one I’m thinking about right now is the missed opportunity of one of my favorite products of all time: @Airtable 👇

Before I go into what I think Airtable has missed, let me start by saying that I was/remain one of its earliest/biggest fans. At a 2015 hackathon (when I used to go to hackathons), I built a CMS backed by Airtable that I called Airguitar which I went on to build many things with.

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(side note on Airguitar: it never became a commercial product or left my own company’s use, and surely it would have had some trademark issues 😃, but also, Airtable’s colors were so much cooler back then… that’s not the missed opportunity, sorry for the digression.)

I legitimately believe that @Airtable belongs in the Hall of Fame of user interface design. Using its database for the first time was like watching Michael Jordan play basketball. The only other experience I’ve had in the same league is using @figmadesign. Both web apps. Bananas.

I’ve created hundreds of workflows (and fully-functioning applications) hacked on top of Airtable, not because Airtable made them easier, but because Airtable made them POSSIBLE.

But, in my opinion, Airtable went on to repeatedly make decisions contrary to their mission.

Airtable’s stated mission is “to democratize software creation by enabling anyone to build the tools that meet their needs.”

Airtable, right now, COULD enable this, but over and over, they have needlessly blocked toolmaking functionality in the most frustrating ways imaginable.

To be fair, Airtable is now a unicorn “worth” billions of dollars and I’m just a toolmaking-obsessed chump who sees a tool for toolmaking that is intentionally impaired by its own toolmaker, shaking my fist at the void.

There are too many examples of Airtable’s anti-toolmaker decisions to name here, but I will go over a few:

This first one may in fact be an honest oversight, but it doesn’t make sense because the Airtable team is Michael Jordan:

My God, the Zapier hacks we have had to build to get around this, yet Airtable Sync somehow manages to be worse.

2. After building a regular-person-readable alternative database view, perfect for a Normy Dashboard, they released it as a marketing tool called Airtable Universe and didn’t give it’s far-more-usable interface to the toolmakers and the users of the tools themselves. 🤦‍♂️

3. User/API pricing remain a kaleidoscopic nightmare for actual toolmaker use.

To be clear, I love paying for software. It’s kind of a hobby of mine. But pricing should MAKE SENSE. Our team can do everything for $25/month but add a user field and it’s $400/month… What?

I’ve moved on now to build my own tool which I hope will achieve Airtable’s mission. Who knows, maybe I’ll run into the same problems they had that forced them to torture and rip the guts out of their most fervent believers and fans.

I wish I could have just used Airtable.

(also maybe add a simple messy page model (there are already “comments”) to each record so people can write some stuff (humans need messy places to write stuff) and embed table views and Airtable is suddenly a better @NotionHQ for what Notion is used for… easy peasy)