Building the Builder: How Airtable Uses Its Own Platform to Empower Everyone

•6 min read
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Airtable has a bold mission: to democratize software creation, enabling anyone to build the custom applications they need to power their work, regardless of technical skill. This vision of empowerment isn't just an external mantra; it's a deeply ingrained practice within the company itself. Airtable employees, across all departments, are avid users and builders on their own platform. This extensive internal adoption—a true "Airtable on Airtable" approach—is fundamental to how they innovate, refine their product, and ensure it genuinely meets the diverse needs of its global user base.

The Ultimate Proving Ground: Running a Company on Airtable

From product operations and marketing campaign management to HR workflows and sales CRM, Airtable teams rely on their own platform to build and manage their most critical business processes. This isn't just about using a few shared bases; it's about employees at all levels creating custom applications, interfaces, and automations to solve their unique challenges and streamline their day-to-day tasks.

Howie Liu, Airtable's co-founder and CEO, has emphasized the vision of creating a "radically faster and more intuitive way to build useful applications." (Source: Airtable About Us). This vision is constantly tested and validated by its own workforce. When an internal marketing team builds an Airtable app to manage a complex content calendar, or when the product team uses it to track feature roadmaps and user feedback, they are experiencing the platform exactly as a customer would. They encounter the same potential friction points and moments of delight, providing an invaluable, real-time feedback loop.

AI Transformation: Starting From Within

Airtable's recent push into AI capabilities is a prime example of its internal-first approach. Before rolling out Airtable AI and tools like Airtable Cobuilder (which allows users to create apps in seconds using AI) to the public, these technologies were extensively used and refined internally.

In a Salesforce Ventures interview, Howie Liu discussed "Starting AI Transformations From Within The Company." This involved internal hackathons where teams reimagined their work with AI and the appointment of "AI ambassadors" across departments to champion its use. Liu noted, "By definition, it's this flexible data schema that every customer can define their own business objects on top of... Every company decides their own use case." This flexibility is tested and proven by Airtable's own teams before it's expected of customers.

The aim, as highlighted in Airtable's product development report, is to "infuse AI into their internal operation [and] deliver AI experiences into their products." When employees use Airtable AI to categorize customer feedback, generate product specs, summarize data, or even draft blog posts (as marketing teams might), they are directly contributing to the refinement of these AI features. Their successes and challenges inform the development of more intuitive prompting, more accurate outputs, and more useful AI-driven suggestions for all users. Some user experiences shared on community forums echo the kinds of productivity gains and learning curves internal teams would also navigate.

How Internal Builders Shape a Better Platform

This deep "dogfooding" culture yields numerous benefits that directly impact the quality and usability of the Airtable platform:

  • User-Centric Design: Because employees from diverse roles (not just engineers) are building apps, the platform is continuously evaluated for its ease of use by both technical and non-technical users. This fosters empathy and drives the development of truly intuitive interfaces and building blocks. The Airtable Engineering Culture on Key Values emphasizes "Bonded by Love for Product" and "Start-to-Finish Ownership," mindsets that thrive when using the product daily.
  • Rapid Identification of Pain Points: If an internal team struggles to link records in a complex way, set up a nuanced automation, or design a clear interface for their specific needs, these pain points are immediately visible and can be addressed by the product and engineering teams.
  • Real-World Workflow Validation: Airtable isn't just tested in hypothetical scenarios. It's used to manage real deadlines, track actual budgets, and collaborate on critical company initiatives. This ensures that features like Views (Grid, Calendar, Kanban, Gallery, Timeline, Gantt), Automations, and Interface Designer are robust and practical for a multitude of real-world applications (Source: Airtable Platform Overview, Airtable Support Docs).
  • Driving Feature Innovation: Many of Airtable's powerful features, from its diverse field types to its integration capabilities and its ever-expanding library of extensions, are likely born out of needs first identified by internal teams pushing the limits of what they can build for their own operations.
  • Ensuring Scalability and Reliability: As Airtable the company grows, so does the complexity of its internal operations. Using its own platform to manage this increasing scale provides crucial insights into performance, data capacity (with features like HyperDB aiming for 100M+ records, as mentioned on their Project Management page), and governance needs, ensuring the platform can support large enterprise customers.

The "Builder" Culture Extends Inward

Airtable's leadership team often includes individuals who were power users and advocates of the platform even before joining the company. Anthony Maggio, Head of Product Management, is one such example (Source: Airtable About Us). This creates a virtuous cycle where those steering the product's direction have a profound, hands-on understanding of its strengths and potential.

The general benefits of "dogfooding," such as improved product quality, faster feedback cycles, and internal buy-in (as outlined by sources like HeroCoders and Mad Devs), are amplified in a company like Airtable, where the product itself is a tool for creation and operational management.

Conclusion: Empowering Others by Empowering Themselves

Airtable's commitment to being its own most active and innovative user is a powerful strategy. By building and running their company on the same platform they offer to the world, they gain unparalleled insights into the needs of modern teams and the evolving landscape of work. This "Airtable on Airtable" approach ensures that every new feature, every UI refinement, and every AI-powered capability is not just theoretically sound but practically proven. It’s this deep, internal proving ground that allows Airtable to confidently empower its customers to build their own "next-gen apps" and transform their operations from the inside out—just as Airtable itself continues to do.