Airtable App Launch Case Study

Introduction

I am not sure how to do this exactly, but I thought it would be interesting to document what happens when you launch an app to the Airtable Marketplace. This post is written in the context of the launch I had a month ago with URL Shortener for Airtable.

The Most Interesting Part

I won’t bother you with the boring bits and start off with the real stuff - users. This is the user growth chart in the first month. I won’t include a cumulative chart even though I really want to, because it’s infamously misleading.

It all started off with a bigger bump of first users, but I saw that they weren’t authenticating, essentially making the installation useless. I even considered them as possible bots. Later on, however, these users have mostly authenticated themselves too, so they weren’t bots after all.

The 20% difference between installations and activations was significant enough that I put in some extra information in the app about it so people go through with it easier. I think it helped, but I am not too sure.

It’s interesting that there are some zero days, but then there are days like June 28th with an extraordinary amount of installs.

Around the time that I launched another app, Data Extraction, the URL Shortener was still glaringly visible on the front page of the marketplace, but a few days after, disappeared through ranking. That was around July 3, and this has decreased the install rate, even though the line graph isn’t as clear on that.

What I am happy about is the fact that it looks like it has struck a chord with Airtable users, and I can probably have chats with them to find out what else might they want.

What I am most surprised about is how little variance is there between days in the install numbers, throughout the entire month. I would have expected more zero days.

The Important Part

So how many users have actually used the app? Not just authenticated, but have actually created links?

First of all, out of the 57 installed users, 40 have authenticated. Of these, 15 users have created links. All considered, I think it’s quite alright! Still, considering that only users that have actually seen some value out of the app can ever become paid users, then it is important for me to raise that current 15/57 rate of 26% of installs to a higher level. This is why I spent two weeks on making the user experience much more seamless and intuitive, but as of writing this post, the release hasn’t gone through the approval yet.

The Funnel

I have identified a funnel for the app.

Before the first step, there are a plethora of ways people get to that point, but mostly I feel like the main driver is just people perusing through the Airtable Marketplace themselves, either through their own accord, or by the suggestion of Airtable on creating new bases.

Airtable Marketplace Listing ➡️ Install ➡️ Authenticate ➡️ Create Links

After the last step it is either blocked by the free tier limit, or the user sees enough value from the product that is willing to pay the subscription fee to create more links.

There is a tiny problem in the funnel, however. Some users seem to after authenticating just selecting their column of 5000 links and creating short links from all of them, completely busting through their free tier. So if this brought them value, it’s good, but if this was a test, then that wouldn’t be probably enough data for them to start paying for it. Because of this, I made it such that users can only go over 3x the free tier limit with a single batch, but not more. I will also give out a warning if more than 50 links are attempted to create in a single go.

What’s Next

Once I have the user experience release approved and up there, I will initiate conversations with my users and trying to hear back on what they think about the app, and what are their needs. But I also have evidence to believe that the app will keep growing organically, giving me more users and work to do.