Google Tables: Airtable's new competitor?
Modern Makers - 27/09/2020
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Hi makers,
This week in the agenda:
🎯 Google takes on Airtable with Tables
📝 Focus on Tally, a new form builder tool
📚 Tons of content to help you grow your skills on Notion
Enjoy!
📚 Readings
Over the past few days I have been reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant - A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. In this book, Eric Jorgenson offers us a collection of what Naval Ravikant has been saying over the past 10 years, whether it be on his Twitter account, in interviews or in podcasts he has participated in.
But who is Naval Ravikant? Naval is best known as one of the co-founders and former CEO of AngelList (which bought Product Hunt in 2016 for $20M). Naval has also invested in Uber, Twitter, Foursquare, Notion and Stack Overflow. A very influential figure in Silicon Valley, whose name is often cited as an example by other successful entrepreneurs.
How to become rich, how to be happy, the importance of meditation and reading, these are the main topics highlighted in this book.
Some of my favorite quotes below:
No one can compete with you on being you. / No one in the world is going to beat you at being you.
Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs. In almost any salaried job, even one paying a lot per hour like a lawyer or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid. Without ownership, when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning. And you can’t earn nonlinearly.
Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It’s now leveraged versus un-leveraged.
Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.
The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player
At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.
The book is free to read, as well as complete pdf and e-reader versions for free download.
Among the other contents that I particularly enjoyed this week:
From PPC to IPO - How Snowflake did it - an analysis of Snowflake's SEO and content strategy. Snowflake is the biggest software tech IPO ever
The Double Life of Productivity’s Most Famous Doctor - YouTuber Ali Abdaal details the process of creation of his videos as well as his intensive use of Notion
🎙️HOW I BUILT THIS with Tope Awotona, founder of Calendly - another great episode of How I Built This with Calendly's founder and CEO. Great product, great business ($60M annual revenue), great CEO.
🧰 Product
Google announced this week the beta launch of Tables, a project developed within its incubator Google’s Area 120. On the first look, Tables looks very much like a simple copy of Airtable.
Tech giants have no other choice but to notice the incredible success and adoption of Airtable (and its $185M Series D I told you about last week). A few months ago, Microsoft announced the launch of Lists, another application extremely similar to Airtable.
On the other hand, the great strength of Tables probably lies in its integration with G Suite. An argument that could therefore be particularly important for very large companies, which are always cautious in their adoption of new tools.
Opinions in the no-code community seem to be quite divided. Some strongly regret to see a company such as Google simply copying the competition, without trying to really innovate. Others, like Ben Collins, have been using Tables for several months and seem to really enjoy the tool. Ben has published an article in which he explains in detail how he is using Tables.
Note that Tables, unlike other projects launched within the Google’s Area 120 incubator, has a real business model. A free account allows you to have up to 100 tables and 1,000 rows. The paid version costs $10 per month, has a limit of 1,000 tables / 10,000 rows and includes an automation feature.
Tables is currently only available in the United States, so you might have to wait a little longer if you want to give it a try.
Do you think that Tables will join Google's graveyard of dead projects in a few months? Or that this tool has the potential to become a leading no-code tool in the future?
Tally is a new form builder tool. A very competitive space where some players such as JotForm and TypeForm are already well established. Nevertheless, Tally stands out with a block building approach, very similar to what Notion can offer for example.
Building your form on Tally is therefore extremely simple but above all very pleasant. You just have to add blocks underneath each other. A text block, an image block, a multiple choice question block ... in a few minutes you get a form that you can share via a link or integrate into your site. You can also add a logo or a cover to further personalise your form.
The very minimalist interface makes Tally very easy to use.
One final argument to convince you: Tally is currently completely free of charge and the creation of forms will remain free and unlimited in the future.
You can even test the tool without the need to create an account, something I really appreciate!
⚒ Tutorials
Notion is probably my favorite tool right now. However, the possibilities offered by Notion are such that it is sometimes complicated to handle for potential new users or beginners.
Notion has just published a collection of guides and tutorials to help you better identify some potential uses of Notion (creating a wiki for your startup or organizing your note-taking for example) or simply to continue learning new skills to master this incredible tool even more.
Here is also a small list of Notion related contents and resources that I've seen this week:
Notion Pack : launched this week on Product Hunt, a pack of 20 Notion templates for freelancers (invoices, proposals, project management, NDA ...). Available in English and French
The Future of Notion – with Notion COO Akshay Kothari : August Bradley talks for almost 50 minutes with Akshay Kothari, Notion's COO. Akshay (who is also the founder of Pulse, which was acquired by LinkedIn a few years ago) talks about the future of Notion and especially the launch of the API
Principles of a Mindful Notion User : William Nutt of Notion VIP presents in video some very useful principles to follow in order to optimize the creation of your workspace within Notion
Wunderpresentation allows you to turn your Notion pages into presentations in just one click
📦 In other news
Need to relax between calls? Headspace meditation app is now available within Microsoft Teams
Zapier has published the list of the fastest growing applications on its platform in 2020. These include Webflow, Calendly and Coda
Parabola now has an integration with Facebook Ads, allowing you to retrieve all the data from your advertising campaigns
The Gallery view is finally available on Airtable's iOS mobile app
Seven years after its launch, Webflow has just passed the 100,000 customer mark
That’s all for this week. If you like the content, don't hesitate to share it with your friends or colleagues.
I also invite you to send me your feedback on this content by leaving a comment below.
Have a great week,
Martin,