Go Wide to Go Narrow : Learnings from our first Product Hunt Launch

The conventional startup advice didn't work for us, here's how we discovered our early ICP for Airbook

Sep 30, 2024

In October 2023, we launched Airbook Beta on Product Hunt. At that point, the product was pretty scrappy—users could write SQL queries and build very basic charts, connecting to over 150 different data sources. That was it.

Before we dive in, here are some cool pictures from launch day!

We knew our product wasn’t perfect.

We also had no clue who we were really building for yet.

Were we targeting enterprises? SMEs? Startups?
Who were the decision-makers? The power users?
Would anyone actually pay for this? And if so, how much?

We had read all the advice:

“Focus on one specific customer, solve one use-case, and do it really well.”

But we did the opposite, at first.

Going Wide, Not Narrow (At First)

When we launched, we didn’t position Airbook for just one specific type of customer. Instead, we basically said:

“Airbook is a super horizontal tool, built for any use-case across Marketing, Sales, Ops, Analytics, Product, CS, and Finance.”

Our assumption was that Airbook could be valuable to many functions within SaaS businesses—maybe not today, but eventually.

With the wide range of connectors and collaboration capabilities we offered, it felt like we could appeal to a lot of teams.

Why We Took This Approach

To be honest, we knew the beta product wasn’t perfect.

It had plenty of bugs. There was no billing page, the backend was glued together in a hacky way, collaboration was broken, and we didn’t even have a proper website.

Here’s how Baby Airbook looked, btw -

We launched anyway.

Why? We wanted to stress-test the idea.

We wanted to get people on the product, hop on calls with them, and see how they viewed the potential value of Airbook.

Casting a wide net was the quickest way to eliminate people who didn’t see any value.

It also helped us identify patterns among those who did see potential (even in the glitchy MVP we had).

This way, we could start figuring out where to focus next.

The Big Questions We Wanted to Answer

From this launch, we were trying to answer a few key questions:

Is there a real need for Airbook?
Who’s getting interested in our product, even if just a little?
What use-cases stood out to them?
How did they see us being different from other tools?
Were they willing to pay? If so, how much?
What was the “delta”—the change—between what they were doing before Airbook and what they saw possible with Airbook?
What’s the right way to charge for Airbook that makes sense to customers?

The Feedback Flooded In

We got a ton of feedback—some good, some not so good. Some people wrote us long emails about what wasn’t working. Others told us the product was too glitchy to use.

Some complained about the lack of transparent pricing, while others said the product was too confusing to navigate. A lot of people were just curious and signed up for fun.

But there were a handful of people who were genuinely interested and gave us some real good feedback!

They told us about their current workflow and how Airbook could save them time and money once it was more polished.

They weren’t ready to pay just yet, but they gave us valuable insights about how they were currently spending their time and budget—areas that Airbook could potentially improve.

Patterns Started to Emerge

Soon, we started seeing clear patterns from the people who signed up and provided feedback.

We learned a few things:

Product, Analytics, Engineering, and Marketing teams saw the most value initially. (So, that became our initial focus areas)
The ability to cross-query from multiple sources was the feature people valued the most.
Better visualizations, dashboards, and improved collaboration were the top features people wanted.
Very small startups (1-20 employees) didn’t see the need for Airbook yet—they were happy with Excel for the time being.
Large companies (10,000+ employees) had built their own in-house systems. Switching to Airbook would’ve been too costly and complex for them.

Our target customer profile started to look more clear now -

SaaS startups with 50-1000 employees in the US or UK.
These companies were in growth mode, rapidly increasing headcount across multiple functions.
As they scaled, the number of different data sources multiplied quickly.
The Excel world they once relied on was now becoming frustrating and inefficient.
They were at a point where they needed to build a flexible, scalable data architecture.
Moving fast, they didn’t have the time, bandwidth, or resources to build a complex architecture from scratch.
They needed something that could scale with them but wasn’t overly complicated to set up, onboard or maintain.

The Teams Who Showed the Most Interest

Here’s a breakdown of the teams who saw the most potential in Airbook, and why they got interested:

Teams that showed most interest-

Product (PMs) - They wanted a full view of the customer journey—from initial signup (e.g., Hubspot) to activation (e.g., Snowflake) to payment (e.g., Stripe)—all in one place.
Analytics (Product Analytics, Mktg Analysts) - They needed to cross-query data from multiple sources, build charts, and collaborate easily, all in one tool.
Engineering - Building pipelines manually was a pain and expensive. In smaller companies, engineers were frustrated with using their time for reporting requests from non-technical teams.
Marketing - They had tons of data sources (ads platforms, CRMs, website tracking tools) but found it chaotic to bring everything together. They struggled to justify their investments because of unreliable data.

What We Learned Post-Beta Launch

After launching the beta, we came out with much more clarity:

Airbook is most valuable for Product, Analytics, Engineering, and Marketing teams.
The ability to cross-query multiple data sources is our most valuable feature.
Small startups don’t see the need just yet, and large enterprises are too complex to switch.
Our sweet spot is SaaS companies with 50-1000 employees in the US and UK.

By casting a wide net at first, we were able to quickly learn who wasn’t a fit for Airbook, and who saw value in the product—even in its rough beta stage.

We found the signals we needed to focus on the right customer profile and use-cases moving forward.

Recently, we launched again on Product Hunt to signal that we’ve come out of Beta.

Although this one went well and we got the #1 Product of the Day & #5 Product of the Week, our first launch taught us much much more.