Founder Chat: What have we learned from talking to Baserow users?

Founder Chat
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When speaking with customers, the goal is to uncover the causes and reasons behind their decision to start using your product. These stories and deep insights reveal what ultimately convinced them to make the switch. Today, we spoke with Olivier Maes, our co-founder and CRO, to discuss his findings after talking to Baserow customers.

@omaes72, over to you!

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Hi everyone, as Baserow user base keeps growing, we started to see some consistent trends in type of users, type of departments, type of industries and what benefits our users are looking for with Baserow. After almost 18 months of customer feedback, I have learned a few interesting things:

  • many users want control over their data and therefore deploy Baserow on their server or with a security approved service provider they already work with.
  • scalability and performance really matters. I had numerous feedback about users complaining about lack of speed and stability with other tools like Airtable once they need to manage large datasets.
  • openness is both a mindset and a technical design. Our users fundamentally believe in the opensource innovation model, even if they do not customize Baserow themselves. The fact to use a software that does not lock them in and is by design open to a broad ecosystem of tools, is something our users really like.
  • we see more and more software partners adding Baserow to their application and service offerings. We see this for instance in Construction, Manufacturing, Real Estate, Accounting, Membership organizations, Youth camps, etc… These software vendors have a lot of existing customers to whom they sell specific software. They are adding Baserow as the data foundation to their applications and open the door to lots of new Baserow users for us. That is something we only can do because we are opensource and the partners can self host Baserow for their customers.
  • Responsiveness and Customer support: as a startup, being fast and accurate with support request answers really makes a difference for our users. They love our team and have sometimes experience terrible support somewhere else.

Overall, I learned that users are a mix of entrepreneurs, opensource fans working at companies, government entities, researchers, students, non profits. It is a very diverse group of users. Some like us because we are free or very cheap, others focus more on security, openness and scalability. A quite specific group of users build businesses with Baserow because of the very permissive MIT license.

I would love to learn more in depth what exactly our users are building with Baserow and how much impact we have on their productivity. I therefore would encourage our users to share some of that on teh Made with Basrow section as this is really useful to our team.

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Thank you!
I work in a climate non-profit organization and we chose Baserow for:

  • openness: it is part of our values to use free software
  • control of the data: we have personal data of lot of activists, we want them on our own server

It’s been a long time we wanted to quit GoogleSheet for this usecase, and we didn’t want to move to AirTable because of the two reasons above.

In our project, we use Baserow with n8n automations. Maybe we’ll share what we built with the community! :wink:

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Thank you for your kind words @Govi :blush:

We’d love to see your Made with Baserow :raised_hands: