The interview
Q: What is your name?
I'm Olivier Maes, CEO of Baserow.
Q: What is your product?
Baserow is a no-code collaborative database, a mix between Excel (good interface) and Database (as much data possible, need to be developper to understand how it works). We took the most scalable database and added a no-code layer, creating tables like in Excel with as many possibilities, informations and parameters as a database. Oh and we're fully open source of course.
Q: Is it SaaS? PaaS? IaaS? Other?
Both Saas & Self-hosted - contrairy to Airtable, which is only SaaS.
Q: Do you provide your technology to cloud operators?
Not yet, we're still in our early stage of deployment. Right now we have 1000 new users per month. We recently passed 20K sign-ups. . Cloud providers... not yet, but we're working on it as Baserow could by a very useful solution.
Q: Are you a market leader? Who do you consider leader in your market? Does GAFAM play any role in your market?
Airtable, Grist, SeaTable, NocoDB, Memento are the main plaers. Airtable has been there the longest, they have seniority, more features, but resist less on large volumes (bugs, rowing).
Q: Which free and open source software solutions do you use?
Quite a few, for example n8n (https://n8n.io/), discourse (https://www.discourse.org/ ), Gitlab, Sentry (https://sentry.io/welcome/ ), protonAG (https://proton.me/fr ).
Q: What components did you develop yourself?
The front end, whose source code is fully open source. In the future about 10% of our new features will be premium features only available for paying clients, everything else will stay in the community edition.
Q: What are the strong points of your technology?
You have a choice of self-hosting or SaaS, we confirm to GDPR and we are open source and we provide security and staibility. In the grand scheme of things, Airtable is quite buggy and not suited to manage large volumes of data. Customers also often mention interface as a positive point. Baserow has fewer features than Airtable for companies,but we're working on it.
Q: Can you name users or clients of your solution? Preferably in the CAC40, DAX30, Fortune500, European governments?
Our paid version debuted in July of 2022 so we don't have any CAC40/DAX30 clients yet since prospection only started very recently. We're anyway concentrating more on middle market companies in the sectors manufacturing and software development. Currently we hover around 1000 clients/month.
Q: Do you have a success case among these clients?
There are many examples with French departments, insurance and manufacturing, a German assureur uses Baserow as CRM.
Q: Why did this client choose your solution rather than the solution of the market leader or GAFAM?
Clients come for possibility to deploy on premise, GDPR and security.
Q: Can you give us an idea of sales/staff/clients/end users over the last 3 years?
As a fully telecommuting company, Baserow's model allows to recruit talent from anywhere in Europe. We're currently about 15 employees across France, Spain, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom. Our choice to remain in Europe is explained by our company's desire to focus on European skills and resources.