Happy new year! 🎉,
First, thanks to all of you for following my entrepreneurship journey with Datablist.
2021 was a building year with the launch during the summer of a first MVP and a focus on some basic data use cases:
- Find and merge duplicates in Excel and CSV files
- Combine several CSV files into a consolidated list
- Clean mailing lists to remove invalid and disposable email addresses
- And a Chrome Extension to import LinkedIn profiles to Airtable or Google Sheets (now removed following LinkedIn complaint)
Those articles have generated a few thousand visits each month from Google (not bad for just 4 articles!). Which leads to interesting feedbacks and talks with users.
=> A special thanks to all beta users for using Datablist and sharing your use cases 🙏
Most of the time, users are dealing with lists of people (subscribers, customers, employees), or companies (prospects, leads) and are stuck in a no man's land between CRM software and spreadsheet tools.
- For growth hackers, how to build prospects lists with cleaning, enrichment, and scoring without polluting their CRM.
- For mailing lists, how to clean and enrich subscribers to find business opportunities.
- For Venture Capital funds, how to manage a list of startups and score them to find the next unicorns.
- For head hunters, how to source candidates, then segment and score them to find perfect matches.
On one side, CRMs focus on sales professionals and are not suited for any of those use cases. And on the other side, many people still choose to use spreadsheets (or Airtable/Notion) or develop custom tools.
Airtable is a great alternative to spreadsheet tools and is getting momentum. With typed properties and relationships, it brings improvements over spreadsheet tools. Yet it comes with its own limitations. Airtable is not built for "large" collections with tens of thousands of items, doesn't have enrichments APIs, and lacks basic data management features (update items from CSV/APIs, consolidate listings, etc.).
The sweet spot I want to target with Datablist is use cases unaddressed by CRMs, where spreadsheet tools are not enough, and when Airtable hits its limitations. Whether Datablist stays a generic tool or focuses on specific use cases remains to be defined.
For 2022, my goal is to keep building Datablist to target one or more of those use cases. 🙏 If you think Datablist can bring value to you in any other way, please contact me 🙂.