Building in Public: How a Small Team Is Taking on Typeform, Zapier, and Airtable

There's a moment in every founder's journey where you look at what you're building, then look at your competitors, and think: are we crazy?

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Zapier has raised $1.4 billion. They have over a thousand employees. They process billions of tasks per year and have an SEO moat of 845,000 indexed pages that took a decade to build.

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Typeform has raised $247 million. They've built one of the most recognized brands in SaaS — people literally say "let me Typeform that" the way they say "let me Google that."

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Airtable has raised $1.4 billion. They've become the default database for non-technical teams worldwide.

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And then there's us. A small team. A fraction of those resources. Building a platform that aims to replace all three of them — plus Mailchimp, plus Clay, plus Chatbase — with one product.

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So yeah. Are we crazy?

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Maybe. But I don't think so. And here's why.

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The Origin Story (It's Not Glamorous)

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TinyCommand didn't start with a grand vision. It started with annoyance.

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I was running a business that — like every business — needed to collect data from customers, store that data somewhere, do things automatically when data came in, and send emails to the right people at the right time.

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Simple enough, right?

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So I signed up for Typeform for forms. Airtable for the database. Zapier to connect them. Mailchimp for emails. Later, Clay for enrichment and a chatbot tool for the website.

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And then I spent the next six months maintaining the spaghetti.

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The Zapier workflow that connected Typeform to Airtable broke every few weeks — usually silently. The Mailchimp integration needed constant babysitting because field types didn't quite match. The enrichment pipeline was a Rube Goldberg machine of three Zapier workflows chained together with delays and filters.

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I was spending more time maintaining my tools than doing the work the tools were supposed to help me with.

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One night — genuinely, 2 AM — I was debugging yet another failed webhook, and I just snapped. Not dramatically. Quietly. I opened a blank document and started sketching what it would look like if all of this were one thing.

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Forms that write to tables. Tables that trigger workflows. Workflows that send emails. All one system. No webhooks. No middleware. No glue.

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That sketch became TinyCommand.

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What We're Actually Building

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I want to be specific because vaporware manifestos are easy. Shipping software is hard.

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Here's what we've built and shipped. It's real, it works, people use it:

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TinyForms — A form builder. Drag and drop. Conditional logic. Embeddable anywhere. The data goes directly into TinyTables because they're the same system.

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TinyTables — A relational database with a spreadsheet interface. Views, filters, sorts, linked records. Think Airtable but natively connected to everything else in the platform.

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TinyWorkflows — An automation engine. "When this happens, do that." But unlike Zapier, actions between TinyCommand products are native — no tasks consumed, no webhooks, no middleware.

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TinyEmails — Email template builder and sender. Not just transactional emails — full marketing email capabilities with a block-based visual editor.

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TinyAgents — AI-powered agents and chatbots. Deploy on your website, connect to your data, let them handle customer interactions.

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AI Builder — This is the one I'm most excited about. Describe what you need in plain English — "I need a lead capture system with a form, database, welcome email sequence, and Slack notifications" — and it builds the entire system. Forms, tables, workflows, emails. All connected. All working.

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Marketplace — 100+ integrations for the tools that live outside our ecosystem. Slack, Stripe, Google Sheets, HubSpot, and more.

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It's not everything. But it's a lot. And it all works together in a way that Typeform + Airtable + Zapier + Mailchimp never will, because it was designed as one system from day one.

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The Unfair Advantages Nobody Talks About

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When people hear "small team taking on billion-dollar companies," they assume it's a suicide mission. But I think the dynamics have shifted in ways that aren't obvious.

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1. The Market Wants Fewer Tools, Not More

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For the last decade, the SaaS market rewarded specialization. "Do one thing well" was the mantra. And it worked — we got incredible individual tools.

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But the pendulum has swung. Companies are drowning in SaaS subscriptions. CFOs are demanding consolidation. The average business is spending $4,000-10,000/year on tools that could be one platform.

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We're not swimming against the current. The current has changed direction.

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2. AI Has Leveled the Playing Field

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This is the big one, and I don't think the incumbents fully appreciate it yet.

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Five years ago, building a form builder + database + automation engine + email tool + AI agents would require a team of 100+ engineers and several years. The incumbents had a massive head start.

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Today, AI has compressed that timeline dramatically. A small team with AI-assisted development can build in months what used to take years. The code generation tools, the ability to rapidly prototype, the acceleration of every part of the development process — it's changed the math on what a small team can ship.

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We're not trying to match decade-old codebases line for line. We're building a next-generation platform with next-generation tools. That's a fundamentally different proposition.

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3. Clean-Sheet Design Is a Real Advantage

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This one sounds like cope, but it's not. Let me explain.

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Zapier was built as middleware. Its entire architecture assumes your tools are separate and need bridging. It can never become a unified platform without rewriting everything from scratch — and you can't rewrite a product that processes billions of tasks while keeping it running.

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Typeform was built as a form builder. Its data model is forms and responses. Adding a general-purpose database on top of that architecture is a hack, not a feature.

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Airtable was built as a spreadsheet-database hybrid. It can add forms (it has), and it can add automations (it has), but they're bolt-ons to a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is still the center of gravity.

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TinyCommand was built as a platform from day one. Every product shares the same data layer. The form schema IS the table schema. The workflow engine reads from the same data store as the tables. The email templates reference the same fields.

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This isn't something you can retrofit. Either your products share a unified data model or they don't. Ours do, because we designed it that way from the start. Theirs don't, because they started as single products and grew outward.

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4. We're Building for AI-First Users

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There's a generational shift happening in how people interact with software.

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The current generation of SaaS tools was designed for the point-and-click era. You navigate menus. You click buttons. You configure settings. You read documentation.

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The next generation of users expects to say "build me a lead generation system" and have it built. They expect AI that understands their whole business context, not just the tool they're currently looking at.

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TinyCommand's AI Builder can do this because it can see the whole platform. Zapier's AI can help you build Zaps. Typeform's AI can help you build forms. But no incumbent AI can build a complete system that spans forms, databases, workflows, and emails — because their AI only sees their piece of the puzzle.

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Our AI sees the whole board. And that matters more every day.

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The AppSumo Chapter

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A few months ago, we launched on AppSumo.

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For those who don't know AppSumo: it's a marketplace for software deals, popular with early adopters and small business owners who are willing to try new tools in exchange for lifetime deals.

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I'll be honest — I was nervous. AppSumo users are demanding. They've seen hundreds of tools come and go. They have strong opinions. They will tell you, publicly and in detail, what's wrong with your product.

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That's exactly what we needed.

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The feedback was overwhelming in volume and incredibly valuable in substance. Users told us what was confusing. What was missing. What broke. What they loved. What they wished worked differently.

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We shipped fixes and features fast. Not "we'll look into it" fast — "it's live now" fast. When you're a small team and a user reports a bug, you can ship a fix the same day. Try getting that from Zapier.

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The AppSumo community became some of our most passionate users. They're in there building real systems — lead gen workflows, customer onboarding pipelines, internal operations tools. They stress-test the platform in ways our internal testing never could.

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If you're reading this and you're an AppSumo user: thank you. Genuinely. You made TinyCommand better.

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What's Coming Next

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I'm not going to give specific dates because I've learned that lesson. But I'll share the direction.

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We're investing heavily in the AI Builder. The vision is that you should be able to describe any business system in plain language and have TinyCommand build it for you — complete, connected, and working. We're not there yet for every use case, but we're getting closer every week.

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We're expanding integrations. The marketplace has 100+ today, and we're adding more constantly. The goal is that TinyCommand handles your core data workflow natively, and integrates with everything else around the edges.

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We're building more templates. Pre-built systems for common use cases — lead generation, customer onboarding, event management, content workflows. One-click deploy, then customize.

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And we're hardening everything. Performance. Reliability. The boring, critical stuff that separates a product people try from a product people depend on.

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What I'm Asking From You

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This is the part where I drop the punchy founder voice and talk to you directly.

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We need users. Not just signups — real users who build real things and tell us what works and what doesn't.

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The free plan is genuinely free. Not a 14-day trial. Not a feature-crippled demo. A real free tier where you can build real things.

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I'm asking you to try it. Pick one workflow — maybe that form that feeds into a spreadsheet that triggers an email. Build it in TinyCommand. See if it's faster, simpler, and more reliable than your current Typeform + Airtable + Zapier + Mailchimp setup.

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If it is: tell someone. Write about it. Tweet about it. That helps us more than anything.

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If it isn't: tell us. Email us. Use the feedback button. Post in the community. Tell us exactly what sucks and why. We'll fix it. We ship fast and we listen to everything.

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We're building this in public because we believe the best products are built with their users, not just for them. Your frustrations become our roadmap. Your workarounds become our next feature. Your success stories become our proof that this whole crazy bet is working.

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The Founders Pass

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One more thing.

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If you really want to go deep, we have the Founders Pass. $399/year gets you full Agency-tier access — that's the $149/month plan, but for the year at a massive discount.

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It also gets you something you can't buy anywhere else: 1:1 building sessions with our team. We'll get on a call with you and help you build whatever you need. Migration from your existing stack. Custom workflows. Complex automations.

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Why do we do this? Because every Founders Pass user teaches us something. You bring use cases we never thought of. You stress-test features we just shipped. You tell us, in real-time, what works and what's confusing.

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It's not altruism. It's the fastest feedback loop we've found.

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The Bet

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Here's what I believe. You can decide if I'm right.

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The era of duct-taping ten SaaS tools together is ending. Not because any one tool is bad — they're all good. But because the system is bad. The disconnection is bad. The middleware tax is bad. The context switching is bad.

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The next era belongs to platforms that do the core things well AND do them together. Where data flows without middleware. Where AI can see the whole picture. Where you pay one bill and log in once and everything just works.

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We're betting TinyCommand is that platform. We're a small team making a big bet against companies with a thousand times our resources.

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But we're not naive. We know the odds. We just think the fundamentals have shifted — AI, market demand for consolidation, and the architectural advantage of clean-sheet design — enough that a small, fast, opinionated team can win.

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Come watch us try. Better yet, come help.

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Try TinyCommand free | Get the Founders Pass — $399/year | Follow our journey

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