Building in Public: How a Small Team Is Taking on Typeform, Zapier, and Airtable
Table of Contents
- What Happens When Every Company Buys 106 SaaS Products?
- Why Did We End Up With 106 Tools in the First Place?
- Are Typeform, Zapier, and Airtable in Trouble?
- What's Our Thesis? (And Why Should You Care?)
- What Have We Actually Built?
- Do Small Teams Actually Have an Advantage?
- Can Bootstrapped Companies Actually Win Against Funded Giants?
- Where Are We Right Now? (The Honest Version)
- The Math That Makes Us Believe
- Is This Crazy? (Probably. But Hear Us Out.)
- Want to Watch (or Join)?
- FAQ
They raised $1.4 billion. We didn't.
Airtable has taken in $1.4 billion in venture capital across multiple rounds. At its peak in 2021, it was valued at $11.7 billion. Today that number sits closer to $4 billion. A 66% decline.
Typeform raised $193 million and peaked at a $935 million valuation. Its current estimated value? About $299 million. Down 68%.
Monday. com went public and once commanded a massive premium. Now it's trading at roughly $3.8 billion market cap, down about 50% from its highs, despite generating $1.16 billion in annual revenue.
These are brilliant products built by talented teams. We use some of them ourselves. But something is breaking in the model that created them, and we think it's worth talking about openly.
This is the story of why we're building TinyCommand. Not a pitch deck. Not a press release. Just the honest math, the real thesis, and an open invitation to watch us either prove it right or fall flat on our faces.
What Happens When Every Company Buys 106 SaaS Products?
The average company now uses 106 SaaS applications. That number is actually down 18% from a peak of 130. Not because companies are discovering they need fewer tools. Because the cost became unbearable and IT departments started fighting back.
Here's where it gets painful.
SaaS spend per employee has climbed to $4,830 per year, up 21.9% year-over-year. That's not a typo. Costs are rising faster even as companies try to cut the number of tools.
Why? Because the tools that survive the cuts are the expensive ones you can't live without. And each one knows it.
Let that sit for a moment. A 50-person company is spending roughly $241,500 per year on SaaS. Between $60,000 and $80,000 of that is pure waste. Duplicate subscriptions nobody canceled. Seats nobody uses. Tools that overlap with three other tools in the stack.
And it's getting worse, not better. 61% of organizations have been forced to cut projects because of unplanned SaaS cost increases. Not planned budget constraints. Surprise price hikes that blew up their roadmaps.
One industry analyst went so far as to predict that 50% of horizontal productivity apps will be acquired or forced to pivot by 2026. We're living through that prediction right now.
This isn't just a billing problem. It's a structural problem with how software gets built, sold, and used.
Why Did We End Up With 106 Tools in the First Place?
The answer is venture capital, and it's not a conspiracy. It's just incentive math.
When you raise $100 million, you have to grow fast enough to justify a $1 billion valuation. The fastest path is picking one category, dominating it, and expanding later. Build the best form tool. Or the best spreadsheet. Or the best email sender. One thing, done exceptionally well.
That strategy works for investors. It works for the company's Series B narrative. It doesn't work for the customer who now needs 106 separate products to run a business.
Every tool in your stack creates what we call "glue tax." The cost of connecting Tool A to Tool B. The Zapier subscription. The custom webhook. The API integration your developer spent three days debugging. The data that lives in four places and matches in none of them.
Here's what a typical small business stack actually costs:
And that doesn't include the invisible costs. The hour your ops person spends when a Zapier workflow breaks at 2 AM. The data that got stuck between Typeform and Airtable because a webhook timed out. The onboarding doc you had to write explaining which tool does what and how they're connected.
The glue tax isn't on the invoice. But it's real.
Are Typeform, Zapier, and Airtable in Trouble?
No. Let's be honest about that first.
These are real companies with real revenue, real customers, and real moats. We're not here to write their obituary. We're here to explain why their model creates an opening.
Typeform makes beautiful forms. The conversational interface genuinely changed how people think about data collection. But at $193 million raised and a valuation that's dropped 68%, the pressure to monetize harder is real. Prices have climbed. The free tier has shrunk. And ultimately, it's still just a form tool. Your data leaves Typeform the moment it's submitted and enters the long, fragile journey through your integration stack.
Airtable is probably the most impressive product of the group. It genuinely reimagined what a database could be for non-technical users. But $1.4 billion in funding creates $1.4 billion in expectations. The product has expanded into interfaces, automations, and apps. Each expansion makes it more powerful and more complex. The gap between "what Airtable can do" and "what a normal user can figure out" gets wider every release.
Zapier is the most interesting case. They raised only $2.7 million in total funding, making them nearly bootstrapped. They hit $5 billion in valuation and $310 million in ARR. That's extraordinary. But their entire business depends on a world where software stays fragmented. Every time two products merge or one platform absorbs a feature, Zapier's addressable market shrinks. They're the world's best glue. But what if the things being glued together start coming pre-assembled?
Monday. com went public and has $1.16 billion in revenue. But its stock is down roughly 50% from peak, even with strong revenue growth. The market is telling us something: revenue alone doesn't justify premium valuations anymore. Investors want profitability, and profitability in single-category SaaS means raising prices on existing customers. That creates the opening.
What's Our Thesis? (And Why Should You Care?)
Our thesis is simple, and it's not original: consolidation is inevitable.
When SaaS sprawl hits a breaking point, customers start looking for platforms that replace multiple tools instead of adding another one. We've seen this movie before. Salesforce absorbed marketing automation. HubSpot absorbed CMS and support. Google absorbed docs, sheets, email, and calendar.
The question isn't whether consolidation will happen in the productivity and operations layer. It's who will do the consolidating.
The incumbents could. Airtable could add forms, email, and workflows. Typeform could add databases. But they won't, because their investors didn't fund a platform play. They funded category dominance. Pivoting to "we do everything" means rewriting the story they've been telling Wall Street and Sand Hill Road for years.
Alex Rampell at Andreessen Horowitz put it perfectly: "The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation."
That's the race we're running. And we think being small is an advantage, not a handicap.
What Have We Actually Built?
Let's get specific. We don't think manifestos mean much without product behind them.
TinyCommand is a single platform with five core products that share one data layer:
The key insight isn't any single product. It's what happens when they share a backbone.
When someone fills out a TinyForms form, the response doesn't get exported, webhooked, Zapped, or API-called into a separate database. It lands directly in a TinyTables table. No middleware. No task counter. No integration to break.
From that table, a TinyWorkflows automation can trigger instantly. Not because we built a connector between two products, but because they're the same product underneath. The workflow reads from the same data layer the form wrote to.
If the workflow needs to send a follow-up email, TinyEmails pulls the merge fields from the same row. No field mapping. No "which custom field maps to which merge tag" debugging sessions.
If the workflow needs to hand off to an AI agent, TinyAgents has access to the same context. The customer's form responses, their email history, their record in the table. All of it. No RAG pipeline stitching together data from four different APIs.
This is the difference between integration and unification. Integration means building bridges between islands. Unification means there were never separate islands to begin with.
Do Small Teams Actually Have an Advantage?
There's a romantic version of this argument that's mostly nonsense. "Small teams are scrappy! They move fast! David vs. Goliath!" That's nice for Twitter threads. Here's the structural version.
Sarah's Zapier bill. Sarah runs a 12-person digital agency in Austin. Her stack was Typeform ($83/mo), Airtable ($45/mo per seat, 5 seats), Zapier ($69/mo), and Mailchimp ($45/mo). Total: $422/month. Her Zapier bill alone doubled in one quarter because her client onboarding workflows triggered more tasks as the agency grew. She didn't add complexity. She added clients. The "automation tax" punished her for growing.
She switched to TinyCommand and consolidated forms, data, workflows, and client emails into one platform. Her total cost dropped to under $100/month. But the bigger win was the one she didn't expect: she stopped spending Friday afternoons debugging broken Zaps.
Marcus's integration nightmare. Marcus is a solo founder building a SaaS product. He used Airtable as his customer database, Typeform for onboarding surveys, Zapier to connect them, and Mailchimp for drip campaigns. Four tools, four billing cycles, four sets of API docs. When Airtable changed their API in late 2025, his Zapier workflows broke silently. He didn't find out until a customer emailed asking why they never received their onboarding sequence. He'd lost two weeks of new signups.
"I don't have an engineering team," Marcus told us. "I can't spend a weekend every quarter re-wiring integrations that someone else broke."
These aren't edge cases. They're the normal experience for small teams using the standard stack.
Here's why small teams building software have structural advantages that large, well-funded companies can't replicate:
1. No investor-driven bloat. When you raise $100M, you hire 200 people to justify the burn rate. Those people need projects. Projects create features. Features create complexity. Complexity creates support tickets. Support tickets require more people. The cycle feeds itself. A small team builds what users need and nothing else.
2. Speed of decision. At a 500-person company, shipping a new feature requires product specs, design reviews, engineering sprints, QA cycles, legal review, and a go-to-market plan. At TinyCommand, we can go from "a customer asked for this" to "it's live" in days, sometimes hours.
3. Aligned incentives. We're not optimizing for metrics that impress a board. We don't need to show "seat expansion" or "net dollar retention" to justify our next funding round. We just need to build something good enough that people keep paying for it. That's a clarifying constraint.
4. Authenticity as a moat. Building in public isn't a marketing tactic for us. It's an operating philosophy. When we ship something, we talk about it. When something breaks, we talk about that too. This creates a relationship with our users that a company with a PR department and a legal review process simply cannot replicate.
Can Bootstrapped Companies Actually Win Against Funded Giants?
The data says yes. Not always. But more often than the industry admits.
Zapier itself is the strongest proof point. $2.7 million raised. $5 billion valuation. $310 million ARR. They competed against Microsoft Power Automate (backed by a $3 trillion company), Workato (raised $416M), and dozens of well-funded alternatives. The product won.
Adam Robinson built Retention. com from $0 to $23 million ARR in four years, completely bootstrapped. No seed round. No Series A. Just a product that solved a real problem and a founder who was relentless about distribution.
Spectora, a home inspection software company, bootstrapped to a $90 million exit. No venture capital. No growth-at-all-costs mandate. Just steady, profitable growth in a market the VCs ignored because it wasn't "big enough."
The pattern is clear. Bootstrapped companies win when:
- The market is real but not hyped enough for VC feeding frenzies
- The founder has domain expertise the funded competitors lack
- The product can grow through word-of-mouth instead of paid acquisition
- Operating costs stay low enough that revenue funds development
We check all four boxes. Not because we're geniuses, but because we built TinyCommand to solve our own problem first. We needed forms, tables, automations, and emails. We were tired of paying five vendors and spending weekends maintaining the duct tape between them.
Where Are We Right Now? (The Honest Version)
This is the part most company blogs skip. The part where you admit what's not done yet, what's hard, and what keeps you up at night.
Here's the truth.
What's working: The core platform is live. Forms, tables, workflows, emails, and AI agents all work and share one data layer. Real users are building real things on it. The consolidation thesis is proving out in practice. When customers switch from a multi-tool stack to TinyCommand, they consistently report spending less time on integration maintenance and more time on their actual business.
What's hard: We're a small team competing with companies that have hundreds of engineers. There are features in Airtable we haven't built yet. There are Zapier integrations we don't support. There are Typeform design touches we haven't matched. We know this. We feel it every day.
But we also know something those companies don't talk about publicly: most of their users don't use most of their features. The average Airtable user touches maybe 15% of what Airtable can do. The gap between "features that exist" and "features people need" is where we compete.
What keeps us up at night: Distribution. Alex Rampell's quote haunts us. Can we get distribution before the incumbents get consolidation? Airtable could wake up tomorrow and announce built-in forms, email, and AI agents. Monday. com could acquire a form tool and an email tool. If that happens before enough people know TinyCommand exists, the game changes.
That's why we're building in public. Not because it's trendy. Because we literally need you to know we exist.
What's next: More depth in every product. Better templates. More AI capabilities across the platform. And, honestly, just telling more people this story. The product is further along than our brand awareness. That's fixable, but only if we're relentless about it.
The Math That Makes Us Believe
We keep coming back to the numbers because the numbers are what convinced us this wasn't a fantasy.
Read that table from top to bottom and a story emerges. Companies are using too many tools. Spending more per person every year. Wasting a third of it. Carrying duplicate licenses. And being forced to cut actual projects because the SaaS bills keep climbing.
That's not a problem you solve by switching from Zapier to Make, or from Typeform to Google Forms. That's a problem you solve by reducing the number of tools.
The savings aren't just in subscription costs (though those are real). The savings are in time, complexity, and cognitive load. Every additional tool in your stack is another login, another set of docs to learn, another integration that can break, another vendor who might change their API or raise their prices.
Is This Crazy? (Probably. But Hear Us Out.)
We know how this sounds. A small team saying "we're going to replace Typeform AND Zapier AND Airtable AND Mailchimp" sounds either delusional or arrogant. Maybe both.
Here's why we think it's neither.
We're not trying to out-build any single one of these companies at their own specialty. We will probably never match Typeform's design polish on conversational forms. We may never have Airtable's depth of field types and views. We almost certainly won't support Zapier's 7,000+ app integrations.
We don't need to.
We need to be good enough at each category that the combined platform is better than the fragmented alternative. "Good enough" forms plus "good enough" tables plus "good enough" automations plus "good enough" emails, all sharing one data layer, beats "best-in-class" forms connected to "best-in-class" tables via "best-in-class" middleware that costs $70/month and breaks every Tuesday.
That's not a new idea. It's literally how Microsoft Office won. Word wasn't the best word processor. Excel wasn't the best spreadsheet. But the suite, together, on one platform, sharing one file system, was unbeatable.
We're betting the same logic applies to the modern business operations stack. And we're building it in public so you can watch the bet play out in real time.
Want to Watch (or Join)?
If anything in this post resonated, here are three ways to get involved:
Just curious? Follow along. We share updates on what we're building, what's working, and what's not. No polished PR. Just the real story. Check out our product lineup and poke around. Everything has a free tier.
Ready to try it? Pick one piece of your stack and replace it. Start with TinyForms or TinyTables. See how it feels. Then add a TinyWorkflows automation and watch data flow without middleware. That's the moment most people get it.
Want to bet on us early? The Founders Pass locks in early-adopter pricing for life. Not a trial. Not a discount that expires. Lifetime pricing that rewards the people who showed up before we were obvious. Because if we're right about consolidation, the people who get in now will look prescient in two years.
We're not pretending to be bigger than we are. We're not pretending this is easy. We're just building something we believe in, showing our work, and inviting you to be part of it.
The incumbents raised billions. We raised our standards. Let's see which one matters more.
FAQ
Is TinyCommand really trying to replace Typeform, Zapier, Airtable, and Mailchimp all at once?
Yes, but with a caveat. We're not trying to replicate every feature of every product. We're building the 80% of functionality that 95% of users actually need, all on one platform. If you're an enterprise running 500 Airtable bases with custom scripting, we're probably not your tool yet. If you're a small-to-mid team paying for four separate products and spending hours maintaining the connections between them, we're built for you.
How can a small team compete with companies that have hundreds of engineers?
The same way Zapier competed with Microsoft's Power Automate with $2.7 million in total funding. Focus beats resources when the focused team is solving the right problem. Large engineering teams spend most of their time on internal coordination, backward compatibility, and features that serve investor narratives rather than user needs. We spend our time building. That's the structural advantage.
What happens if Airtable or Monday. com just builds everything you're building?
It's possible. But "just building" a consolidated platform from the inside of a company optimized for a single category is much harder than it looks. It means reorganizing teams, rethinking pricing, cannibalizing existing revenue, and admitting to investors that the single-category strategy was a stepping stone, not the destination. History says incumbents are slow to do this. By the time they do, the startup either has enough distribution to compete or it doesn't. That's the race.
Is building in public just a marketing strategy?
No. Building in public is how we stay accountable. When you share your roadmap, your wins, and your mistakes publicly, you can't hide behind PR. Your users know what's coming because you told them. Your failures are visible, which means you fix them faster. As one principle puts it, "Treat building in public as an operating rhythm, not a campaign." We use it as a forcing function for honesty, speed, and customer proximity. The marketing benefits are a side effect.
What does TinyCommand cost compared to a typical multi-tool stack?
A standard small-team stack of Typeform ($25-83/mo), Airtable ($20-45/seat/mo), Zapier ($20-69/mo), and Mailchimp ($13-350/mo) runs $180-750/month for a 3-person team, before accounting for time spent on integration maintenance. TinyCommand's platform starts free and scales to a fraction of that cost. Check our Pricing page for current plans, or grab a Founders Pass to lock in early-adopter pricing permanently.
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