One of the primary challenges that B2B healthcare, consumer health, and biotech companies face when it comes to finding third-party software solutions is that they don't comply with the level of sensitivity necessary to be able to use the software. This includes: * Measures to control and lock down PHI (Protected Health Information) and PII (Personally Identifiable Information) * Regular and rigorous audit logs that are easily accessible * The ability to manage permission groups at the mo

Every tech startup in the US incorporates as a Delaware C Corp with 10,000,000 shares of Common Stock at the date of founding. This is remarkably consistent–if you go through an accelerator like Y Combinator or Techstars, if you use the default options with Stripe Atlas or Clerky, or if you ask a tech law firm for advice, they'll all point you in the same direction. Incorporating in Delaware and as a C Corp are pretty well understood and well explained on the internet, but why 10 million shares

Today, we're announcing our Series A and the public launch of Airplane runbooks—a developer platform for automating internal workflows.

I often get questions from founders about how they should think about the “technical moat” of what they’re building, or from potential employees about our technical moat at Heap. If you have a successful product, what’s to stop someone else from building it? Technical moats exist, but they rarely take the form people expect them to take. People often look for an answer to that question in the form of a monolithic, singular technology, like a single algorithm, or a particular piece of code nobo

Building a product that interacts with financial systems and institutions tends to require a number of manual operational workflows. As a result, fintech and insurtech companies invest a significant amount of engineering effort into building internal workflows and processes for support, ops, risk, compliance, and other teams. This is why these companies often dedicate some percentage of their headcount to developing internal tools. One challenge is building internal tools while accounting for s

One of the first things that a scaling startup builds as soon as they have a reasonable amount of customer volume is an admin panel, sometimes called an admin dashboard or control center. From here, people on support, customer success, ops, and other teams can read and write customer data to help resolve customer issues. Examples of the types of things you might need to do in an admin panel: * Read data: Lookup a user's metadata and transaction history; see a list of users on a team * Sim

Airplane enables engineers at SaaS companies to focus on doing the thing they do best: building a great product. With Airplane, you can move quickly by transforming code into enterprise-grade internal apps in minutes that can be used by anyone on your team. Why SaaS companies choose Airplane SaaS companies are able to grow more quickly when developers can fully focus on building the company's core offering. Airplane enables this by: * Enabling non-engineers to safely run operations that were

Engineering teams tend to prioritize customer-facing features over internal tools. As a result, the state of internal tools in most companies–especially fast-growing startups–lags far behind where it would be in an ideal world. But there's a solution: why not just let the support or ops team build their own tools? There's tons of no-code vendors out there that promise exactly this. However, unless approached correctly, this won't work. Before diving in, I want to clarify that the primary reaso

Many Airplane users run tasks integrated with their production systems, and the overwhelming majority of users run their production systems on AWS. In this post, we'll walk through how you can easily integrate the two together! Via Self-Hosted AWS Agents With Airplane, you can self-host agents [https://docs.airplane.dev/platform/agent-installation] to run within your own AWS account / AWS VPC. This gives you the most flexibility: Airplane agents can run within your own private network(s), and y

This article is not about compliance requirements, RBAC, SSO, etc. If you're interested in that, check out EnterpriseReady.io. However, having every box checked on that website still won't result in a high-quality enterprise product.

In December 2020, Josh Ma and I started our startup, Airplane. Before that, we spent several months exploring ideas before settling on the idea that eventually became Airplane.

In 2013, I co-founded Heap, a product analytics company that I helped grow to over 200 people and $X0,000,000 in ARR before I left in 2020. In 2021, I co-founded Airplane, a developer platform for quickly creating internal tools.

A lot of Airplane users wonder how we're different from Retool–are Airplane and Retool competitors? Complementary? Here's our take. TLDR: both tools excel in different ways, and plenty of companies use both Retool and Airplane as complements. But there are also a few areas of overlap.

At Airplane, we recently exited our free early access period and started charging for our product. I thought it'd be helpful to write a post talking through the logic behind our pricing model, partially as an explanation for our customers, but also as a data point for other early-stage B2B SaaS businesses. Prior to Airplane, I also spent 7 years at my previous startup Heap [https://heap.io/] iterating several times on pricing. What are you optimizing for? It might seem obvious that the point of

Here at Airplane, we get asked often about the differences between Airplane and Rundeck. We thought we'd give our take. We're obviously biased towards our approach, but we started building Airplane in part due to some of the needs we had that existing tools, like Rundeck, didn't meet.

At Airplane, as of this week, we've completed our System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type I audit. For the entire time that we've had customers using our product, we've taken industry-standard security practices.

Replace brittle cron jobs with easy-to-use scheduled Airplane tasks.

Today we're publicly launching Airplane, a platform that lets engineers quickly create lightweight internal apps for their teammates. We've been in closed beta for the last 6 months, but as of today, Airplane is open for anyone to sign up and try out [https://www.airplane.dev/]. Why existing approaches to internal tools fall short My co-founder Josh and I both spent the last 7+ years at two different SaaS companies.  I previously co-founded Heap, an analytics company, and Josh was CTO at Benchl

Airplane will be available soon. Send us a note at hello@airplane.dev to get early access.