How Optimeister became Airtable Partner of the Year

How it started

In 2020 I was building websites. A local employment agency asked for more than that: receiving applications, reviewing candidates, sending emails, printing contracts. Custom software was out of reach, so I tried Airtable. A few weeks later it was live, and it did more for them than the rest of the website combined.

That was the end of the website business. In January 2022 Optimeister started, with Airtable as the favourite tool in the toolbox. The first clients came, the first projects went live, and a few months in I made my first hire. More followed. People who wanted to go deep on solving problems and get really good at it. The projects kept getting bigger, and Airtable kept being the right answer. We never planned to specialise. It just happened naturally, and the team grew into a team of experts along the way.

In 2023 I came across Nelson Wang on LinkedIn, who was leading Airtable Partnerships globally. I sent him a message. Fifteen minutes later I had an introduction to Samuel Cook, who had just been hired to build the partner program in EMEA. We met a few days later, passed the accreditation, and became the first Airtable partner in the Netherlands. We had no idea what it would mean in practice. But it was one more reason to go all in on the platform we liked most.

Becoming a partner

From there we grew closer to the Airtable team. We had our own client base and our own leads. Now there was a second flow: Airtable started pulling us into their opportunities, and we pulled them into ours. The first joint wins came fast. In 2024 we were one of the few partners worldwide to become a Gold Partner.

Being a partner opened doors. It also raised expectations. Airtable doesn't run its program as a badge collection. They look at how you work: how you design systems, how you scope, how you structure delivery, how your solutions hold up once real teams depend on them. Fair enough. They need partners they can put in front of their biggest customers without worrying.

So we rethought a lot. Not just how we build, but how we run a project from first call to go-live. We refined how we scope. We got stricter in how we design. We got better at guiding clients through change. And we raised the bar on what we call done.

In 2025 that got recognised. At the Partner Summit in London we won the Consulting Excellence award. That same day Nolo Apps took home the big one, and fully deserved. Oliver, Vic and their team set the standard for what a great partner looks like. For us, Consulting Excellence confirmed what we already felt: we had become a partner Airtable could really count on. And there was a lot more ahead if we kept pushing. So we kept pushing.

The year the stakes went up

Then came this year. Bigger projects, higher stakes. We were already working with great brands. Now some of the biggest names in the world are on the list. The delivery framework we built over the years was made for exactly this. Of course it exposed some gaps. But overall, it held up quite well.

We also sourced and closed Airtable’s biggest partner-sourced license deal in EMEA this year. A flagship logo, and one I can’t say much about today. What I can say is that it took fifteen months. Airtable got its biggest partner-sourced deal of the year in the region, and we got a customer we expect to work with for years.

The biggest change in 2026 was where we put our boundaries. We no longer wanted to be the Dutch Airtable partner. We wanted to be the go-to Airtable partner in Europe. This year we delivered for companies in the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, Sweden, Portugal, Germany and the Middle East. Most of our projects were outside the Netherlands. Three years ago that would have sounded ambitious. Now it's just where the work is.

The team changed with it. Until this year everyone at Optimeister was an engineer, and everyone spoke Dutch. In 2026 we built a dedicated delivery team and hired Yuliia: our first non-engineer and our first non-Dutch speaker. Her job is easy to describe and hard to do. Make sure every project runs smoothly, creates real value, and keeps the client confident along the way. Once she started, we saw how much we had needed that role. Engineers got their focus back. Projects stayed on track. Clients had one person who always knew where things stood.

She also switched our working language to English. We could all speak it, and we did with clients. But using it all day, about the most complex things we build, is a different thing. It turned out to be one of the best things that happened to us this year. We're not a Dutch team that works abroad anymore. We're an international team that happens to sit in Nijmegen.

We also started giving back to the ecosystem instead of only selling into it. We co-hosted our first event with Airtable, launched a builder community in the Benelux, and sponsored Airspace London.

Partner of the Year 2026

The day before Airspace London, Airtable hosts its yearly Partner Summit. Roughly fifty partners from across EMEA in one room. This year felt different. Airtable had just been acquired by Bending Spoons, and everyone wanted to know what that meant.

We got a first look at the product roadmap, which matters more than it sounds. It means we can design systems today that are ready for what's coming next. We also aligned with Airtable on next year's go-to-market plans, so the collaboration on client projects gets tighter, not looser.

Then Scott Robertson, VP EMEA, put one of our success stories on stage. That's when I started to think this could become a special day. The summit closes with awards. That's where Optimeister was named Airtable Partner of the Year for EMEA. A proud moment for the whole team that made it happen.

So why did we win?

The competition was strong. Several partners in that room had won this award before. So I asked Sam, our partner manager, why we deserved it. He was clear. Airtable judges on four things: sourced and influenced revenue, services delivery, project health, and enterprise reach. Here's how we did on each.

Sourced and influenced revenue

We bring deals to Airtable. And when Airtable brings a deal to us, we don't wait for the signature. We invest. Our pre-sales runs in four calls: a first session to explore the workflow and the requirements, a demo built on the customer's own process, a scoping conversation to decide what phase one is and what comes later, and a proposal. Discovery, validation, roadmap. All before we've invoiced a single euro.

There's a reason for that. Airtable on its own is a box of Lego bricks. Nobody buys a box of Lego bricks for their operations. They buy the thing you build with it. So we sell the solution, not the platform. The customer gets confidence that this is the right tool and a scope that matches the real work. The deal closes easier, the project lands better, and a happy customer tends to bring the next one. In 2026 this is how Airtable's biggest partner-sourced license deal in EMEA came together.

Services delivery

This is the one we won Consulting Excellence for last year, so we had a head start. It's about the quality of what we build and how we build it. Over the years we developed a phased methodology: discovery, design, development, deployment, hypercare, support. Sprint by sprint, with a clear scope and a clear definition of done. A typical first engagement takes about three months. As long as we stick to the method, it pretty much guarantees a system that fits. And when a system ends up different from the first design, which happens, Airtable is flexible. So are we.

What we're good at is the part between a nice demo and a system people actually use every day. Translating a messy process into a clean data model. Building interfaces that make sense to the people who didn't ask for a new system. Guiding a team through the change. That's where most projects fail, and it's where we've put most of our effort.

The thing that holds it all together is our own operating system. Built in Airtable, obviously. It runs our projects, sprints, tickets, time and support, so we can run fitfteen projects in parallel with a lean team and still know exactly where every one of them stands. We eat our own cooking. It tastes fine.

Project health

Our customers rate us 4.9 out of 5. I've thought about why. Part of it is structure: a dedicated delivery lead on every project, one person who always knows where things stand. Hypercare after go-live, so the first weeks of real usage are covered. Support agreements after that, so the system keeps evolving instead of slowly decaying.

The bigger part is harder to write down. We are a team that wants things to work. We keep each other honest. When something doesn't go to plan, we don't hide it. We face it, we tell the client, and we fix it. Problems get flagged early instead of discovered late. I can say with a straight face that everyone here cares about the company and about the customer. You can't fake that over a three month project. It shows up in the score.

Enterprise reach

Airtable's focus is large, complex organisations. That's where most of their users are. If you build great systems but only for small local businesses, you're a fine builder and a less interesting partner. Our typical customer is an operational leader in marketing, sales or operations at a mid-to-large company, replacing spreadsheets that stopped scaling. Ten seats to a few hundred. Industry doesn't matter much. Complexity does.

Delivering for teams like that is a different sport. More discovery, more stakeholder alignment, more change management, more project management. We've done it for companies like Philips, Daikin, Hearst and Storytel. We still learn on every one of them. Challenges come with the territory. But we've proven we can play at that level, and that's what Airtable is looking for.

Why it matters to us

We could act cool about this. An award is an award. But for us it matters, and I'd rather say why.

When you sit across the table from a company with 50.000 employees, credibility is everything. Right now we have eight people. Before anyone takes us seriously at that level, we have to prove we can deliver. An award like this does a lot of that proving before we've said a word. The conversation starts with less doubt, and that is worth a lot.

It matters inside Airtable too. Account teams in London, Paris and Munich decide which partner they bring into a deal. Most of them have never met us. Partner of the Year is the shortcut that puts us on their shortlist before we've had the chance to earn it in person.

For our clients, it's confirmation. The people who chose us over a big consultancy firm took a bet. This makes that bet a little easier to defend.

And for the team, it's the visible moment. Most of their work lives inside systems nobody outside the client ever sees. An award is one of the few times that work gets seen. Since January 2022, not one person has left Optimeister. They earned that.

What's next

Airtable is entering a new era. The acquisition by Bending Spoons means changes. What I can say is that we're more committed than ever to keep building alongside the Airtable team. The early signs on the product are good. Bending Spoons is shipping updates in weeks that used to take months. That matters to us for one reason: we want to offer our customers the best value we can, and for that Airtable has to stay a serious platform in the age of AI. So far, it looks like it will.

On AI, here's what we see in practice. More and more clients come to us with an AI question. Almost every time, the honest answer starts with their data. One process lives in two tools and three spreadsheets, nobody agrees on what a 'project' is, and the numbers don't match. AI on top of that gives you fast, confident nonsense. So we do what we've always done: get the operations onto one platform first, with clean data and clear processes. Then AI becomes useful, often faster than people expect.

For us, Q4 is busier than it has ever been. We're looking to grow the team where it makes sense, carefully, the same way we've done it so far. Last year I wrote that we were building something big and that 2026 would show it. I think it did.

To our clients: thank you for trusting us with the workflows that run your business. To Sam and the Airtable partner team: thank you for betting on us early. And to Bram, Gijs, Jelle, Bob, Rich, Yuliia: this one is yours.