What is Airtable? And Is It For Me?

hi this is Dan Lehman from automationhelpers.com and today we're going to talk about airtable one of my favorite Tools in my automation stack and why I think it's going to be useful for you as well we're going to talk about what exactly is airtable and how I think it's going to make your life infinitely easier and make your team more efficient as well but first let's start off with the question what is airtable well in its simplest form airtable is a database now if you're not very technical this might sound like a big scary concept SQL databases complex querying language and old tools like Microsoft Access might all come to mind in fact you might be thinking well why the heck wouldn't I just use a spreadsheet a topic which will cover a little more in depth in another video but behind almost every business application you know and love is a database if you're a salesperson you probably use a customer relationship management or CRM tool which uses a database to store important information about prospects the people who work at companies and the deals that you're tracking if your project manager you use a project management tool to track projects tasks and deliverables even applications like YouTube they're storing videos playlists subscribers viewer data if you think about the applications that you use every day you'll start to notice a pattern of the types of similar objects that are related to one another when I was a teacher I used to create so many spreadsheets that contain similar information about my students I had a spreadsheet with student information I had a spreadsheet to track their musical instruments I had a spreadsheet to track music contests and events we went to I had a spreadsheet to track who was borrowing equipment from the school so much copying and pasting of student data between these spreadsheets instead a database allows us to relate objects to each other hence the name relational database so now all of these different objects could tie back to my students rather than duplicating information all over the place and that's what airtable lets us do is tie all the important bits of information to one another but rather than an archaic and complicated interface airtable lets us create this whole structure of information by using a colorful drag and drop interface adding new tables is as easy as clicking a button different fields can be arranged in the way that makes the most sense to you you're not even limited to seeing the data in a spreadsheet like way you can create different views of your data you can even toggle between these views while keeping that same underlying data intact and that's only the basic functionality what if you want people outside of your organization to create records airtable forms lets web visitors submit information from your website perfect for event registration or contact forms on the road and want to make quick changes to a record airtable's got a mobile app for IOS and Android your table has recently been investing in creating even more personalized interfaces to be able to interact with information giving more flexibility to the types of user experiences you can dream up aside from the visual aspects of the platform airtable has a powerful automation engine that allows you to design workflows these workflows can update records trigger email notifications and also work with a variety of Integrated Systems and if you're a developer you automatically have access to an API to be able to create update records integrate with other systems and if you're not a developer tons of people are using systems like zapier and integromat which is now called make to be able to have systems talk to one another so that you can have your business applications fully integrated so as you can see airtable is an incredibly powerful tool and I'm sure you're excited about a lot of the functionality that airtable has to offer but the next question that comes up is is airtable the right fit for me and I think airtable can be used in almost any situation you can tell it's really flexible but really what you have to think about is does this fit within kind of the core use cases of what you want to do so the groups that I see being most successful with airtable one is in large companies or organizations if you're part of a functional team now what do I mean by functional team well this is where I'm talking about you're part of a sales team you're part of a product team an engineering team an implementation team when you are operating within a silo I think airtable can be really powerful because it offers the flexibility to be able to quickly iterate and collaborate as a team within a single system the question that usually comes up is well how does airtable compare to the other systems that we might have available to us so again in the case of a sales team you have maybe Salesforce as an option of a CRM would you use airtable instead of Salesforce same thing with project management you might have access to Asana or another tool so these business applications are created specifically for the purpose of that team with a lot of baked in business logic sometimes there's AI you know Salesforce comes bundled with Einstein so a lot of reporting business intelligence things behind it and I think where air table can stack up against those applications is that you can be really Nimble with airtable you can make changes quickly with airtable if you don't like the way something works you know what go off and configure it tailor it to the way you want it to be within an ecosystem like Salesforce yes you can definitely customize configure right there's there's a huge industry built off of Just Salesforce Consulting but do you want to have to be reliant on a full-time CRM admin to make one tweak or change to a field you know that might not be the best fit for where you are organiz organizationally speaking so with airtable you don't get all of the baked in business logic that can make a system so valuable but you get the ease of use being able to configure it tailor it add on to it in a much faster fashion get faster time to value that way now speaking of time to Value another group that I think can really utilize airtable is startups or small teams small businesses and this is because you have a handful of users you need to be able to iterate very very quickly and so in order to do this you want to be able to take advantage of functionality build something up make changes to it later not have to worry about a cumbersome process the other part with this is that a startup usually doesn't want to buy 10 different business applications to be able to set up processes for the organization so as you're building those processes to be able to do it in one tool is immensely helpful and then of course as a solo founder even a non-technical user can use airtable very quickly by themselves so using the free plan and then going up from there when you're ready I think makes a lot of sense for solo founders and then air table is just fun to use so even outside of business applications I think it can make a ton of sense to be able to utilize airtable if you're going on a trip you can do trip planning plan your locations your schedule all these pieces within a single interface and so I find myself reaching for airtable more often than I do Google Sheets even in a personal sense when I'm not using it for business applications if airtable starting to sound like a good fit sign up with the link below to find the air table plan that's right for you and go ahead and subscribe to the channel for more air table and automation platform related content head over to our website automationhelpers.com where we help businesses like yours Implement configure and integrate systems together to have the best experience with airtable

Channel: Dan Leeman

Views: 81,340

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Id: BX61XKNYvIY

Length: 7min 53sec (473 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 09 2022