Powerful Product Prototyping with Airtable
My main responsibility as a Product Architect at HappyFunCorp is to ensure our clients are building the right things at the right time. Working with startups in particular means finding creative ways to get things done while respecting budgets. This leads us to reach for low-/no-code tools so that we can strategically focus on writing custom code in the most valuable places.
One of the most powerful and best-loved ‘bootstrapping’ tools at HFC is Airtable.
Not long ago I was looking for a task management tool to replace Jira on a project with non-technical team members…
I sit here today having fully drunk the Airtable Kool-Aid, leveraging it far past anything I imagined when I first created an account. HFC in general has used Airtable for product prototyping and internal operations for years, but as the platform has evolved, it’s only gotten more powerful and useful.
Here’s a breakdown of some inspiring/surprising/awesome use cases we’ve used successfully.
First, what is Airtable?
If you’re already familiar with Airtable, feel free to skip ahead.
At first glance, Airtable might remind you of Google Sheets / Excel — the default view is set up in a row / column format. Each row is a record, and each column is a labelled data type. Airtable allows you to easily view the data in multiple ways — Kanban, Calendar, Gantt, Gallery — as well as submit new records via customizable forms (sort of like Google Forms, but better).
There is also a marketplace filled with useful apps where you can leverage your data to create invoices, view pivot tables, or keep your data clean by merging or deleting duplicate records, as just a few examples. If none of the current apps fit your needs, Airtable has a robust API and a scripting tool inside of it to create your own custom apps. So what does this all mean? For several of my clients it means we can build out robust administrative tools without building a complex backend, or paying for an off-the-shelf tool that doesn’t quite do what we need.
Airtable Feature Highlights
The basics of Airtable are pretty cool, but there are a handful of features that make it uncommonly useful.
Automations
Airtable has built in automations to help reduce manual data entry or, you can use a trigger to run a complex script. (But not too complex, they timebox scripts within automations, but so far, this hasn’t blocked us from doing anything we’ve needed.) Need to fire off a Slack message every time an order is being returned? No problem.
And of course, if any of those triggers or any of the endpoints native to Airtable don’t solve your problem, Zapier and tools like it work seamlessly with Airtable. I’ve used both Zapier and Integromat to send data in and out of Airtable. These integrations can help connect Airtable to different platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, Mailchimp, Facebook, Instagram and the list goes on. This means you can further automate workflows or just ensure all of your data is in sync across multiple platforms.
Linked Bases
The most powerful aspect of Airtable is that it’s a relational database, but now they allow you to sync your bases. How is this useful? Let’s say you have two teams, Team A and Team B. They overlap slightly, but you really only want Team B to see a limited amount of data from Team A. You can setup a view in Team B’s base that syncs the information from Team A’s base. Team B can use that data and build on it, but not edit it in any way. It’s a fantastic way to link teams together and keep everyone on the same page.
Integrations like Stacker take this idea much farther by allowing you to create a frontend for your Airtable data. Where you can restrict the fields pulled in, who has read / write access, and what fields can be editable. You can also show related data all on one page which is a limitation to viewing directly within Airtable.
Documentation
When I first started using Airtable they didn’t have this feature, but now you can add descriptions to your columns, views, tables and even apps.
When you start linking together lots of tables, or population fields via automations or integrations, it can very quickly become cumbersome to keep track of your original intention when you created a column. Sometimes you need a column as a worker column or stepping stone to help get the data you need to populate another column. I’ve come back to a table six months after building some flows scratching my head muttering to myself “‘what the actual f — — did I do here?”. I can not stress enough how important it has been for our process to start using the descriptions. I really wish Airtable would add them to automations as well as some type of grouping.
So let’s dive into a few of my favorite ways we have been able to leverage Airtable….
Practical Applications of Airtable
E-commerce: Bulk Product Import / Exporting
WooCommerce and Shopify both have ways to edit products in bulk, but if your products and variations start tipping over the one thousand mark, it can be a massive time sink to do this without some help. Depending on how complex your product is, just making sure all the right boxes are ticked can take anywhere from 10–30 minutes to add one product. With Airtable we are able to setup templates with the correct format needed to bulk import data to these platforms. Further, we can setup forms allowing internal teams to select options from drop downs, ensuring data is always correct, and auto populate other fields as needed using either default values or formulas. This can seriously reduce time spent doing admin work so that more time can be spent making customers happy and growing the business.
E-commerce: Inventory Management
One of the main reasons we started using Airtable on a Wordpress / WooCommerce project was due to the speed of adding products / variants to Woo. Due to processing time within Woo, it could take upward of 30 mins just to do a single product with multiple variants. If you have hundreds of new products and thousands of variants, that’s a lot of wasted time just to get your products in front of consumers. So we set up a base and a form to easily input the required data. Then another table in that base that properly formatted the data, from there we could quickly download a .CSV for bulk importing, like discussed above. But the true magic comes after. Now that we have all our products and variants in airtable, it’s much easier to manage inventory across the board. Woo is limited unless you have a developer add custom fields to store additional data on a product, variant, order, customer, etc.
With Airtable we can add any meta data we want. Airtable has a data type of barcode, which looks like a basic input field, but if you use the Airtable app on a phone or tablet, you can use the camera as a barcode reader. Or, just buy a Bluetooth barcode reader which teams have said is faster than the phone. Scanning an item finds it on your table, allowing editing of data like location as an example quick and easy. You can add the chart or pivot table apps so you can view inventory at a glance, or setup Slack alerts when something is running low. You can even trigger shipment emails to customers automatically with their tracking codes.
Taking this a step further, we built a custom app which runs within Airtable to access USPS API. Now we can see when items are out for delivery or coming back, and setup automations within Airtable to update order status according to the official shipping status.
Personal use
I recently moved from Brooklyn to my hometown of Pittsburgh PA, and have become mildly (okay, totally) obsessed with walking the city steps. I did a walking tour where the guide recommended getting this book which has all of the 800+ sets listed in the back. It was quickly way too time consuming to find the steps in the book and reference them with a google map of the area to figure out if that was indeed the set I walked or not. After a little research I found the city of Pittsburgh has all of the steps in a data set which I imported into Airtable. With a little tweaking, I added a linked table to create routes. By adding sets of steps to the routes, I can then roll up how many total stepcases and individual steps are in a given route, and then add data like elevation gain, time to walk, and more fully satisfying the data nerd within…
What no code / low code solutions have you come up with? I’d love to hear about them!
