6/14/2022 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S11-E07

Duration: 61 minutes

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In This Episode

Welcome to the BuiltOnAir Podcast, the live show.  The BuiltOnAir Podcast is a live weekly show highlighting everything happening in the Airtable world.

Check us out at BuiltOnAir.com. Join our community, join our Slack Channel, and meet your fellow Airtable fans.

Todays Hosts

Alli Alosa – Hi there! I’m Alli 🙂 I’m a fine artist turned “techie” with a passion for organization and automation. I’m also proud to be a Community Leader in the Airtable forum, and a co-host of the BuiltOnAir podcast. My favorite part about being an Airtable consultant and developer is that I get to talk with people from all sorts of industries, and each project is an opportunity to learn how a business works.

Kamille Parks – I am an Airtable Community Forums Leader and the developer behind the custom Airtable app “Scheduler”, one of the winning projects in the Airtable Custom Blocks Contest now widely available on the Marketplace. I focus on building simple scripts, automations, and custom apps for Airtable that streamline data entry and everyday workflows.

Dan Fellars – I am the Founder of Openside, On2Air, and BuiltOnAir. I love automation and software. When not coding the next feature of On2Air, I love spending time with my wife and kids and golfing.

Show Segments

Round The Bases – 00:03:10 –

Following Articles Used in this Segment:

[Reddit] Do you think AirTable’s pricing strurue is be a barrier to future growth? : Airtable

[BuiltOnAir Community] Slack | general | BuiltOnAir | 1 new item

[BuiltOnAir Community] Slack | general | BuiltOnAir | 1 new item

[BuiltOnAir Community] Slack | general | BuiltOnAir | 1 new item

[Twitter] Leo Guinan on Twitter: "@CSMikeCardona @arvidkahl @airtable I'll +1 for Mike building it. You won't be disappointed with the result. 👍" / Twitter

[Airtable Community] Other collaborators can see my personal views – Ask the community / Views – Airtable Community Forum

Meet the Experts – 00:34:42 –

Meet Charlie Melendez from ProfitGrab.

Visit them online

Base Showcase – 00:49:33 –

We dive into a full working base that will A crypto algorithmic trading bot. Find out more at https://www.profitgrab.com/

Field Focus – –

A deep dive into the Display Unpaid Balances Formulas & Linked Records – Use Formula and Linked Record fields to display unpaid balances for work performed. 

Full Segment Details

Segment: Round The Bases

Start Time: 00:03:10

Roundup of what’s happening in the Airtable communities – Airtable, BuiltOnAir, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Following Articles Used in this Segment:

[Reddit] Do you think AirTable’s pricing strurue is be a barrier to future growth? : Airtable

[BuiltOnAir Community] Slack | general | BuiltOnAir | 1 new item

[BuiltOnAir Community] Slack | general | BuiltOnAir | 1 new item

[BuiltOnAir Community] Slack | general | BuiltOnAir | 1 new item

[Twitter] Leo Guinan on Twitter: "@CSMikeCardona @arvidkahl @airtable I'll +1 for Mike building it. You won't be disappointed with the result. 👍" / Twitter

[Airtable Community] Other collaborators can see my personal views – Ask the community / Views – Airtable Community Forum

Segment: Meet the Experts

Start Time: 00:34:42

Charlie Melendez – Automation Architect | Low-Code Developer

Meet Charlie Melendez from ProfitGrab.

Visit them online

Segment: Base Showcase

Start Time: 00:49:33

ProfitGrab

We dive into a full working base that will A crypto algorithmic trading bot. Find out more at https://www.profitgrab.com/

Segment: Field Focus

Start Time:

Learn about the Display Unpaid Balances – Use Formula and Linked Record fields to display unpaid balances for work performed.

A deep dive into the Display Unpaid Balances Formulas & Linked Records – Use Formula and Linked Record fields to display unpaid balances for work performed. 

Full Transcription

The full transcription for the show can be found here:

[00:01:41] Welcome to the BuiltOnAir podcast,
[00:01:44] season 11, episode seven.
[00:01:47] Good to be back with you
[00:01:48] this Tuesday morning,
[00:01:50] myself and our regulars,
[00:01:51] Alli and Kamille are with us
[00:01:53] and we have special guests with us,
[00:01:55] Charlie melendez. Charlie, welcome.
[00:01:58] Thank you.
[00:01:59] Good to have you with us.
[00:02:01] We'll learn more about Charlie and his
[00:02:03] story and background
[00:02:05] later in the episode.
[00:02:06] So as always the BuiltOnAir
[00:02:08] podcast is an hour long live show
[00:02:11] we do every Tuesday
[00:02:13] and we always go through
[00:02:14] a couple different segments.
[00:02:16] I'll walk through
[00:02:17] what we're gonna be doing today.
[00:02:18] We always begin
[00:02:19] with our Round the Bases,
[00:02:21] talking about what's going on in the
[00:02:23] Airtable communities,
[00:02:24] keep you up to date
[00:02:26] on everything Airtable
[00:02:27] then we'll do a spotlight on our
[00:02:29] primary sponsor On2Air,
[00:02:31] then we'll learn more
[00:02:32] about Charlie and his story as
[00:02:34] an expert in the Airtable world
[00:02:37] and what he's up to.
[00:02:38] And then Charlie's gonna
[00:02:40] walk us through
[00:02:41] a base of his called ProfitGrab.
[00:02:44] Then we'll talk quickly
[00:02:45] about our BuiltOnAir community
[00:02:47] and how you can join.
[00:02:48] And then finally, Kamille
[00:02:50] is going to
[00:02:51] walk us through how to use fields in
[00:02:54] particular formula fields
[00:02:56] and linked record fields
[00:02:59] to manage unpaid balances and
[00:03:01] how to display those. So
[00:03:04] with that
[00:03:04] we will kick off with our Round the Bases
[00:03:08] and talk about what's going on
[00:03:10] in the Airtable community.
[00:03:13] Nothing, I didn't see any
[00:03:15] product feature updates this week.
[00:03:18] So relatively quiet
[00:03:19] on the Airtable front
[00:03:21] unless you guys know of anything
[00:03:23] announced,
[00:03:25] nothing announced.
[00:03:27] But you know,
[00:03:28] the usual array of
[00:03:30] some people are having a
[00:03:31] b testing and some people aren't.
[00:03:34] So there's no telling
[00:03:35] if that particular thing
[00:03:36] will be made
[00:03:37] available to everyone
[00:03:39] anytime soon or if they're gonna,
[00:03:40] you know, drop implementation. So
[00:03:43] that's right, That's right.
[00:03:45] Somebody took a screenshot
[00:03:46] of a feature that was
[00:03:47] there and then an hour or two later
[00:03:50] it was gone.
[00:03:51] I hope it comes back because I
[00:03:53] really wanted it definitely.
[00:03:56] So this is the
[00:03:58] filtering by linked records and
[00:04:01] being able to choose
[00:04:02] a particular linked record
[00:04:04] rather than typing in a value.
[00:04:05] We touched on this briefly
[00:04:07] in our last episode
[00:04:08] because I was talking about
[00:04:09] using a single select
[00:04:11] as a little hack to do that.
[00:04:13] So
[00:04:14] I'm I'm hopeful.
[00:04:15] Yeah, I think Airtable's learned
[00:04:18] not to do those tests
[00:04:20] on Tuesday morning or
[00:04:21] else we'll go live with it.
[00:04:24] I specifically said like the last time
[00:04:28] a major one happened,
[00:04:30] I was like maybe
[00:04:31] you should just do it on Thursday.
[00:04:32] So it's after our show
[00:04:34] and after Chris Dancy
[00:04:35] and Ben Green show on Wednesday,
[00:04:38] just so that no one can,
[00:04:41] you know, publicize something
[00:04:43] a little too early.
[00:04:45] but this has been sort of,
[00:04:47] you know, the screenshots happened
[00:04:49] about a week ago,
[00:04:50] so it wasn't like it was this morning.
[00:04:53] I believe it was Tuesday afternoon.
[00:04:56] Yeah, I guess the the implications of that
[00:04:58] is like right now
[00:04:59] when you filter by linked record,
[00:05:01] if you change the name that
[00:05:03] linked record
[00:05:04] then that messes up that filter.
[00:05:05] Whereas this one I guess we'll be
[00:05:06] at the source like the record I. D.
[00:05:08] So you can change the name
[00:05:10] and we'll stick
[00:05:10] with that.
[00:05:11] That's really nice.
[00:05:12] And you guys probably
[00:05:14] discuss this on your
[00:05:15] last call but the 50 record limit,
[00:05:17] sorry 50 automations now, from 25 to 50
[00:05:20] Is also insane.
[00:05:21] I remember when I first learned
[00:05:23] it was 25 was from Ben Green.
[00:05:25] He had on one of his YouTube videos
[00:05:27] and I was like 25 limit because I've never
[00:05:28] reached that much
[00:05:29] and I was like
[00:05:30] I'm never gonna reach that
[00:05:31] and I reach it for
[00:05:32] like almost all of my clients now.
[00:05:34] So I hated it because you're having to
[00:05:36] calculate
[00:05:37] which ones do I want to use
[00:05:38] with Make and Zapier
[00:05:39] and which ones do I want to
[00:05:40] keep in Airtable and
[00:05:42] And doing all these like
[00:05:43] analysis and now there's
[00:05:45] just like this freedom off the
[00:05:46] back but I know that we'll be
[00:05:48] hitting that 50 limit pretty soon.
[00:05:50] Yeah there are still some things,
[00:05:52] a lot of things
[00:05:53] that you can't really replace
[00:05:57] Make or Zapier
[00:06:00] with native Airtable automations
[00:06:02] just because they connect to so many other
[00:06:04] platforms.
[00:06:05] You can do a lot of simple stuff
[00:06:07] or anything that's coding or
[00:06:09] hooking up to an A. P. I probably
[00:06:11] with the script action
[00:06:13] but there's still some stuff that,
[00:06:14] you know,
[00:06:15] Probably should remain
[00:06:17] in those other platforms,
[00:06:19] but expanding it to 50
[00:06:20] means some people
[00:06:21] are going to be able to simplify
[00:06:23] and some other people are
[00:06:24] probably gonna stay
[00:06:25] loosely where they're at.
[00:06:27] Yeah.
[00:06:28] Yeah, that's a good segue.
[00:06:30] I'll skip to this
[00:06:31] thread that was
[00:06:32] in the BuiltOnAir community
[00:06:34] that Hannah posted
[00:06:36] about your favorite feature
[00:06:38] from last month
[00:06:39] and has the screenshot of
[00:06:41] of what came out last month
[00:06:43] and a lot of people agree
[00:06:44] with Charlie about the
[00:06:46] increase in the automation limit.
[00:06:51] Other stuff
[00:06:53] people posted
[00:06:54] automations,
[00:06:56] somebody said the closing of the forms
[00:07:00] to be able to
[00:07:02] give a message
[00:07:03] if you want to shut down a form.
[00:07:07] That is a good one.
[00:07:09] Yeah, looks like those
[00:07:11] were the two favorite ones for the month.
[00:07:15] I'm also a fan of the calendar,
[00:07:19] the calendar view
[00:07:20] and how you can choose the different
[00:07:21] fields like you can for
[00:07:22] the timeline.
[00:07:23] I think that's pretty huge.
[00:07:25] I know a ton of people that have been
[00:07:27] asking for that
[00:07:28] for a very long time, so that's exciting.
[00:07:31] I think the implement
[00:07:32] the exact implementation was a little bit
[00:07:35] like it wasn't quite,
[00:07:37] I love the idea,
[00:07:39] I was one of the people that said
[00:07:41] calendar view should get
[00:07:43] what timeline view does
[00:07:45] and I appreciate that they're
[00:07:47] making, you know, those adjustments to it,
[00:07:49] it's if I were to hazard a guess,
[00:07:51] which has not been confirmed
[00:07:53] by anything at
[00:07:53] all so don't quote me
[00:07:55] if I were to hazard a guess,
[00:07:57] the fact that they're adding
[00:07:58] that level of future additions
[00:08:00] to the calendar view
[00:08:02] to me suggests that they're
[00:08:03] updating the underlying code
[00:08:05] that is the calendar view
[00:08:06] because it's one of the
[00:08:07] oldest views in the
[00:08:08] platform.
[00:08:10] whereas timeline was the newest view
[00:08:12] in the platform and being able to have
[00:08:14] that parity.
[00:08:16] So it's good to see that it is having the,
[00:08:21] you know, attention put on it.
[00:08:23] Scott was saying that, you know,
[00:08:25] the actual implementation
[00:08:27] was disappointing because again,
[00:08:29] it wasn't quite
[00:08:30] doing what I think some of us
[00:08:32] were expecting it to do,
[00:08:33] like it didn't wrap
[00:08:34] the right way and if you had
[00:08:38] an attachment field,
[00:08:39] the link would appear and that's,
[00:08:41] you know,
[00:08:41] most likely not what you would want.
[00:08:45] but I liked it there
[00:08:48] focusing on it
[00:08:49] or having visible focus on it.
[00:08:51] It just, it needs a little bit
[00:08:53] more work to be
[00:08:54] I think where it needs to be
[00:08:56] one new integration
[00:08:58] that I've seen in the past month
[00:09:01] it's in beta,
[00:09:02] so it's probably a b tested across people,
[00:09:04] but it's the Twilio integration
[00:09:06] and I love that because
[00:09:07] I typically use have to use
[00:09:10] Zapier for Twilio, or Make
[00:09:11] and the only thing I don't like though
[00:09:13] is that you can only put one phone number
[00:09:15] when you're sending a message
[00:09:17] and usually I want to
[00:09:18] send messages to an array of
[00:09:19] phone numbers potentially.
[00:09:21] And Twilio only in the native integration
[00:09:23] only allows one phone number so kind
[00:09:25] of just throwing that out there
[00:09:27] was an Airtable people
[00:09:28] listening to this open
[00:09:29] that up.
[00:09:30] Yeah. Very good.
[00:09:33] Cool. Let's move on.
[00:09:35] Another one will stay
[00:09:36] in the BuiltOnAir community.
[00:09:38] Actually yeah this is a good one.
[00:09:43] Rebecca friend of the show
[00:09:45] was a guest a couple seasons ago
[00:09:48] just talking
[00:09:49] about how much she's been able
[00:09:51] to cut down on her workflow
[00:09:53] with automations and
[00:09:54] and two years ago
[00:09:56] she says she had a not a workflow
[00:09:58] that took a month,
[00:09:58] cut it down to five days
[00:10:00] and now down to five hours
[00:10:03] and then this year
[00:10:04] it's now down to 15 minutes.
[00:10:06] And so I think it's cool
[00:10:08] to just talk about
[00:10:09] the wins of using Airtable to
[00:10:11] to reduce time to do things.
[00:10:13] There's so many
[00:10:15] examples of things that would
[00:10:17] take forever
[00:10:18] that you can automate in Airtable so
[00:10:21] shout out to Rebecca for
[00:10:22] that.
[00:10:25] Yeah
[00:10:25] that's a I think it's a great story
[00:10:28] because Rebecca
[00:10:29] uses Airtable for her like job
[00:10:32] and it's unlike us who
[00:10:34] you know we have
[00:10:35] consulting businesses
[00:10:36] or part of a consulting business
[00:10:38] where you know we are,
[00:10:39] it is explicitly our job
[00:10:41] to use Airtable and be good at it.
[00:10:44] Rebecca's story
[00:10:45] is a little bit different in that
[00:10:48] she found a tool to help
[00:10:50] with her
[00:10:50] regular job
[00:10:51] and became so good at it over time
[00:10:54] just by using it more and more
[00:10:56] And being able to, as she's saying,
[00:10:59] cut something down from one month to 15
[00:11:01] minutes just by using the platform
[00:11:04] consistently over time.
[00:11:06] And I think that's,
[00:11:07] you know, a real strength of the
[00:11:08] product. There are a lot of other
[00:11:11] database or database like
[00:11:13] programs where you could
[00:11:15] have the same story
[00:11:17] where you use it for a couple of
[00:11:18] years and you get something down
[00:11:21] from one month to five or 15 minutes.
[00:11:24] but the odds of you wanting
[00:11:26] to stay in that platform
[00:11:27] by yourself effectively
[00:11:29] for that long to get to that point
[00:11:32] it's slim. Like
[00:11:33] if you, no one's gonna stick around
[00:11:35] with my school by themselves
[00:11:37] if you're not a database person
[00:11:39] by nature is what I'm saying.
[00:11:42] Airtable is friendly enough
[00:11:44] that they'll have people
[00:11:46] will stick with it long enough
[00:11:47] to get to a point where
[00:11:48] they can
[00:11:49] have a story like Rebecca's.
[00:11:51] Yeah,
[00:11:52] yeah. And there's countless of others.
[00:11:54] We love hearing those success stories.
[00:11:56] So
[00:11:58] alright, moving on.
[00:12:00] already did that one
[00:12:01] final one from the BuiltOnAir
[00:12:03] community. so Scott,
[00:12:05] this was actually brought up,
[00:12:07] I think Jan mentioned in
[00:12:08] the comments last week
[00:12:11] about a video with Howie Liu,
[00:12:14] airtable Ceo and he posted
[00:12:16] that and then Scott shared it again
[00:12:19] after watching it. And
[00:12:20] so first couple of things
[00:12:22] in this thread first is watch the video,
[00:12:24] I started to watch it.
[00:12:25] I haven't finished it,
[00:12:27] I'm gonna finish that.
[00:12:28] But it's good if you want to see
[00:12:30] his insights on
[00:12:31] on his vision for Airtable and
[00:12:33] where it's going.
[00:12:34] But the better thing about this thread
[00:12:37] is if you're interested at all in history
[00:12:39] of database design,
[00:12:41] this thread is for you,
[00:12:43] Bill French and others
[00:12:45] jump in
[00:12:46] and give a long history.
[00:12:48] And if you're nostalgic
[00:12:50] for the early days of computing,
[00:12:52] lots of great nuggets
[00:12:54] of information in this
[00:12:55] thread, talking about the early days
[00:12:58] of busy coke and excel
[00:13:01] and the history of
[00:13:02] the look up field
[00:13:03] and naming conventions
[00:13:04] and things like that.
[00:13:05] So I don't know if you guys
[00:13:07] all dove into this thread.
[00:13:08] There's a lot of stuff
[00:13:09] here.
[00:13:11] I
[00:13:12] I just wanted to say like
[00:13:13] I love watching Howie
[00:13:14] Liu's interviews sometimes
[00:13:16] because the interviewer
[00:13:17] you can tell has
[00:13:18] never used Airtable and they usually
[00:13:19] ask a question like,
[00:13:21] so you know what,
[00:13:22] what can you do, what makes you
[00:13:23] different from the other,
[00:13:24] you know, things and you know
[00:13:26] what makes you stand out,
[00:13:27] what makes you different
[00:13:28] and you can tell like
[00:13:29] for me, I'm like wanting to yell
[00:13:31] at the screen like,
[00:13:32] are you kidding me?
[00:13:33] Like it's it's amazing.
[00:13:33] But I can tell that he's kind of like
[00:13:35] catching, he doesn't even know how to
[00:13:37] begin and he just kind of explains it
[00:13:39] as you know we want to build apps and he
[00:13:40] says it in this like calm ceo manner but
[00:13:43] I just think it's funny
[00:13:44] because we know the use case,
[00:13:46] we know how powerful it is,
[00:13:46] like how fun it is. So
[00:13:48] I just want to point that out.
[00:13:50] No, it's, it is kind of crazy.
[00:13:52] I've noticed
[00:13:52] I've watched a few interviews with
[00:13:54] him recently and
[00:13:55] generally speaking, he does
[00:13:56] exactly that he's very calm and
[00:13:58] kind of takes a very
[00:13:59] calm approach to it. It's
[00:14:01] it's interesting to try and hear him
[00:14:03] to hear him try to explain what it is like
[00:14:06] because we try and do that
[00:14:08] all the time
[00:14:08] and I feel like people don't usually get
[00:14:10] it until they actually have
[00:14:12] their own Aha moment.
[00:14:13] Well that's the problem
[00:14:15] because Airtable is a generalist software
[00:14:19] so you know
[00:14:19] it,
[00:14:20] my nature is to say,
[00:14:22] oh well if you wanted to
[00:14:24] build your own Crm,
[00:14:25] you know, you could, you know,
[00:14:27] set your stuff up like this,
[00:14:28] but if the person
[00:14:28] I'm talking to doesn't need a Crm
[00:14:31] and they need something else,
[00:14:32] I've chosen the wrong example
[00:14:34] to explain them to
[00:14:35] because what they're hearing is
[00:14:37] oh it's a Crm platform
[00:14:38] that you can customize,
[00:14:39] it's not,
[00:14:39] it's a platform
[00:14:41] that you can customize to be
[00:14:43] something else
[00:14:44] and depending on what that something is,
[00:14:46] it might be a great
[00:14:47] solution or it might be like
[00:14:49] a really convoluted setup,
[00:14:50] you know, depending on where you go.
[00:14:52] Yeah, the best part here is
[00:14:54] towards the end, Bill talks about,
[00:14:57] you know,
[00:14:58] there will be a day
[00:15:00] our grandchildren
[00:15:02] or in 30 years will be like
[00:15:04] there used to be this platform
[00:15:06] called Airtable, that was amazing and our
[00:15:09] grandkids will roll their eyes at us and
[00:15:12] will be the old ones
[00:15:14] in the room like Bill and Scott and Peter,
[00:15:16] although I'm probably closer to them
[00:15:19] than you guys are,
[00:15:21] I think about that actually
[00:15:24] kind of often and
[00:15:26] this goes back to what Bill said
[00:15:28] recently about how we're kind of in the
[00:15:29] beginning of this massive wave
[00:15:31] that's coming for no code,
[00:15:32] He's a statistic like
[00:15:33] in the next five years,
[00:15:34] 60% of development
[00:15:36] is going to be in the no code realm
[00:15:38] and it's very true,
[00:15:39] we're seeing as consultants,
[00:15:41] all of these companies coming
[00:15:42] out of the woodworks
[00:15:44] finding us and saying, we really,
[00:15:45] I want to use Airtable,
[00:15:47] our competitor uses it
[00:15:48] or we saw this other use case
[00:15:49] and we want to match
[00:15:50] that same thing
[00:15:50] and build it better.
[00:15:51] It's amazing.
[00:15:52] And then I think to myself like,
[00:15:54] okay, we might have 5,
[00:15:56] 10 years of amazing
[00:15:57] opportunities as consultants to work
[00:15:59] with amazing companies,
[00:16:00] but what's gonna be the next thing
[00:16:02] and then I kind of think to myself,
[00:16:04] you know, spreadsheets
[00:16:05] went from Excel to Google sheets,
[00:16:07] which kind of
[00:16:07] revolutionized it,
[00:16:08] but relational databases,
[00:16:10] which is what Airtable is,
[00:16:11] there's nothing really above,
[00:16:13] at least to my knowledge,
[00:16:14] I'd love to be corrected
[00:16:14] on this, but
[00:16:15] above relational databases,
[00:16:17] like that's kind of the peak
[00:16:19] performance for applications,
[00:16:20] that's what everything is.
[00:16:21] Facebook is just a
[00:16:22] relational database.
[00:16:23] Wikipedia is just a relational database.
[00:16:24] So if Airtable really wins that
[00:16:27] relational database category,
[00:16:29] it might be a really, really long time,
[00:16:31] but it's definitely true.
[00:16:32] There's always gonna be a moment
[00:16:34] where they say,
[00:16:35] I remember Airtable so good
[00:16:35] call.
[00:16:36] Yeah,
[00:16:37] yeah, maybe AI would be
[00:16:39] the next generation on top of that,
[00:16:42] some form of that.
[00:16:45] Yeah, cool stuff.
[00:16:47] Very cool. So yeah,
[00:16:49] great thread. Awesome insights.
[00:16:52] Bill, Scott, Peter Nelson
[00:16:54] always also getting involved
[00:16:55] in that conversation and
[00:16:57] sharing their insights.
[00:16:58] So we'd love to,
[00:17:00] to see the BuiltOnAir community and
[00:17:02] it's been pretty active
[00:17:04] last couple of weeks, so
[00:17:05] jump in and participate there.
[00:17:08] Moving on, there's only one
[00:17:10] thing that I that
[00:17:11] I thought worth bringing up
[00:17:13] from the Airtable community
[00:17:15] and I always think this
[00:17:16] is a good reminder
[00:17:18] somebody learning through
[00:17:21] maybe unfortunate circumstances
[00:17:24] that personal views
[00:17:26] are not hidden from other users.
[00:17:31] And so this person saying
[00:17:32] what's going on here,
[00:17:33] I created all these personal
[00:17:34] views, but I can see theirs
[00:17:37] and they can see mine
[00:17:39] for other collaborators and I
[00:17:41] didn't realize this,
[00:17:42] but they actually quoted
[00:17:44] from the documentations
[00:17:46] that it says personal views
[00:17:47] are also hidden from other
[00:17:49] collaborators view sidebar by default.
[00:17:52] And so Scott answers this
[00:17:54] basically saying that
[00:17:56] you can toggle that on and off.
[00:17:59] So any thoughts on that?
[00:18:00] Something worth definitely
[00:18:02] if you're working with
[00:18:03] clients to make sure they're aware of.
[00:18:06] I think it's sort of
[00:18:09] one of the top two,
[00:18:11] if I were to hazard a guess
[00:18:14] the top two sort of
[00:18:16] aspects of Airtable
[00:18:17] that I think most people
[00:18:19] want improved upon our
[00:18:21] the record limits per base.
[00:18:23] I think we all just want more records.
[00:18:25] I'll leave that alone.
[00:18:26] And then the second one is you know,
[00:18:28] permissions just generally
[00:18:30] to hide certain things
[00:18:32] throughout the product,
[00:18:34] whether that be views,
[00:18:36] whether that be whole tables.
[00:18:38] There's a lot of things
[00:18:39] that you want to just sort of hide
[00:18:42] in a table because
[00:18:42] of the way that it's delivered
[00:18:45] on the website or via apps.
[00:18:47] The whole base gets
[00:18:48] loaded at one time.
[00:18:50] So,
[00:18:51] you know, mechanically
[00:18:53] they could go in
[00:18:54] and allow you the ability to hide
[00:18:56] certain things. I think there
[00:18:58] at
[00:19:00] they might need to adjust
[00:19:02] how the base loads
[00:19:03] to begin with to really truly hide
[00:19:05] something from somebody
[00:19:06] because if you're tech savvy,
[00:19:08] you could get in there.
[00:19:09] which might be their point.
[00:19:11] Maybe they don't want to
[00:19:12] give people a false sense
[00:19:12] of security,
[00:19:13] but some sense of security would be nice.
[00:19:16] I think there should be a happy medium
[00:19:19] between a personal view and a
[00:19:20] collaborator, collaborative view.
[00:19:24] You know, just
[00:19:26] there's some views
[00:19:27] absolutely no one needs to look at
[00:19:29] except for Zapier.
[00:19:30] Right. Yeah,
[00:19:32] absolutely.
[00:19:33] I mean, I usually try
[00:19:34] and tell my clients
[00:19:35] like personal views are very
[00:19:36] superficial. Like the really only
[00:19:39] benefit that I see to them
[00:19:41] is the fact that you can
[00:19:42] toggle them to be hidden.
[00:19:44] But I mean that doesn't mean
[00:19:45] that no one can find it.
[00:19:47] And also that no one
[00:19:48] else can adjust the
[00:19:51] like no one else can can't talk today,
[00:19:53] No one can configure your personal view
[00:19:56] other than you.
[00:19:58] But other than that,
[00:19:59] I mean someone can just duplicate it
[00:20:01] and then unhide
[00:20:01] whatever they want. So
[00:20:03] it's not really secure.
[00:20:05] Yeah,
[00:20:06] I think going to Kamille's point
[00:20:08] like about the permissions,
[00:20:09] as you were saying
[00:20:10] that one of the biggest ones that I see
[00:20:12] is the duplicate base thing.
[00:20:14] The fact that a read only person
[00:20:16] can duplicate your base,
[00:20:17] duplicate all your
[00:20:18] automations, all your business data,
[00:20:20] like everything put into their own free
[00:20:22] plan, even if it's a pro plan base
[00:20:24] and just like have it there.
[00:20:25] To me is just insane.
[00:20:26] Like if there was a permission
[00:20:28] where I could limit
[00:20:29] read only can duplicate,
[00:20:31] editors can duplicate,
[00:20:32] even creators can, only the owner can
[00:20:34] or creators can duplicate.
[00:20:36] Like
[00:20:36] I think that's a pretty simple one, but
[00:20:38] that's to me is one of the big things
[00:20:41] that I'm talking to clients and I say
[00:20:42] really be careful
[00:20:43] who you give access to the base to.
[00:20:45] Don't just give it around
[00:20:46] like candy. Like be very careful
[00:20:48] because anybody can duplicate all of your
[00:20:49] systems, all of your business data
[00:20:51] immediately
[00:20:53] and Scott agrees.
[00:20:55] I've he also has a comment
[00:20:57] in there Scott,
[00:20:58] friend of the show he was on,
[00:21:00] I believe this season
[00:21:02] in previous seasons as well.
[00:21:04] you know,
[00:21:05] the notion of having utility views
[00:21:07] and utility tables that you set up
[00:21:09] so that your system works,
[00:21:11] but you don't ever actually
[00:21:12] need to go in and look at.
[00:21:16] one of those
[00:21:17] common forms of utility tables
[00:21:20] is like having each collaborator
[00:21:23] in your table as
[00:21:24] a record in that
[00:21:25] as like a users table
[00:21:27] because it allows you to do a whole lot
[00:21:29] of things like attach,
[00:21:31] you know, a particular role
[00:21:33] to a collaborator in a base.
[00:21:36] I feel like that is a common
[00:21:37] enough thing where that should,
[00:21:38] there should just be
[00:21:40] the concept of having a utility table
[00:21:42] might need to be
[00:21:43] fleshed out a little bit more
[00:21:45] as an actual feature of Airtable,
[00:21:46] whether instead of
[00:21:47] it being like a workaround.
[00:21:49] But there's a lot of things that
[00:21:50] go into
[00:21:52] how personally
[00:21:53] I would like to see
[00:21:54] utility views and personal views etcetera
[00:21:57] being improved upon.
[00:21:59] Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of people
[00:22:02] like
[00:22:03] the use case that I think about
[00:22:04] is like when I'm handing off
[00:22:06] a project to a
[00:22:06] client and they might not be super
[00:22:09] familiar with Airtable
[00:22:10] or super comfortable with it yet.
[00:22:11] And they see all
[00:22:11] these tables off to the side that are like
[00:22:14] you know they're like
[00:22:15] why do we have all of these tables?
[00:22:17] And one of them might
[00:22:18] just be a list of countries
[00:22:19] that they could pick from
[00:22:21] or something and that we
[00:22:22] want to have a finite
[00:22:23] list or more control over it.
[00:22:25] But I'm like trust me
[00:22:26] you just don't have to go
[00:22:26] there. Just ignore it.
[00:22:28] Like sometimes I'll put one table
[00:22:29] in the middle that's
[00:22:30] just like a pipe character
[00:22:32] as the name. So it's a divider
[00:22:33] and I'll be like anything on this side,
[00:22:35] worry about that, anything on that side,
[00:22:37] don't worry about it.
[00:22:38] So views got sections
[00:22:40] and then automations got sections
[00:22:42] and my hope is that
[00:22:43] someday tables
[00:22:45] might get sections so I could just dump.
[00:22:47] Yeah
[00:22:48] I probably only need two sections
[00:22:50] for any project that I do
[00:22:52] just the tables and
[00:22:52] then all the utility tables just get
[00:22:55] shoved off into the corner.
[00:22:57] If I could do that I'd be happy with
[00:22:59] that would be nice for you more. But
[00:23:02] literally I just want to hide
[00:23:04] a bunch just put them away.
[00:23:06] It would also be nice
[00:23:07] for automations to have a search bar
[00:23:09] now that we have up to
[00:23:09] 50
[00:23:10] and I see like
[00:23:11] when an error
[00:23:12] and I get an error message
[00:23:13] like this automation
[00:23:14] failed. I have to like
[00:23:15] go through this massive list
[00:23:17] even if I have sections I'm
[00:23:18] like what section what is this
[00:23:20] if there was a search there
[00:23:21] that also be really
[00:23:22] helpful.
[00:23:22] And then one more little feature
[00:23:24] suggestion is record id as
[00:23:26] a field type.
[00:23:27] I think
[00:23:27] like almost every table
[00:23:28] that I use,
[00:23:29] I'm always creating a formula with
[00:23:31] record I. D.
[00:23:32] I mean I could create a formula
[00:23:33] with creative time too
[00:23:34] but they made a creative
[00:23:35] time field type.
[00:23:36] It's just low hanging fruit
[00:23:38] but it's just saved me so much time
[00:23:40] just like
[00:23:41] that's it. You know
[00:23:43] I like that
[00:23:44] I think it would actually
[00:23:45] make it a lot more accessible for the
[00:23:47] everyday user too
[00:23:48] because most people aren't,
[00:23:48] they don't even realize
[00:23:49] you can just type it as a formula
[00:23:53] they do they're like
[00:23:54] I don't even know what this is.
[00:23:56] It might be prompt more
[00:23:56] people
[00:23:57] to do
[00:23:57] a little bit more reading into it.
[00:23:59] Yeah
[00:24:00] for sure.
[00:24:02] Cool. Let's move on to
[00:24:03] another controversial topic
[00:24:06] of Airtable.
[00:24:06] This one comes from the
[00:24:08] Reddit community
[00:24:10] poses the question,
[00:24:11] do you think Airtable's pricing structure
[00:24:14] is a barrier to future growth
[00:24:17] and this one got a lot of discussion.
[00:24:19] I know we've had this topic
[00:24:22] in the past but why not bring it up again?
[00:24:26] Sure.
[00:24:28] I mean,
[00:24:29] does anybody else wanna take this?
[00:24:31] I have a lot to say on this.
[00:24:33] I could give a brief
[00:24:36] summary. So there's
[00:24:39] the issue with scale
[00:24:41] and Airtable
[00:24:42] is that Airtable's pricing structure is by
[00:24:44] collaborator.
[00:24:47] You they have different plans
[00:24:49] where each plan
[00:24:50] will give you like more limits for
[00:24:51] here's how many records
[00:24:53] you can have,
[00:24:53] here's how many automations,
[00:24:54] here's how many
[00:24:55] sync integrations etcetera.
[00:24:58] if you have a small team
[00:25:00] but you need like
[00:25:03] 100,000 records,
[00:25:04] you'll probably be fine
[00:25:06] if you have a large team
[00:25:08] and a small amount of records
[00:25:10] that you need your
[00:25:12] screwed essentially
[00:25:13] because it's you're paying
[00:25:15] by person and sometimes it
[00:25:16] doesn't really make sense
[00:25:18] to pay by person.
[00:25:19] Especially if the people need to
[00:25:21] only interact with very few items. And so
[00:25:26] there's a point
[00:25:28] where businesses
[00:25:29] that run off of Airtable
[00:25:31] often seek solutions that are like
[00:25:33] external portals,
[00:25:35] whether that be pory or Stackr
[00:25:38] or softr or some other
[00:25:39] integration where
[00:25:41] that will handle user management
[00:25:43] and having multiple people in
[00:25:44] your base,
[00:25:45] it sort of reduces the
[00:25:47] reliance you have
[00:25:49] on having collaborators
[00:25:50] actually in Airtable.
[00:25:52] So you're circumventing that cost,
[00:25:54] there's a point,
[00:25:55] this is like an event horizon where you,
[00:25:58] once you pass it,
[00:25:59] you're
[00:26:01] you're now needing a third party
[00:26:03] to do what you might have
[00:26:04] been able to do in Airtable
[00:26:06] had they addressed that particular issue
[00:26:12] go for it, Charlie
[00:26:13] yeah, I see it as
[00:26:15] an existential issue, honestly.
[00:26:17] And I attribute this to
[00:26:19] Chris Dancy,
[00:26:20] who's the first person
[00:26:21] to spark this go off in my brain like
[00:26:23] it's in our interest for Airtable
[00:26:25] to get their economic model right?
[00:26:26] I've even spoken to
[00:26:27] some people at Airtable
[00:26:29] about this
[00:26:29] because I think it's so
[00:26:30] important, I think that
[00:26:34] if they fix the permission side of it,
[00:26:37] that also helps, you know,
[00:26:39] but otherwise
[00:26:40] I don't want any users
[00:26:41] in my Airtable bases, especially the more
[00:26:43] complex bases that I built for clients.
[00:26:45] My biggest selling point to them is like
[00:26:48] why have people in your base
[00:26:49] when they can duplicate
[00:26:51] when they can do when
[00:26:51] they can edit things
[00:26:52] that they shouldn't edit.
[00:26:54] It's overwhelming.
[00:26:54] Imagine having all these tables
[00:26:56] with all these views,
[00:26:57] you hire a new employee,
[00:26:57] you have to train them on,
[00:26:58] you go to this view,
[00:26:59] you go to this table,
[00:27:00] you go to this view
[00:27:01] and then you can only edit these fields.
[00:27:02] It's really overwhelming
[00:27:04] for large businesses
[00:27:05] to actually use Airtable as the
[00:27:07] front end as the interface
[00:27:08] layer.
[00:27:09] That's like the main thing.
[00:27:11] But secondly, why are we paying at the
[00:27:14] user level?
[00:27:15] I don't,
[00:27:16] my whole theory is
[00:27:17] you should be your economic model should
[00:27:19] be based on your actual cost.
[00:27:21] Like what is the cost
[00:27:22] of a base to Airtable,
[00:27:23] It's not adding a user
[00:27:24] If I add one user to the base
[00:27:26] that's not adding a load
[00:27:27] to Airtable in terms of like
[00:27:29] how much does it cost them
[00:27:30] for this base to
[00:27:31] actually function
[00:27:32] at the pennies and dollar level.
[00:27:34] It's really about how many
[00:27:35] records are there,
[00:27:36] how many complex fields
[00:27:37] that are like maybe date based and
[00:27:39] time based,
[00:27:40] how many automations are running,
[00:27:41] how many different automation I
[00:27:42] have available to run
[00:27:44] how many apps I have opened at one time.
[00:27:47] Like these are all the kind of
[00:27:49] moving parts
[00:27:50] that actually affect the bottom line
[00:27:51] cost to Airtable of a base functioning
[00:27:54] and that's what their model should be
[00:27:56] built more towards because if it's set to
[00:27:58] the user model
[00:27:59] I'm gonna be very frank here.
[00:28:01] I have a couple of clients
[00:28:02] where I have three
[00:28:03] users in the base
[00:28:05] me and the two point contacts
[00:28:07] of that business.
[00:28:08] And then one client has
[00:28:09] 1300 users
[00:28:10] using an external system
[00:28:12] which I'm not gonna name.
[00:28:14] But they're using an
[00:28:16] external amazing front end
[00:28:17] that has roles and
[00:28:18] permissions
[00:28:19] and it's amazing
[00:28:20] how much has been
[00:28:22] accomplished in that portal.
[00:28:23] But they're paying Airtable $70
[00:28:26] a month for this base.
[00:28:28] And they're paying
[00:28:29] this other one say $300 $400
[00:28:31] they're paying Zapier
[00:28:32] and all these things.
[00:28:33] They're total stack is
[00:28:35] you know maybe $500 a month. And
[00:28:39] they would be paying
[00:28:40] if Airtable got them into their model,
[00:28:42] they'd be paying
[00:28:43] thousands and thousands
[00:28:44] of dollars per month and it just
[00:28:45] doesn't make any sense.
[00:28:46] We don't want users in Airtable
[00:28:48] and interfaces was
[00:28:48] kind of their
[00:28:50] first attempt to do this
[00:28:52] and it's kind of
[00:28:53] not there yet, it's still in beta,
[00:28:55] but I think they need to get
[00:28:57] the economic model right
[00:28:58] and it's in our interest
[00:28:59] that they actually do that
[00:29:00] because I want Airtable to survive.
[00:29:01] I want them to be extremely profitable.
[00:29:03] I want to pay for that base that has
[00:29:05] 1300 users using it all day.
[00:29:07] I want to pay for that base
[00:29:09] based on how much it's being used
[00:29:11] and convince my
[00:29:11] clients that it's worth to pay Airtable
[00:29:13] $300 a month for this base or
[00:29:15] $1000 a month for this base
[00:29:17] based on how complex it is. So
[00:29:19] yeah, yeah, this topic
[00:29:21] could go on forever.
[00:29:22] Alli any final thoughts?
[00:29:26] I mean I think
[00:29:28] I noticed Scott in the comments wrote
[00:29:30] that mini extensions doesn't charge
[00:29:32] per head.
[00:29:33] I mean that's,
[00:29:34] that's like probably
[00:29:36] where I usually go to.
[00:29:37] I mean apps like Stackr
[00:29:39] are I think have a better look
[00:29:41] and feel softer of
[00:29:42] course has a very nice look and feel.
[00:29:44] But mini intentions, I love
[00:29:46] simplicity of being able
[00:29:48] to just have a form to edit
[00:29:49] the existing records and
[00:29:50] you can hook that up to a portal.
[00:29:52] I mean
[00:29:53] outward simplicity,
[00:29:54] it's not the easiest app
[00:29:56] to learn how to use,
[00:29:56] but
[00:29:57] I find it the most powerful and that's
[00:30:00] generally my
[00:30:01] work around for not having
[00:30:03] to pay for so many users,
[00:30:05] Jen is recommending pori
[00:30:07] for display purposes,
[00:30:09] not necessarily edit purposes
[00:30:11] and they all as you know,
[00:30:13] I'm sure you've gathered
[00:30:15] eat every single one of these
[00:30:17] platforms is really good
[00:30:19] at one particular thing
[00:30:21] or one set of things and
[00:30:23] you know, Airtable of course
[00:30:25] is really good at being
[00:30:26] the back end for all of
[00:30:27] those things. It would be
[00:30:29] very nice if eventually
[00:30:31] interfaces was grew into something
[00:30:34] that could take on some
[00:30:35] of what we have to rely on
[00:30:37] portals to do.
[00:30:39] And Charlie, as you said,
[00:30:41] a good portion of that
[00:30:42] has to do with permissions
[00:30:43] because you still have to be a
[00:30:44] collaborator in the base.
[00:30:46] So you could separate out
[00:30:48] those permissions
[00:30:49] in some
[00:30:49] way or
[00:30:51] work out a different pricing structure
[00:30:53] for the base versus the interface that
[00:30:55] connects to it.
[00:30:56] I think that would help.
[00:30:57] But in the interim
[00:30:59] it is, there's a point where it
[00:31:01] doesn't make sense to have your
[00:31:03] collaborators in Airtable anymore.
[00:31:05] Yeah,
[00:31:07] All right, let's move on
[00:31:09] that topic we can spend hours
[00:31:11] talking about this but
[00:31:12] definitely room for improvement
[00:31:14] on Airtable's side and hopefully they're
[00:31:16] thinking about it.
[00:31:17] One more.
[00:31:18] One more final one from Twitter
[00:31:20] and then we'll move on.
[00:31:21] I want to definitely hear Charlie's story,
[00:31:24] but I thought this was cool.
[00:31:25] I think we've talked about Mike Cardona
[00:31:28] a couple of times.
[00:31:29] He actually tweeted about us
[00:31:30] talking about him on the podcast,
[00:31:32] so
[00:31:32] we're gonna give them another shout out.
[00:31:35] I just thought this was cool.
[00:31:37] Somebody who has a decent sized following,
[00:31:39] I don't know who it is,
[00:31:41] Arvid call said, hey,
[00:31:42] I'm trying to figure out
[00:31:44] how to build a newsletter.
[00:31:46] Any ideas, what would you use?
[00:31:47] I'm currently using Calendly
[00:31:49] and it's not
[00:31:50] working. And Mike reached out
[00:31:52] and said, hey,
[00:31:53] I'll build it for you for free
[00:31:54] in Airtable.
[00:31:55] I wanted to do something
[00:31:57] kind of along these lines and it
[00:31:59] looks like
[00:32:01] you might get the gig
[00:32:02] obviously free is hard to
[00:32:04] argue with.
[00:32:05] But anyways, if you see somebody post,
[00:32:08] if you're looking to get
[00:32:10] into consulting
[00:32:11] and you see somebody
[00:32:13] with a decent sized following
[00:32:15] and they post,
[00:32:15] like looking for ways to solve a problem,
[00:32:18] go ahead and and say you'll build a
[00:32:20] form for free in Airtable
[00:32:22] and a good way to get some free publicity,
[00:32:25] I assume
[00:32:26] if he does well, this guy will,
[00:32:28] will give him a shout out
[00:32:29] to his following.
[00:32:31] So good stuff.
[00:32:33] So that wraps up our
[00:32:34] Round the Bases
[00:32:35] and what's going on in the
[00:32:37] Airtable communities
[00:32:39] for our On2Air spotlight
[00:32:41] On2Air's a primary sponsor.
[00:32:43] It's an all in one toolkit
[00:32:45] to run your business on Airtable,
[00:32:46] it's a suite of apps
[00:32:47] that do a variety of different things.
[00:32:49] One of the things
[00:32:51] that it does
[00:32:52] is it integrates with Google
[00:32:54] Google docs,
[00:32:54] Google sheets and Google slides
[00:32:56] as part of our On2Air Actions
[00:32:59] app or product.
[00:33:01] And I just wanted to read a
[00:33:04] email that we got
[00:33:05] over the weekend
[00:33:06] from one of our customers.
[00:33:07] Andrew, he just says,
[00:33:09] I want to emphasize
[00:33:10] how wonderfully helpful
[00:33:12] I found On2Air Actions.
[00:33:13] I so wish I found this sooner.
[00:33:14] Can't tell you how
[00:33:15] advantageous it has been to my work
[00:33:18] there's some things
[00:33:19] I'm using it for
[00:33:20] and he lists out four different use
[00:33:22] cases
[00:33:22] to produce schedules as a pdf
[00:33:25] group by dates.
[00:33:26] I love the conditional
[00:33:27] formatting.
[00:33:28] That alone is invaluable
[00:33:30] trucking schedules
[00:33:32] group by truck members
[00:33:33] and product object info sheets.
[00:33:36] I won't go through all of them,
[00:33:38] but he uses both our
[00:33:40] Google docs integration
[00:33:41] and our Google sheets.
[00:33:43] I don't think he's using Google slides.
[00:33:45] But now he's building a
[00:33:47] budget base,
[00:33:48] syncing his data from Airtable into a
[00:33:50] Google sheets
[00:33:51] that he's been trying to get to
[00:33:54] his finance director and now can
[00:33:56] automate that entire process.
[00:33:58] So each of them
[00:33:59] are invaluable to me and my
[00:34:01] business, so cool,
[00:34:02] shout out from Andrew,
[00:34:04] appreciate the love and support.
[00:34:05] He's been great to work with and
[00:34:08] we've added some features
[00:34:10] that we named after him
[00:34:12] because he suggested the idea.
[00:34:13] So if that's of interest
[00:34:16] check it out in
[00:34:17] On2Air on2air.com
[00:34:19] so are Google integrations
[00:34:20] right now are a little bit hard to find.
[00:34:22] We're gonna work on
[00:34:23] making those more prominent,
[00:34:25] but right now they're,
[00:34:26] they're inside of our
[00:34:28] On2Air Actions app and
[00:34:30] allow you to use Google docs
[00:34:33] as your template engine
[00:34:34] to generate and automate
[00:34:36] document creation
[00:34:38] with that.
[00:34:39] Now we're gonna learn more about
[00:34:41] Charlie and we're gonna have Alli
[00:34:43] talk to him and we can learn more.
[00:34:46] Excellent, awesome.
[00:34:47] Well thank you again,
[00:34:49] Charlie for joining us.
[00:34:51] Thanks nice to be here.
[00:34:52] I'm a big fan of the show
[00:34:54] and yeah, looking forward to
[00:34:55] it,
[00:34:56] awesome.
[00:34:57] Yeah, we're well,
[00:34:58] I'm pretty sure you and I
[00:35:00] have pretty similar back stories
[00:35:01] when it comes to Airtable.
[00:35:03] I know we both were
[00:35:04] doing some stuff with it for our
[00:35:05] family businesses
[00:35:07] also have trucks in common
[00:35:09] that along with Rebecca I believe.
[00:35:11] and Dan's customer.
[00:35:13] So, trucks are everywhere.
[00:35:16] It was a party business,
[00:35:18] is that correct?
[00:35:19] Yeah. Event rentals.
[00:35:20] So here in Miami we do the events like
[00:35:22] tables, chairs, tents,
[00:35:24] cooking equipment
[00:35:25] for the super bowl when it comes to
[00:35:27] town and
[00:35:28] yeah, all sorts of stuff like that.
[00:35:31] That's super cool. So I
[00:35:33] know you were the one
[00:35:34] that actually introduced me
[00:35:36] to mini extensions years ago,
[00:35:38] which I consider you
[00:35:40] the mini extensions king for sure,
[00:35:42] I think was that really
[00:35:44] kind of like,
[00:35:45] was that your turning point
[00:35:46] for with Airtable or did you did
[00:35:48] you have the bug before that?
[00:35:50] So my dad one day
[00:35:51] came to my office in the middle
[00:35:52] of Covid.
[00:35:53] I actually also blamed Covid
[00:35:54] for this because otherwise I would have
[00:35:56] been too busy
[00:35:57] with my day to day job
[00:35:58] to ever even go down this rabbit hole.
[00:36:00] And my dad came to my office
[00:36:02] and said I want you to build
[00:36:03] a database for our
[00:36:04] tenting department.
[00:36:05] And I was like a database.
[00:36:07] Why not just a spreadsheet? Like you know,
[00:36:09] all he wanted was someone
[00:36:10] to search a tent
[00:36:11] and see what bag it goes into
[00:36:12] the color and everything.
[00:36:13] And like you can just
[00:36:14] a spreadsheet
[00:36:15] and do control F and it will find it.
[00:36:16] And he's like,
[00:36:17] it has to be a database
[00:36:18] where someone enters it and then they
[00:36:19] click search and it pulls it up
[00:36:21] and my brain was just flexing
[00:36:22] in ways that had never flexed before.
[00:36:24] And I'm like what,
[00:36:25] what is the database?
[00:36:26] And I looked into like,
[00:36:26] filemaker Pro smart sheets.
[00:36:28] And I got all these like
[00:36:30] high level sales people
[00:36:31] trying to get me to pay
[00:36:32] thousands of dollars
[00:36:33] and they couldn't even give me an
[00:36:34] example of it working.
[00:36:36] And one day I reached out to a
[00:36:39] a friend of mine,
[00:36:40] Austin Bunsen shout out Austin,
[00:36:42] he's an amazing developer
[00:36:44] and startup founder
[00:36:45] at y Combinator right now
[00:36:47] and he said you should probably
[00:36:48] use Airtable
[00:36:50] and I imported my filemaker pro
[00:36:52] spreadsheet into Airtable and
[00:36:55] the like the light bulb
[00:36:56] just went off
[00:36:57] and it was magic. And I had all of these
[00:37:00] these processes, these ideas,
[00:37:02] these concepts from the business.
[00:37:04] So you know our business
[00:37:05] had really good software,
[00:37:07] like really good expensive
[00:37:08] software, but in a big operation
[00:37:10] you have all these
[00:37:11] middle operations that don't
[00:37:13] get addressed by that big software
[00:37:15] and you have all these ideas
[00:37:16] because you're in the operation
[00:37:18] and so you're like
[00:37:18] it wouldn't it be amazing
[00:37:19] if we had this process or this app?
[00:37:21] That's how you would say
[00:37:22] five years ago
[00:37:23] that would do this
[00:37:24] when I input this,
[00:37:24] this would happen.
[00:37:26] So I had all these ideas and
[00:37:28] the first one that hit me was
[00:37:30] the truck inspection app
[00:37:32] if you want to share
[00:37:33] that Dan.
[00:37:35] So I had this idea of why not
[00:37:38] you know our trucks
[00:37:39] were coming back with damage
[00:37:41] to the trucks, you know,
[00:37:43] almost every other week
[00:37:45] and I had no clue who was doing
[00:37:46] the damage because by the time
[00:37:48] you find the damage,
[00:37:49] you know the drivers aren't
[00:37:50] telling you I had a tree,
[00:37:51] you know, it rains,
[00:37:52] the trees get lower and you're
[00:37:53] going through a street
[00:37:54] in a nice neighborhood
[00:37:55] and boom it hits the top of the
[00:37:56] thing and that costs $1,000 to fix.
[00:37:59] So I said okay let me
[00:38:01] let me build a form with a Q. R. Code.
[00:38:03] You'll see that each of my trucks
[00:38:06] has this Q. R. Code on it
[00:38:07] that right there if you can see it
[00:38:10] that assumes not working so well.
[00:38:12] So when the driver
[00:38:13] just walks up to the truck
[00:38:14] scans it with a smartphone.
[00:38:15] They don't need an app on their phone,
[00:38:17] right? I don't want to
[00:38:18] have to maintain apps.
[00:38:19] They scan that QR code.
[00:38:21] It pulls up this form.
[00:38:23] It's a basic Airtable form and
[00:38:24] it already pre fills that truck.
[00:38:26] They indicate who
[00:38:28] they are
[00:38:28] they indicate
[00:38:29] yes they have the license
[00:38:30] registration
[00:38:31] is the cabin clean?
[00:38:31] If they put no,
[00:38:32] it makes them take a picture.
[00:38:34] You know the tires in good
[00:38:35] condition.
[00:38:35] So this is basically like an F. D. O. T.
[00:38:38] Form for trucks.
[00:38:40] And if there was damage
[00:38:41] to the truck
[00:38:43] then we get a notification on the back end
[00:38:45] Immediately
[00:38:46] or if the cabin is not clean
[00:38:48] or anything like that we get
[00:38:49] notifications. Which has become invaluable
[00:38:52] because we're getting notifications
[00:38:54] as soon as there's damage
[00:38:55] and I can immediately go
[00:38:56] to the history of that truck
[00:38:58] and say okay on this day
[00:39:00] you know was there damage
[00:39:01] on this day? No there wasn't damage.
[00:39:03] Was there damage on this day?
[00:39:04] Yes there's damage
[00:39:05] okay who was driving the truck
[00:39:07] the day before And like we're
[00:39:08] able to pinpoint
[00:39:09] who is the person who's responsible.
[00:39:11] So like this was the first half
[00:39:13] and I haven't touched
[00:39:15] this base for two years.
[00:39:16] I built this two years ago,
[00:39:18] it's still working flawlessly.
[00:39:20] That's the other beautiful thing
[00:39:21] about Airtable is
[00:39:21] it's not like you have to
[00:39:22] maintain these systems
[00:39:23] that you build if you do it right,
[00:39:25] like you can do something this,
[00:39:27] maybe it took me a day
[00:39:28] or two right to come up
[00:39:29] with the right form
[00:39:30] to print out the Q. R. Codes.
[00:39:31] Like I don't have to change
[00:39:32] anything. So that's another like
[00:39:34] really amazing thing
[00:39:35] about Airtable and this
[00:39:36] base has become so invaluable.
[00:39:38] We also do load inspection.
[00:39:40] So every time a truck
[00:39:41] is loaded or unloaded,
[00:39:43] if anything fell in the truck,
[00:39:44] we get notified,
[00:39:45] the driver didn't strap it
[00:39:46] correctly before
[00:39:46] that'd be like a buddy system
[00:39:48] where people wouldn't really
[00:39:49] tell on each other.
[00:39:50] But the really cool thing here
[00:39:52] and this goes to Rebecca's point is
[00:39:54] about saving time.
[00:39:55] My
[00:39:57] We have about 150 employees.
[00:40:00] And of those employees,
[00:40:01] about 80 of them
[00:40:02] have different schedules every day and
[00:40:04] they can have to show up
[00:40:06] at four in the morning
[00:40:07] at seven in the morning.
[00:40:07] And it was a really big nightmare.
[00:40:09] How do we tell them
[00:40:10] what you're scheduled for
[00:40:11] tomorrow.
[00:40:12] And so we've been around
[00:40:14] for 30 plus years at this point.
[00:40:15] And we've always used this system
[00:40:17] using a voicemail. So my dispatcher
[00:40:19] would set up the schedules
[00:40:21] and then he would use a phone
[00:40:23] a cell phone
[00:40:24] and record a voice mail saying,
[00:40:25] you know, John four in the morning.
[00:40:28] Albert four in the morning Rogelio 4 15.
[00:40:31] And he'd go through this list
[00:40:32] of 80 people
[00:40:33] and there's only like a minute and a
[00:40:34] half that you can use in a voicemail.
[00:40:36] So you have to like rush through it if it
[00:40:37] was a long list
[00:40:38] and if you messed up, you have to redo it.
[00:40:40] And then you can imagine
[00:40:42] the employees
[00:40:43] they have to call every night and wait
[00:40:45] the whole list
[00:40:46] to listen to their name,
[00:40:47] paying attention.
[00:40:48] And if they don't hear
[00:40:48] their name, maybe they're like,
[00:40:50] am I off the clock tomorrow
[00:40:52] or do I have to call again?
[00:40:53] So it was just this
[00:40:54] system that worked
[00:40:56] right.
[00:40:56] But it also took like an hour,
[00:40:58] hour and a half to do
[00:40:59] the schedule
[00:41:00] to put onto this paper
[00:41:01] and then translate to
[00:41:02] another paper to then
[00:41:03] record this voicemail.
[00:41:04] So it's like an hour and a half
[00:41:05] that it took this process.
[00:41:07] Well, one day I showed up
[00:41:08] and the trucks were late,
[00:41:10] they hadn't left yet.
[00:41:11] And I asked the load master,
[00:41:12] like, what's the hold up?
[00:41:13] Why are the trucks left?
[00:41:15] And he said, because David
[00:41:16] didn't show up on time,
[00:41:17] he should have showed up at six
[00:41:18] in the morning and he showed up at eight.
[00:41:19] So I walked over to David
[00:41:20] and David, I said to David,
[00:41:22] like, why didn't you show
[00:41:22] up at six?
[00:41:23] And he's like,
[00:41:24] I always show up at eight,
[00:41:26] I never have to show up at six.
[00:41:27] So I never call into
[00:41:28] the phone number
[00:41:29] because I always show up at eight
[00:41:31] and it hit me in that moment.
[00:41:32] Like I need to build a system
[00:41:34] that notifies David
[00:41:36] what his time is and not the
[00:41:37] other way around
[00:41:38] where he can give me that type
[00:41:40] of excuse and be right actually.
[00:41:41] So I went
[00:41:43] to dispatcher,
[00:41:44] I said show me when you schedule it,
[00:41:45] what is the output looking a
[00:41:47] CSP I got that output
[00:41:49] and I created this simple view
[00:41:51] where all they're doing
[00:41:53] is pasting right now
[00:41:54] it's obviously blank
[00:41:55] because they'd be pasting for tomorrow,
[00:41:57] but they're simply
[00:41:57] pasting the schedule
[00:41:59] that they have on this other system
[00:42:02] into Airtable and it
[00:42:03] sends text messages to everybody.
[00:42:05] So hey alexander your schedule tomorrow,
[00:42:07] Tuesday June 14th at eight a.m.
[00:42:09] And it says it in Spanish
[00:42:11] too
[00:42:11] English and Spanish.
[00:42:12] So now there's no excuse
[00:42:14] every single day
[00:42:15] my employees get a text message saying
[00:42:17] you're like, this is your schedule
[00:42:19] or it says like you're not scheduled,
[00:42:21] it's very clear,
[00:42:22] Hey Robert,
[00:42:22] you're not scheduled for June 14
[00:42:24] And I mean to this point
[00:42:26] we've sent up 23,000 text messages
[00:42:29] in the past like
[00:42:30] year and a half.
[00:42:31] So this is another system
[00:42:32] that I set up, it took me maybe an
[00:42:33] hour to set up
[00:42:34] and I haven't had to touch
[00:42:36] and it saved an hour and a half per
[00:42:37] day because to do this
[00:42:38] maybe takes 10 minutes
[00:42:39] to the schedule and just simply
[00:42:40] paste the CSB
[00:42:42] So this is another like
[00:42:44] really interesting example.
[00:42:45] Then I got to the point
[00:42:47] where I had to
[00:42:48] build some more complicated systems
[00:42:50] and that's when I found mini
[00:42:51] extensions Alli,
[00:42:53] and you know usually hold off
[00:42:55] on paying for these add on
[00:42:56] solutions until you have a really good
[00:42:58] use case and I had one
[00:43:00] and it just blew my mind
[00:43:01] how powerful it was.
[00:43:03] And then I remember
[00:43:04] that conversation when I showed it to you
[00:43:06] and the people
[00:43:06] over at gap consulting and
[00:43:08] yeah it is that powerful and
[00:43:11] I can show you one other use case
[00:43:12] for mini extensions.
[00:43:14] That's kind of what
[00:43:15] brought me to Airtable.
[00:43:16] But like seven years ago
[00:43:18] I started a product
[00:43:19] in the parking ticket world.
[00:43:21] So you know you get a parking
[00:43:23] ticket on your car,
[00:43:24] you show up the parking tickets there,
[00:43:26] you have to take it
[00:43:27] into your car.
[00:43:28] You have to look at it with guilt
[00:43:30] and you have to like think
[00:43:31] about what could have been
[00:43:33] and then you put it
[00:43:34] on the side of your car
[00:43:34] And you can't pay for it immediately
[00:43:36] because it's not in the database yet.
[00:43:38] So you have to wait like 24-48 hours
[00:43:40] for it to even enter the database.
[00:43:42] So you have this period of guilt
[00:43:44] that then turns into neglect
[00:43:46] because you kind
[00:43:46] of like just leave it there
[00:43:47] and you're like, I'm not gonna pay for it,
[00:43:48] I still have 20 days, right?
[00:43:50] And then 35 days go by
[00:43:51] and you go and you look and
[00:43:53] you're like, oh my God,
[00:43:54] I forgot to pay that parking ticket.
[00:43:55] And now it's gone from $36 to $72.
[00:43:58] So a friend of mine
[00:44:00] and I came up with the idea,
[00:44:02] why don't we build an app
[00:44:04] that scrapes the city database
[00:44:06] and automatically pays
[00:44:08] that parking ticket for you
[00:44:09] and just simply notifies you.
[00:44:10] So literally you can
[00:44:11] walk up to your car,
[00:44:12] grab the parking ticket
[00:44:13] and throw it away and you'll get an
[00:44:14] email two days later
[00:44:15] with a receipt from the city
[00:44:16] saying, you know,
[00:44:16] you just paid this parking ticket,
[00:44:18] that's it.
[00:44:19] So we built it, we got like
[00:44:21] 100 200 of our friends
[00:44:23] and family to sign up.
[00:44:24] And one day I was walking past a
[00:44:25] dealership
[00:44:27] and this is one of the biggest dealerships
[00:44:29] in Miami and I'm like,
[00:44:30] they have loaner fleets
[00:44:31] and loaner fleets
[00:44:32] have the ethical dilemma of,
[00:44:34] you know, I'm borrowing this car,
[00:44:36] I'm getting a parking ticket,
[00:44:37] I don't care, right,
[00:44:39] it's not gonna affect me.
[00:44:40] So I walked in and I went to the
[00:44:41] loaner fleet manager and said,
[00:44:43] do you guys have an issue
[00:44:44] with parking tickets?
[00:44:45] And he's like, yeah, why?
[00:44:46] And I'm like, well
[00:44:47] I have this system that can notify
[00:44:49] you whenever a parking ticket
[00:44:51] is issued like within 24 hours.
[00:44:53] And his his Jaw dropped,
[00:44:54] his eyes just open. He's like wait really?
[00:44:56] Are you have you built that?
[00:44:58] I'm like yeah it exists. And he said Okay.
[00:45:00] And he took me to the finance manager,
[00:45:03] we resolved the price point and he ended
[00:45:05] up giving me their list of 750 vehicles.
[00:45:07] I took that and I went to every other
[00:45:09] dealership in Miami.
[00:45:11] And because that was the
[00:45:12] biggest dealership
[00:45:13] they all that was like the name
[00:45:14] recognition I needed
[00:45:15] and they all had the same problem.
[00:45:17] I was able to get like
[00:45:19] three and a half thousand vehicles of
[00:45:20] loaner fleets.
[00:45:21] And then I started like
[00:45:22] going after rental cars right?
[00:45:24] And I had to build this
[00:45:25] with the developer,
[00:45:26] the same developer who I get a shout
[00:45:28] out to earlier actually Austin Bunsen
[00:45:30] and he built an amazing system.
[00:45:34] Recently though I wanted
[00:45:35] now that I've gotten pretty good
[00:45:37] at Airtable,
[00:45:37] I wanted to see if I can replicate this
[00:45:39] in Airtable. So rather than being a
[00:45:40] code based platform,
[00:45:42] can I replicate this system in Airtable.
[00:45:44] So I used a scraping no code
[00:45:46] solution to scrape the city database
[00:45:50] with my CSV list
[00:45:52] and I have
[00:45:54] this base here that
[00:45:56] basically my users
[00:45:58] have these has a portal.
[00:46:01] So this is a mini extensions portal,
[00:46:03] an example of what you can do
[00:46:04] with mini extensions
[00:46:04] where a user goes
[00:46:05] and it's very simple.
[00:46:07] All they have is my vehicles and my
[00:46:08] violations and they can add vehicles.
[00:46:11] So they add new vehicles to their fleet.
[00:46:13] They are able to, you know,
[00:46:14] put in some information
[00:46:15] and now they're adding to
[00:46:16] their vehicle list fleet.
[00:46:18] And they can go at any point
[00:46:20] and see their overall breakdown
[00:46:23] of vehicles and
[00:46:23] how much is due
[00:46:24] or their violations
[00:46:26] because the city doesn't give you this
[00:46:28] portal access.
[00:46:29] This portal view across
[00:46:31] my whole fleet of 700 vehicles and look
[00:46:33] at how many vehicles
[00:46:34] are referred to collection. Like
[00:46:36] there's so many reasons
[00:46:37] why this is such a good idea.
[00:46:38] But there's cars,
[00:46:39] this is a lot of money
[00:46:40] in terms of late fees,
[00:46:41] it affects their credit
[00:46:42] and if you get five tickets,
[00:46:44] the car gets towed.
[00:46:45] So like imagine these people
[00:46:46] using a loaner vehicle
[00:46:47] that gets towed while they're using it
[00:46:48] or a rental car.
[00:46:49] So anyways,
[00:46:50] this is an example of how you
[00:46:52] can build that in Airtable and on
[00:46:53] top of it with
[00:46:55] mini extensions. So yeah, that's
[00:46:57] kind of how I got into it
[00:46:59] very, very cool.
[00:47:01] Yeah, just chock full of more
[00:47:03] and more use cases
[00:47:04] every time I talk to you.
[00:47:05] That's just really the,
[00:47:09] that is such a good use case
[00:47:12] at a good story.
[00:47:13] I would clarify for folks who
[00:47:16] are unfamiliar.
[00:47:17] We are currently looking at a
[00:47:19] mini extensions portal just so
[00:47:20] that they're aware.
[00:47:22] And it's also just a good sort of
[00:47:26] look at, we were talking earlier about,
[00:47:28] or I was talking earlier about the event
[00:47:30] horizon and imagining,
[00:47:31] I don't know how many different
[00:47:33] dealerships that you have
[00:47:35] in there, but you certainly
[00:47:37] don't want to give,
[00:47:38] you know Toyota a look at
[00:47:40] Chevy's trucks. That would be,
[00:47:44] you know, it would seem
[00:47:45] like a recipe for disaster. And so
[00:47:47] it's sort of a use case like this
[00:47:50] necessitates using an external portal
[00:47:53] and it
[00:47:53] just makes it,
[00:47:55] it seems so easy
[00:47:56] just to look at what is,
[00:47:58] you only want to look at my stuff
[00:48:00] or specifically this car
[00:48:02] or specifically this violation.
[00:48:05] Yeah. So you have that
[00:48:06] search function up here
[00:48:07] and I do off of your point Kamille,
[00:48:09] like,
[00:48:10] yeah, this is a perfect example
[00:48:11] if you don't want Toyota
[00:48:13] and them in your Airtable base,
[00:48:14] like think about how crazy
[00:48:15] and messed up the world it has to be in.
[00:48:17] If I actually made them users,
[00:48:18] which is what Airtable
[00:48:19] technically wants me to
[00:48:20] do right?
[00:48:21] If I'm a Airtable developer.
[00:48:24] but there's also options, right?
[00:48:26] So I could have gone fancy
[00:48:28] and made a Stackr
[00:48:29] portal or I could have gone fancy
[00:48:31] made a softer portal, but it's really just
[00:48:33] about utility.
[00:48:33] My customers don't need fancy.
[00:48:35] They want straightforward
[00:48:36] simplicity. It's usually a clerk
[00:48:38] who's even looking at this,
[00:48:38] not the, you know, fancy finance person
[00:48:41] who gave me the contract,
[00:48:43] it's usually someone else
[00:48:44] who just needs very clear,
[00:48:45] I'm going to this website,
[00:48:46] it's taking me in automatically,
[00:48:48] they don't have to have even
[00:48:49] log in functionality,
[00:48:50] it's in the U. R. L.
[00:48:51] And they're simply just
[00:48:52] typing in a thing there.
[00:48:53] Again they're able to add stuff,
[00:48:55] they're getting notifications
[00:48:56] every day via
[00:48:56] text message and email when they get
[00:48:59] violation. So
[00:49:01] yeah.
[00:49:02] Yeah super super cool
[00:49:05] bravo.
[00:49:06] Thank you.
[00:49:08] Yeah looking forward to learning more
[00:49:10] about ProfitGrab in a few minutes,
[00:49:13] awesome. Yeah Charlie appreciate,
[00:49:15] love hearing your story and how you've
[00:49:18] progressed. And now
[00:49:20] you've got a product out there
[00:49:23] and built on Airtable
[00:49:24] and you're gonna walk us through that
[00:49:28] so we'll move on to our base showcase on
[00:49:31] profit, grab,
[00:49:33] share your screen.
[00:49:34] Yeah so similar to the other impetus
[00:49:38] for what led to the other me even finding
[00:49:42] Airtable,
[00:49:43] I have to credit my dad,
[00:49:45] so my dad one day came to me and said
[00:49:47] can you build me something?
[00:49:49] He was trading in cryptocurrencies
[00:49:51] and stocks,
[00:49:51] Can you build, can you build me something
[00:49:53] that when my Cryptocurrency goes down
[00:49:55] 5%
[00:49:56] I just got a text message
[00:49:57] saying hey you gotta go buy
[00:49:59] this Cryptocurrency
[00:50:00] and it even calculates
[00:50:01] the value and everything
[00:50:03] and I love when people come to me with
[00:50:06] hey can you build this on Airtable?
[00:50:08] I mean it's just it's the happiest moment
[00:50:10] of the day when people do that
[00:50:11] because it's like
[00:50:12] extremely rarely, almost never
[00:50:15] can you do you say no to that
[00:50:16] because everything
[00:50:17] is pretty much possible.
[00:50:20] So like within an hour,
[00:50:21] hour and a half
[00:50:22] I had set up, you know I was pulling
[00:50:24] Cryptocurrency prices,
[00:50:26] I had set up the schema
[00:50:27] to work functionally and I was
[00:50:29] sending notifications to him,
[00:50:31] the notifications kind of look like this.
[00:50:33] So these are the text messages
[00:50:34] that go out.
[00:50:35] So I would say something like
[00:50:36] hey there you know this is
[00:50:38] a bi notice for this
[00:50:39] currency,
[00:50:40] This is the price that you
[00:50:42] originally purchased at right now.
[00:50:43] In this case it's 17% down.
[00:50:46] You've used $5,000 out
[00:50:49] of your $10,000 budget.
[00:50:51] You know there's a 56%
[00:50:52] variance between your top purchase
[00:50:54] and what it is right
[00:50:55] now. So I'm giving all these
[00:50:56] like data points that was helping him
[00:50:58] determine if he did want to buy it
[00:50:59] at that moment or if you wanted to wait a
[00:51:00] little bit
[00:51:01] and then he would have to go
[00:51:04] into his exchange
[00:51:05] to buy the currency to buy it and
[00:51:08] then come back to a form
[00:51:09] that I have here where
[00:51:10] a mini extensions form right
[00:51:12] that he would click
[00:51:13] and he'd enter the data
[00:51:15] as to what he purchased.
[00:51:17] Then I had the realization like
[00:51:18] what about if I could actually
[00:51:20] place the trades
[00:51:21] directly on the exchange for him
[00:51:23] versus him having to place it
[00:51:25] and then come
[00:51:25] back
[00:51:26] in the middle of the night,
[00:51:27] he was waking up at two
[00:51:29] in the morning excited to
[00:51:30] see like hey you gotta
[00:51:31] sell this for a 10% profit
[00:51:33] and he'd be like
[00:51:33] I get all the notifications
[00:51:35] for all my users,
[00:51:36] so I would see him actually like
[00:51:37] doing this at one a.m.
[00:51:38] Two a.m. in the morning,
[00:51:40] I'd also be excited.
[00:51:41] This was like when the kryptos
[00:51:42] we're all going up to now
[00:51:43] it's not the case.
[00:51:46] And so then I started talking
[00:51:48] to a developer really close friend of mine
[00:51:52] And we ended up connecting Airtable
[00:51:55] to crack in which is one of the major
[00:51:57] exchanges
[00:51:58] and that opened up so much
[00:52:01] potential and opportunity which has led to
[00:52:05] ProfitGrab
[00:52:05] so I'll kind of like
[00:52:07] give you a brief overview,
[00:52:08] so we have these 25
[00:52:09] cryptocurrencies.
[00:52:10] They're updating the prices
[00:52:12] every 30 seconds,
[00:52:13] so you'll see like the last update
[00:52:15] over here.
[00:52:16] That's its own,
[00:52:17] all of these are like mini stories right?
[00:52:19] I first used
[00:52:20] how do you get the pricing data
[00:52:23] to be as close to live as possible.
[00:52:26] I found pipe dream
[00:52:27] pipe dream is really good
[00:52:28] because you can connect to any API
[00:52:30] And I was able to connect to a good
[00:52:33] source like for pricing
[00:52:34] but pipe dream if I
[00:52:35] was doing it every
[00:52:36] so there you go see it's updating
[00:52:38] pipe dream would charge me
[00:52:40] came onto like $120 for every
[00:52:42] two minutes refresh times
[00:52:44] And if you think about it
[00:52:45] you go from two minutes to one minute,
[00:52:47] that's double the amount of searches.
[00:52:49] So it would go from
[00:52:50] $100 to $200
[00:52:51] and if I went from there to 30 seconds
[00:52:53] now it becomes $400
[00:52:55] in those multiples.
[00:52:57] But we were able to
[00:52:59] build our own kind of like
[00:53:01] server that was pinging crack
[00:53:03] and eventually that's
[00:53:03] the optimal solution
[00:53:05] now just in case anybody's interested
[00:53:07] that's pinging
[00:53:08] Kraken who has a publicly exposed
[00:53:10] price A. P. I.
[00:53:11] And just pushing it to Airtable
[00:53:13] every 30 seconds.
[00:53:14] So it's not using any
[00:53:15] Airtable automations,
[00:53:15] it's not using any third party sources,
[00:53:17] it's probably costing
[00:53:19] I don't know $5 per month
[00:53:21] in terms of how much data
[00:53:22] processing it's using.
[00:53:24] So it's bringing over
[00:53:26] the prices every 30 seconds
[00:53:28] and then users have this interface
[00:53:30] so this is built on Stackr.
[00:53:32] I love Stackr,
[00:53:34] it's probably my preferred
[00:53:37] go to for a nice third party
[00:53:40] login functionality
[00:53:42] and people can you know
[00:53:43] update their information some basic
[00:53:46] stuff,
[00:53:47] they can go then to their coins.
[00:53:49] So in this case
[00:53:50] you probably add a new coin.
[00:53:51] So I want to now create a position for
[00:53:54] say Bitcoin something
[00:53:55] that everybody understands,
[00:53:57] you then go and
[00:53:58] you set your risk settings.
[00:54:00] So I want to purchase every like I
[00:54:02] only want to purchase 15 positions total.
[00:54:04] That's pretty conservative right?
[00:54:06] Or I only want to purchase five
[00:54:07] that's really aggressive
[00:54:09] because you can only
[00:54:09] buy five times if it goes down
[00:54:12] so let's keep it up
[00:54:13] conservative 15 how much
[00:54:14] budget the budget's gonna be $10,000
[00:54:18] and then there's advanced settings.
[00:54:20] So the advanced settings is
[00:54:22] By default I set it at 5%
[00:54:23] 5%. So if you think about it
[00:54:25] you get into your first
[00:54:26] position.
[00:54:27] If it goes down 5%
[00:54:28] it buys another position.
[00:54:30] Remember you have up to 15
[00:54:31] positions because that
[00:54:32] was what you selected
[00:54:33] Then if it goes down another 5%
[00:54:35] it gets into your next position
[00:54:37] Then imagine from there it goes up 5%.
[00:54:40] Okay now you got out of your lowest
[00:54:42] position it's sold
[00:54:43] and it captured that close profits
[00:54:45] then it goes up again
[00:54:45] another 5% it's sold
[00:54:47] and got out of that.
[00:54:49] So I call this capturing the
[00:54:51] forgetting the word
[00:54:55] entropy of the market.
[00:54:56] The random fluctuations.
[00:54:58] You're all day all night you're
[00:55:00] the bot is capturing all of these
[00:55:01] waves that are happening.
[00:55:03] It's getting in and
[00:55:03] getting out and even for very small
[00:55:06] immediate jumps
[00:55:07] that happen on news boom
[00:55:08] it's sell sell sell and then buys buys
[00:55:10] buys or the opposite
[00:55:11] fake bad news
[00:55:12] it buys buys buys
[00:55:13] and then sell sell sell as
[00:55:14] the normal as the market normalizes.
[00:55:16] But you set your by side percentage
[00:55:18] if you want to override that 5%.
[00:55:20] So I can say I want to buy
[00:55:21] only when it goes down 15%
[00:55:23] and I want to make it automatic
[00:55:25] or manual.
[00:55:26] So I can either get text messages
[00:55:28] that say do you want to buy this?
[00:55:29] Based on your parameters,
[00:55:31] you should buy right
[00:55:31] now or you set it to automatically buy
[00:55:34] by clicking this checkbox and I'm just
[00:55:35] gonna automatically place
[00:55:37] the trades for you.
[00:55:38] And then the sell side can be
[00:55:39] different. So the sell side
[00:55:41] I want to sell when it's up 10%
[00:55:42] or I want to sell
[00:55:43] only when it's a home run
[00:55:44] and then it's up 25%. Hypothetically
[00:55:46] these things are happening with crypto and
[00:55:49] you know even with massive drops
[00:55:51] if you put your settings correctly,
[00:55:52] you're gonna be capturing waves
[00:55:54] even with the massive drops
[00:55:55] that we've been
[00:55:56] seeing recently.
[00:55:57] And then you can also make it
[00:55:59] to auto sell or to a manual sell.
[00:56:02] I went a step further.
[00:56:03] I'm not sure if anybody
[00:56:05] understands the finance side,
[00:56:06] but a trailing stop loss
[00:56:07] is something that crypto
[00:56:09] exchanges don't do.
[00:56:10] So I had to build my own
[00:56:12] trailing stop loss in Airtable. Which is
[00:56:15] why sell
[00:56:16] When the if you put your settings
[00:56:19] to 25% say it goes to 25%,
[00:56:21] why sell when it hits 25%?
[00:56:23] Why not now just start a ticker
[00:56:25] that says if you're
[00:56:26] trailing stop loss was say 2%
[00:56:30] you're letting it breathe
[00:56:31] so you're letting it go up
[00:56:33] And only when it pulls down 2%
[00:56:35] now so once it hits 25%
[00:56:37] it's entered this kind of
[00:56:38] like tracking thing only when it pulls
[00:56:40] back 2% does it actually do the sell and
[00:56:43] the same thing on the reverse
[00:56:44] when it's buying,
[00:56:45] why buy when it's 10% why not
[00:56:46] wait because it might keep going,
[00:56:48] it might go to 18%
[00:56:49] and then only pull back a
[00:56:50] little bit then
[00:56:51] and that's when you buy.
[00:56:52] So it's like a
[00:56:53] financial tool to not just buy at 10%,
[00:56:55] you let it breathe and it can go all the
[00:56:58] way down to 20 and then pulls back to 18%
[00:57:00] and that's when it buys
[00:57:02] so that's called a trailing stop loss.
[00:57:04] So I implemented that in here
[00:57:05] also
[00:57:06] and this is like where you
[00:57:08] saved the coin,
[00:57:09] I'm not gonna save this because
[00:57:10] this is
[00:57:11] a live system at this point
[00:57:13] but you can then go
[00:57:14] into any of your coins.
[00:57:16] So like for instance let's go into
[00:57:18] which is a very
[00:57:20] interesting coin.
[00:57:21] You can see Stackr allows me
[00:57:23] to embed stuff into Stackr so
[00:57:24] I've embedded the charts
[00:57:26] for each of these coins
[00:57:27] so it's easy for you to you
[00:57:28] know see things and
[00:57:30] do some analysis in here
[00:57:32] which is really nice.
[00:57:33] I can update this coin setting
[00:57:35] so I can say you know I want to change the
[00:57:37] budget to 12,000 and I want to
[00:57:39] change the settings basically.
[00:57:41] I want to make it not automatically
[00:57:43] buy anymore.
[00:57:43] I only want to be notified just
[00:57:44] by turning off this checkbox
[00:57:46] and that's all
[00:57:48] like as I said that's all being
[00:57:49] pushed over to Airtable.
[00:57:52] That's tracking all of this data.
[00:57:54] This is just the front end and Stackr.
[00:57:58] So as you can see for this
[00:58:00] this person has all these
[00:58:01] active positions.
[00:58:02] They have all of these closed positions,
[00:58:05] it tells you the annualized return for
[00:58:07] each of these closed positions.
[00:58:09] But it's a full fledged system now it's it
[00:58:12] has $1.4 million dollars
[00:58:14] invested. It has $284,000
[00:58:17] in closed profits to this point.
[00:58:21] I went a step further though and I said
[00:58:23] does the system actually make sense? Like
[00:58:26] can I build a back tester
[00:58:28] where
[00:58:30] if I said Bitcoin between March and August
[00:58:34] If I would have done say
[00:58:36] 10 positions 5% down,
[00:58:38] 10% up and a 1% trailing stop
[00:58:40] loss.
[00:58:41] How would that have performed
[00:58:44] versus just buying Bitcoin outright?
[00:58:46] And I hired a python developer
[00:58:49] to use basically the same
[00:58:51] system that I've
[00:58:52] already done like
[00:58:53] the algorithm that I've set up
[00:58:55] and he was able to build this
[00:58:57] back tester
[00:58:58] that outputs if you can think about it
[00:59:00] that's 90 to
[00:59:02] 100,000 lines of pricing data
[00:59:04] every single minute
[00:59:05] for the for like nine month
[00:59:07] period.
[00:59:07] And it goes through this data set
[00:59:10] and it calculates what the total
[00:59:12] return would have been.
[00:59:13] So this is the output of the chart
[00:59:14] of the closed profit
[00:59:16] and loss of the open P. N. L.
[00:59:18] And of the total return
[00:59:19] in terms of percentage.
[00:59:20] And in this example you'll see
[00:59:22] like this is where Bitcoin
[00:59:23] over a period of time
[00:59:25] was you know went down went up
[00:59:26] if you had bought on this day
[00:59:28] and right now
[00:59:29] we're at this day your overall
[00:59:31] return would be 9%
[00:59:32] whereas in ProfitGrab it would have
[00:59:34] been 48% because if you
[00:59:36] think about it it would have been
[00:59:37] buying, buying right selling up here
[00:59:39] Buying as it goes down
[00:59:41] selling selling, selling, buying, buying,
[00:59:42] buying it would reach a point
[00:59:44] when this becomes flat
[00:59:45] because you run out of
[00:59:45] budget right, you only had 10 positions.
[00:59:48] You bought those 10 positions now it's
[00:59:50] below that area.
[00:59:51] You're not making any money
[00:59:52] at this point so it becomes flat
[00:59:54] but then it comes back up
[00:59:56] and you start selling out
[00:59:57] of all those positions and
[00:59:58] you have this you know
[00:59:59] buy buy buy again, sell, sell sell.
[01:00:01] It's a really interesting strategy
[01:00:03] because you'll see that
[01:00:04] this curve right here
[01:00:05] is pretty predictable
[01:00:07] and I've done this test
[01:00:08] you know we're now involving
[01:00:10] machine learning
[01:00:12] and if I run up 20 Amazon aws
[01:00:16] processors and
[01:00:17] I said between this day and this day,
[01:00:20] this coin go and do as many
[01:00:22] configurations as you want
[01:00:24] and tell me what would have been
[01:00:25] the most optimal
[01:00:26] variable strategy.
[01:00:28] So but what we're finding is
[01:00:30] that this return is pretty
[01:00:32] predictable as long as you're
[01:00:33] in budget if you're out
[01:00:35] of budget becomes flat
[01:00:35] obviously.
[01:00:37] So it's been a really interesting system
[01:00:40] to set up. I have a finance
[01:00:41] background.
[01:00:42] My first job was in Merrill Lynch
[01:00:44] as a financial advisor.
[01:00:45] So I love this but
[01:00:47] I don't like my success being
[01:00:50] dependent on the markets
[01:00:51] and how random they are.
[01:00:53] So that's why I love Airtable
[01:00:55] is because it's not
[01:00:56] your building systems that
[01:00:57] work for the people
[01:00:58] you're building it for.
[01:00:59] And this was a really good example
[01:01:00] of building a system in Airtable
[01:01:02] that is basically an algorithm,
[01:01:04] an algorithm trading bot
[01:01:06] with Airtable as a
[01:01:07] back and
[01:01:08] there
[01:01:08] was a logic layer
[01:01:09] Stackr as the interface layer
[01:01:12] set and forget
[01:01:14] and it's been an amazing, amazing ride
[01:01:17] to this point. So that's ProfitGrab.
[01:01:22] I understood everything
[01:01:23] I'm sure Alli and Kamille
[01:01:25] did as well but that was
[01:01:27] awesome.
[01:01:28] Very cool stuff.
[01:01:29] Amazing what can be done in Airtable.
[01:01:33] And you've got real
[01:01:35] customers running a real business
[01:01:37] that's so cool. The
[01:01:40] Have that, do you foresee
[01:01:41] Airtable being the solution
[01:01:43] long term or that will it
[01:01:44] require?
[01:01:45] No. So I've done the calculations
[01:01:47] and I could probably only fit about
[01:01:49] 50 users in Airtable.
[01:01:51] I'm at right right now about 25 users.
[01:01:54] So I'm being very selective, right?
[01:01:57] I have minimums as to how
[01:02:00] how large of an account
[01:02:01] you need to be able to be
[01:02:02] in the system cause it's not
[01:02:02] worth it for some of the $5,000
[01:02:04] to take up one of those slots.
[01:02:06] Then you start getting into,
[01:02:08] you know, can I archive past data?
[01:02:09] I don't really want to get into that.
[01:02:11] So eventually we will be building it in
[01:02:13] raw code. But it's an amazing
[01:02:17] jumping point because I can export,
[01:02:19] you know, as you guys said,
[01:02:21] I think it's a sync dot I, I always
[01:02:23] think that I get it wrong,
[01:02:25] but you can export your schema
[01:02:26] to a sequel days,
[01:02:27] and give it on a silver platter
[01:02:29] to developers and say, here it is,
[01:02:31] here are all the automations,
[01:02:32] here's the schema of the system,
[01:02:34] like all you have to
[01:02:35] do is copy
[01:02:35] and you're cutting your development time
[01:02:37] like to a fraction of what it
[01:02:38] would have been
[01:02:39] just trying to tell the developer
[01:02:40] what they need to build.
[01:02:43] so we, we probably will get to that point.
[01:02:48] Yeah, but we need to
[01:02:49] to jump off of Airtable
[01:02:51] awesome, Thank you Charlie
[01:02:53] for sharing that
[01:02:54] and people can find you at profitgrab.com
[01:02:57] if they're interested
[01:02:58] and have deep pockets that want to put in
[01:03:00] crypto Exactly, exactly.
[01:03:03] That and I also besides
[01:03:06] crypto every morning I
[01:03:09] I work with a small team
[01:03:11] of mine so I called him a team
[01:03:13] but we're really,
[01:03:14] they're just like enthusiasts
[01:03:17] Airtable and shout out to them.
[01:03:20] It's really fun because they see me
[01:03:22] building and we talk about
[01:03:23] things that we're
[01:03:24] building at that moment
[01:03:25] and they're becoming really good
[01:03:27] and I'm able to give
[01:03:27] them tasks on projects
[01:03:29] that I'm working on.
[01:03:30] So if anybody's interested in that too,
[01:03:32] I do that every morning around eight
[01:03:34] a.m.
[01:03:35] It also keeps me in check.
[01:03:36] I do all of my work like in one hour,
[01:03:38] which is so great because then
[01:03:39] I have the rest of the day
[01:03:41] to just have client
[01:03:41] meetings and relax
[01:03:43] so how can they,
[01:03:44] what's the best way to get in contact with
[01:03:46] you?
[01:03:47] It's a great question.
[01:03:49] Probably my email.
[01:03:50] I don't know where I can write my
[01:03:52] email.
[01:03:54] You could put it in the slack group.
[01:03:58] That might be, yes,
[01:03:59] I'll do that, I'll do that,
[01:04:01] I'll put in the slack group
[01:04:02] but that's the best way.
[01:04:03] Cool, thank you Charlie
[01:04:05] and we appreciate you having on,
[01:04:07] we'll check in with you
[01:04:08] down the road
[01:04:09] and see where things are at
[01:04:10] with everything.
[01:04:11] Thank you.
[01:04:12] You have other amazing stuff
[01:04:14] to share with us. So we'll just stand
[01:04:16] Kamille is gonna share with us
[01:04:18] next week on on the segment she's got
[01:04:21] so we'll look forward to that.
[01:04:22] And just a quick plug for BuiltOnAir,
[01:04:24] join us in the BuiltOnAir community
[01:04:27] at builtonair.com
[01:04:29] and you'll find Charlie
[01:04:30] and Alli and Kamille and myself
[01:04:33] and thousands of other
[01:04:34] Airtable fans.
[01:04:35] And we'd love to have you join us.
[01:04:38] So thank you for this week
[01:04:39] for being with us.
[01:04:40] And we'd love to see what you
[01:04:42] build on air and join us next
[01:04:43] week. Take care everyone.