Airtable

Here at Dragon Drop HQ, we're always on the lookout for new apps, frameworks, libraries that make the process of building tech of value just a bit easier today than it was yesterday.

One of our great finds over the last few years is Airtable. A cross between a spreadsheet and a database, Airtable allows us to rapidly build business process apps that don't break your budget.

So many organisations are powered by spreadsheets, but in our experience, the great benefit of spreadsheets - their flexibility - is also their Achilles heel. Data quality deteriorates over time and a beautifully designed spreadsheet quickly turns into mess of fields and records.

Airtable’s table and field configuration provides a more structured set up and taps into the power of relational databases by allowing you to link your data together. Airtable’s automations and scripting capabilities add a layer of workflow and business process capability that takes your app from mere data storage to a fully-fledged app.

Dragon Drop’s recommendation:

When you want to tame the spreadsheet chaos, but don't have the budget for a bespoke web app, let (and Dragon Drop) step in.

A few Airtable projects we’ve built:

Client onboarding app

A professional services company used Airtable to onboard their new clients. Data from a series of questionnaires was collated in Airtable and allowed our client to efficiently progress new clients from signing to operation

Holiday request app

A digital agency wanted a solution to manage the holiday requests of their rapidly growing team. An Airtable base with automations and notifications ensured that requests did not get lost and a complete picture of the outstanding holiday allowance was always available

Matching mentors to mentees

A personal coaching company needed an automated way to match their coaching clients with their pre-approved coaches. When a new client completed their application, they were automatically matched with up to 5 coaches based on their answers to their application questionnaire and each coach was given a matching score for this client. Having whittled their list of 200+ coaches down to a high-scoring set of 5, the coaching company then selected the most appropriate candidate, saving hours of manual review. This solution used Airtable’s automation and scripting capabilities to process the incoming application data and apply the matching criteria

Processing ecommerce orders

An online retailer wanted a way to process their ecommerce orders through their bespoke manufacturing process. Dragon Drop designed an Airtable base that would import their online order data and create worksheets for each order item. The worksheets contained product image information and an autogenerated QR code to help track items through the process.