BuiltOnAir

Welcome to BuiltOnAir, a podcast and video series about all things Airtable. Each episode, we talk with someone active in the Airtable community to discuss their experiences and showcase an interesting way they’ve used Airtable in their work.

Today, we chat with Kevin S. Lin: Software Developer, AWS Consultant, and Startup Founder. After over 5 years at AWS, Amazon Web Services, Kevin set-off on his own to help others get the most out of their cloud-based systems. His company, Thence, aims to help businesses put scalable systems in place, reduce costs, and make sense of “the cloud”.

Kevin has a passion for data, and uses Airtable to sort, track, and organize several aspects of both his work and personal life. He tells us about his latest project: a scalable knowledge base which can be used to organize any amount of information, and find it again in seconds.

In today’s episode, Kevin shares with us a demo of his product, BackupTable. BackupTable allows you to backup entire Airtable Bases, every field of every table, for free. Users with a paid account can even backup attachment fields, and set their backups to run on an automated 24-hour schedule.

View his BackupTable here: 

Check out Thence here: 

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View the video demo from this episode 

BuiltOnAir is sponsored by Openside. 

Openside's newest product, On2Air Forms, is the Airtable forms solution you've been looking for. For a limited time, get On2Air Forms FREE when you purchase the On2Air Actions Zapier connector at openside.com. 

Welcome to BuiltOnAir, a podcast and video series about all things Airtable. Each episode, we talk with someone active in the Airtable community to discuss their experiences and showcase an interesting way they’ve used Airtable in their work.

On today’s episode of BuiltOnAir, we (digitally) travel overseas to chat with Jonathan Bowen. Jonathan is an Airtable developer and consultant boasting over 20 years of experience in technology, the past 13 of which have been focused on web apps and e-commerce development. His company, DragonDrop (a creative play on words - get it, drag and drop?), helps clients build Airtable bases to manage all sorts of workflows.

Jonathan was recently named a Community Leader in the Airtable Community forum, which means he has been recognized by the Airtable Staff for his outstanding contribution toward helping users get the most out of the product.

The first base Jonathan shares with us today is a multi-step onboarding process, in which he has combined Airtable, Zapier, and TypeForm to create a simple flow of information between the client and the base. The client receives an email with a list of steps to complete, and each step is linked to a TypeForm form. Jonathan demonstrates the creative way that he ensures the client’s information updates the correct record in Airtable.

Next, we dive into a project he recently completed for the Computer Museum of America, where he used the Airtable API to render data from a base onto a webpage, and export it as a PDF. Jonathan is currently working toward gearing this process more toward the general public, and plans to post on the Community Forum soon with step by step instructions.

Check out Jonathan on the Airtable Community Forum here!

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View the video demo from this episode

BuiltOnAir is sponsored by Openside. 

Openside's newest product, On2Air Forms, is the Airtable forms solution you've been looking for. For a limited time, get On2Air Forms FREE when you purchase the On2Air Actions Zapier connector at openside.com. 

Welcome to BuiltOnAir, a podcast and video series about all things Airtable. Each episode, we talk with someone active in the Airtable community to discuss their experiences and showcase an interesting way they’ve used Airtable in their work.

In this episode, I speak with Melanie Magdalena: scientist, creator, web-designer, developer, and self-proclaimed unicorn. Melanie works with nonprofits and entrepreneurs to simplify their workflows using no code solutions. After kicking off her career in archaeology, life took her in a different direction and she started using her technological knowledge to build platforms to help her day-to-day work life.

Today, she resides in Austin, Texas, and is a co-founder of Deytah, a digital consulting service helping small businesses to solve their data problems. Together with her co-founders, they recently released Automation Academy, where users can sign up to check out their Automation Recipes.

In today’s episode, Melanie showcases a base she created to calculate the scores of student assessments; and details an extremely creative way to get the data she needs in the right spots.

Find her online at here
Connect with Melanie on all social channels | @m2creates

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View the video demo from this episode 

BuiltOnAir is sponsored by Openside. 

Openside's newest product, On2Air Forms, is the Airtable forms solution you've been looking for. For a limited time, get On2Air Forms FREE when you purchase the On2Air Actions Zapier connector at openside.com.  

Welcome to BuiltOnAir, a podcast and video series about all things Airtable. Each episode, we talk with someone active in the Airtable community to discuss their experiences and showcase an interesting way they’ve used Airtable in their work.

Say hello to Ash Forrest, a freelance artist and from St. Louis, MO on BuiltOnAir this week. Ash is a photographer, artist and marketer who has brought together each world into a great blend of creativity and function. She’s a livestreamer and community builder that has adopted Airtable into many personal and professional uses, and shares some of her best creations here. 

A few years back, Ash started using a service called Twitch to livestream (video streamed real-time online) herself doing art for a live, virtual audience. Building a Twitch channel involves doing a lot of work to build a community, so she has spent a lot of time streaming physical art, digital art, and more. There are multiple interactive elements built into the system that involves interaction between streamer and audience. She’s done a 24 hour livestream to raise money for charity before.

She has extensive experience with marketing (especially from her time as a photographer), and it was through a client 2 years ago that she discovered Airtable. She was immediately attracted to the simplicity and visual appeal of organizing her data. She’s always sharing the app with fellow artists as a great option for staying on track without needing to code or even write formulas. 

Now Ash uses it for meal planning, budgeting, as a bullet journal, bill paying, business accounting, and a place to track physical records. In her own words, “anything that [she] can fit into an Airtable, [she’ll] make it fit into an Airtable.” This also includes keeping a rolodex of clients, content creation, and a library of artwork created (on sale, purchased, in development, etc). “Everything in [her] life can be Airtabled.”

The first Airtable base Ash shares is a bullet journal (a journal tracking the different aspects of personal life and habits). It makes great use of an emoji header for each field to represent the various habits she wants to check on each day, including water intake, vitamins, exercise and more. She’s also added a place to capture any ideas she has during the day in a single place, then use a view to see them all in one place. The journal helps her see correlations between variables e.g. how the food she eats affects her energy level, and more. 

The second base she showcases is a content and marketing system she built to help blogs. With the base she’s able to create a library of content with all assets contained on site. She built in a SEO checklist to help bloggers make sure each aspect of their content is optimization, with checkboxes to ensure the focus keywords are included in each relevant element. Ash included a social media table as a separate place to associate each social platform’s posts with the blog article in the first table. 

Find Ash on her personal website

Link to Podcast Management content

Link to Digital Bullet Journal content

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View the video demo from this episode 

BuiltOnAir is sponsored by Openside. 

Openside's newest product, On2Air Forms, is the Airtable forms solution you've been looking for. For a limited time, get On2Air Forms FREE when you purchase the On2Air Actions Zapier connector at openside.com. 

Welcome to BuiltOnAir, a podcast and video series about all things Airtable. Each episode, we talk with someone active in the Airtable community to discuss their experiences and showcase an interesting way they’ve used Airtable in their work.

On this week’s episode we have Alli Alosa on the podcast. Alli lives in New England where her primary work is with a family-owned truck dealership. Although her training in college was more in the fine arts, she’s been enjoying working with family doing advertising and marketing. Her most recent work with Airtable has helped the business consolidate their policies and practices across the board, and make all their work more streamlined. 

Her work with Airtable started when her father found the app and suggested she use it to put into place an inventory management system for their company. With eight different locations for selling and servicing 18-wheeler trucks, they needed a way to pull all the operations together into a single place. Their first approaches involved using normal spreadsheets to try to solve the problem, but quickly discovered that their needs were more geared toward a customized database system. 

Since Alli built their inventory management platform in Airtable, the company has added other systems in the app, including rental car and flight booking tracking, paid time off, and many more. In total they have around 20 fully used bases. Family members were all on board when they adopted Airtable, and Alli has been the main developer during each project. Since then they’ve created multiple internal tutorials for their teams to use it in their responsibilities. Their need for tutorials was less about creating a base (like the Airtable-made tutorials) and more for interacting with the database already created, which is what Alli has been focusing on.

For her demonstration, Alli shares their primary inventory database. The base is embedded into their own internal website, and team members need to login to access the content there. Much of the base has been set up to be automatically updated with new inventory, sale details and inventory movement data within 2 hours of occurrence.

The base also makes use of the Airtable Blocks feature to make it easy to output a truck details page that auto-populates and looks uniform, allowing sales team members to quickly print and share the information. They have a table to watch the current ad being run (via attachment), then another to keep an up to date database of leads. Automation features have been built into the system via services like Zapier. 

Visit Alli on her personal website |

Find Alli in the Airtable Community | 

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View the video demo from this episode |  

BuiltOnAir is sponsored by Openside. 

Openside's newest product, On2Air Forms, is the Airtable forms solution you've been looking for. For a limited time, get On2Air Forms FREE when you purchase the On2Air Actions Zapier connector at openside.com  

Welcome to BuiltOnAir, a podcast and video series about all things Airtable. Each episode, we talk with someone active in the Airtable community to discuss their experiences and showcase an interesting way they’ve used Airtable in their work.

In this episode, we speak with Sam Davyson, creator of an upcoming app called Airportal. Sam is a developer who has a passion for enabling amazing customer experiences that don’t involve writing code. Airportal is a platform that Sam and his team developed to solve many of the issues that Airtable users are facing today involving advanced permissions levels.

Airportal allows you to turn your base into beautifully designed customer portal,  customizable with your logo and color scheme. Users can log-in with a username and password, and depending on the permissions you give them, can view, edit, and create new records. You can even limit their permissions down to specific fields in specific tables; a feature that the Airtable community is sure to love.

In this episode, Sam takes us through a demo of Airportal, from the initial set-up, to customizing the permissions, and shows us what it will look like from the end user’s point of view. At the time of this recording, Airportal is on track to release in late September.

Check out Airportal online 

Sign up for the BuiltOnAir newsletter! 

View the video demo from this episode 

BuiltOnAir is sponsored by Openside. 

Openside's newest product, On2Air Forms, is the Airtable forms solution you've been looking for. For a limited time, get On2Air Forms FREE when you purchase the On2Air Actions Zapier connector at openside.com 

Welcome to BuiltOnAir, a podcast and video series about all things Airtable. Each episode, we talk with someone active in the Airtable community to discuss their experiences and showcase an interesting way they’ve used Airtable in their work.

Say hi to Vix Meldrew from the UK on this episode as she gives a look into her work as an influencer in the social media world. She uses Airtable to streamline her personal publishing schedule, and shares the best templates with her audience to help them organize their own social media and content projects.

Vix wasn’t always a blogger and influencer. She started as a school teacher for young children, and didn’t officially go full time in the online world for a while as she got used to the idea of being a public figure. She even tried to keep her blogging work hidden from people for a while after getting into the work. That didn’t last long, as she now has a large following of people and has made a name helping people to turn their personality and personal brand into their full-time business. 

Her work now involves guiding people through the many facets of publishing content and becoming an influencer online. Airtable has played a large part in her business processes, and more recently she’s been developing a membership site that uses Airtable as a central part of the development. 

Vix shares a refreshing perspective on being an influencer that leaves a legacy. She asks her audience how they want to be remembered, and encourages them to be authentic in sharing their story. For her it’s not about getting 50k followers or selling out to a sponsored product, and because of that she’s had to be selective in which people she accepts as clients; they need to want to leave a meaningful legacy with their work. She wants to help “light a fire” in her audience so they’re able to accomplish their own definition of success. 

Vix shares a database template she built to help bloggers and content creators to stay organized and purposeful in their work. Formatted in a simple, intuitive way, the base has a table with instructions on how to use the full thing, then tables for daily tasks to do when producing new content vs when no new content is made that day. After that there are tables to outline weekly tasks and monthly tasks. Each table was designed to give content makers a routine so they’re never stuck or at a loss.

Her Blog Management and Organization base includes these main tables:

• How to use - a “welcome mat” to give a broad picture of what’s involved in the Airtable and process
• Daily Tasks -New Content Day - what to do or steps to take on days when you’re developing new content
• Daily Tasks -No New Content - what to do when you’re not developing new material and can then focus on past content and interaction
• Weekly Tasks - things to do on a weekly basis to grow your outreach
• Monthly Tasks - bigger tasks that can often be done in batches to expand your brand on a larger scale
• New Content To-Do List - color coded list of things to do for producing content on each social media platform

Vix also takes a moment to share an Airtable she’s created to help manage the launch of a membership site. She walks through the different tables based on themes required for a successful site. In each table the tasks are broken down into 2, 5, 10, 30 and 60 minute time slots, to allow work to be done in what’s available in the moment.

Find Vix on her website and take the quiz for what kind of blogger you are

Connect with Vix on all social channels | @vixmeldrew

Sign up for the BuiltOnAir newsletter!

View the video demo from this episode 

BuiltOnAir is sponsored by Openside. 

Openside's newest product, On2Air Forms, is the Airtable forms solution you've been looking for. For a limited time, get On2Air Forms FREE when you purchase the On2Air Actions Zapier connector at openside.com  

Welcome to BuiltOnAir, a podcast and video series about all things Airtable. Each episode, we talk with someone active in the Airtable community to discuss their experiences and showcase an interesting way they’ve used Airtable in their work.

This week we welcome Patrick Ford, a media developer in the maker space at Anderson University in South Carolina. His work there involves designing learning experiences for their students and faculty, and helping them integrate technology into their education. 

Patrick started out studying as a media developer in college, then got a job building handrails for a company after he graduated. During his time working he learned a variety of design skills and software including CAD and Sketch, which made for a great background of experience for his current work at Anderson University (AU). 

His work in the CIDL of the university includes both support for their technology needs and educating people on both what to do and what they can do with the tech. Their department has 3d printers, laser cutters, a podcast booth, AR and VR tech, and more. Each item is part of Patricks work in helping the students be on the cutting edge of learning with technology. He loves to show faculty how their inventory can go beyond the normal approach to transferring knowledge and facilitate a more in-depth learning experience. 

Patrick talks about “modular learning,” an approach to education that allows a student to choose what classes or content they want or need to learn, and focus on the highest priorities for their goals. It also gives students the opportunity to prepare for jobs that may or may not exist at the time they start college. 

Airtable came into the picture as Patrick was exploring IFTT (“If This, Then That”) and was intrigued by how it was described as a “relational database” at the time. What started as simple experimentation with shopping lists and home organization led to him building multiple databases for use at the maker space of AU.. 

The base Patrick shares is a Makerspace Manager used at CIDL. It’s designed to collect and track bookings at the maker space, and has tables for users, machines and spaces, and a reservation system for when people want to take time with the resources at CIDL. The database makes great use of forms for making bookings or reserving inventory, and calendars to check availability of rooms and equipment. 

Patrick also shares an infographic he created using the Blocks feature of Airtable, showing stats from the AU maker space during a given semester, including user growth, demographics, total reservation hours, and more. It’s served as a great way to watch how their work is growing and how they’re helping people learn. 

Check out the maker space website and learn more about the CIDL | 

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View the video demo from this episode | 

BuiltOnAir is sponsored by Openside. 

Openside's newest product, On2Air Forms, is the Airtable forms solution you've been looking for. For a limited time, get On2Air Forms FREE when you purchase the On2Air Actions Zapier connector on openside.com. 

Welcome to BuiltOnAir, a podcast and video series about all things Airtable. Each episode, we talk with someone active in the Airtable community to discuss their experiences and showcase an interesting way they’ve used Airtable in their work.

Kamille Parks hails from Los Angeles, California as an urban planner at the architecture firm Gruen Associates. Her work involves ideation and planning for historical and transportation projects all throughout the city. Although Kamille works on various projects at a time, and often those projects take years to complete, this episode we get a great look at what an average day looks like for her, and how Airtable plays a role in making it happen.

Kamille talks about what got her into the work of urban planning, and how she was elated when she discovered that she could major in the subject and do what she had dreamed of doing all growing up. Even though much of her work needs to be kept under wraps for years, she finds great satisfaction knowing she’s doing work to benefit the community.

She teaches a boot camp-style classes at USC to teach tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketchup, and other programs that planners would use on an average day. She works on the weekends to teach these additional skills to students. Airtable plays a role in scheduling what she’s planning to teach, how much each class is worth, and making sure she’s in compliance with the school’s insurance. She also uses the base to set up and keep a record of training sessions with fellow students.

Airtable first entered the scene for Kamille’s work as the firm was looking for a database that could store the whole library of past projects. She transitioned to using databases more than spreadsheets in her life. 

The base Kamille shares is a meal planner she designed to help her be prepared and enter the “working professional” life. In it she showcases how she used formulas to make the recipe’s ingredients to show in a visually appealing way. She shares how the database is structured to allow for easy filtering based on criteria (vegetarian, made in an Instant Pot, breakfast, etc). The base generates a shopping list based on meal planning for the week, and allows excluding the ingredients she already has in the pantry. The shopping list can also be filtered by where ingredients are likely to be found in a grocery store.

Kamille also walks through what her Integromat + Cognito Forms + Airtable does for her database. Because she uses a paid Airtable account she is able to use an Airtable block with a Cognito Form integrated to easily input both the general ingredients and the unique qualifiers for how the ingredient is interacted with (e.g. chopped, minced, sliced). Her Integromat setup is what pulls the Cognito Forms data into her Airtable database, and she walks through how the two are able to communicate pulling the form entries into fields.

As a wrap up, Kamille talks about how her recipe database has made preserving family recipes possible beyond a written record. Airtable has made it possible to help her family preserve her grandmother’s legacy in recipes. She’s potentially going to share the database in Airtable Universe in the future, so keep your eyes open for that when it happens!

See more of Kamille’s design portfolio on her website | 

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View the video demo from this episode |

BuiltOnAir is sponsored by Openside. 

Openside's newest product, On2Air Forms, is the Airtable forms solution you've been looking for. For a limited time, get On2Air Forms FREE when you purchase the On2Air Actions Zapier connector on openside.com 

This episode we get to hear from Lanie Lamarre, an upbeat data specialist who excels at helping overwhelmed entrepreneurs get organized. Lanie has made a name online as “Miss GSD,” and specializes in helping online creatives make data, systems and operations fun in their work. She’s worked extensively with entrepreneurs, graphic designers, web professionals, and others who are “packaging their brilliant ways of thinking” to make the processes behind their brilliance support their frontend.

Lanie makes it a point to always be in a constant cycle of learning new tools and ways to get things done. She talks about learning to “speak a person’s language” so that she can understand what people are saying and show them ways to do it that they might not have seen before. Her skillset has been a match for many professionals who didn’t understand what they were missing but could finally get it by her seeing what they needed to see and explaining it to them.

She shares more of her story in adapting and accumulating the skill of seeing the big picture and the details simultaneously, then how Airtable is the perfect platform for doing that for anyone. Airtable combines visual qualities with data arrangement to match the way that people think. Lanie also shares how Airtable creates a place to store data, but can easily be arranged to show only the data you need to see at the moment.

Lanie’s process to help online creatives involves looking at the overall process their daily work takes, then analyzing what is honestly working and is most enjoyed. This allows the creatives to really take a look at what’s happening and outsource, organize or hone in on the things that really matter to their measure of success. One of the biggest things she helps people with is organizing their content creation. This includes everything from social posts, videos, and audio, to blog posts. 

Lanie discusses one of her top pet peeves: buzzword lingo. She talks about how words like “productivity, content, hacks, channels” and more are overused, and how things could be improved by simplifying and saying exactly what is intended in your content.

She talks about the common first users experience with Airtable, and how she gained her own experience with it. She began to teach what she learned, and that has now been packaged as a backbone for what she does with her clients. Now she’s consistently helping people to start using Airtable confidently from the start.

During the showcase portion of the episode, Lanie shares a base she built for content creation and scheduling. In it she shares her philosophy and process for creating a brand voice. The base features several linked fields that serve as “accountability” for making sure that any piece of content matches your core brand messages. These fields also make sure that people can’t lose sight of their big vision.

The base features tables for messaging, offers, content creation, content library, and “as featured in.” Each table is brilliantly designed to relate to the next in keeping the messaging succinct and on-target during the whole process of developing and publishing content.

Learn more about Lanie and her work on her website | 

Sign up for the BuiltOnAir newsletter! |

View the video demo from this episode | 

BuiltOnAir is sponsored by Openside. 

Openside's newest product, On2Air Forms, is the Airtable forms solution you've been looking for. For a limited time, get On2Air Forms FREE when you purchase the On2Air Actions Zapier connector at https://openside.com