 from the rooms now. And I think we are back. Hi everyone. Is everyone back? Everybody feeling good? Did you guys have good rooms meeting each other? Good? This is so exciting. So next up, I'm excited to start the beginning of track one, which technically was to start at one o'clock, but since we're back now, and we're moving right along, I believe just keep this train on the tracks. Track one is going to be all of our beginning, what we call base one on one, all of our beginning speakers. And our track chair for track one is someone named Shae Redding Rogers. So Shae has been in my life for, gosh, I don't know, it feels like forever. I'm not quite sure. We'll figure it out in a second. Shae, if you can unmute yourself, I'd appreciate that. But Shae and I, hi Shae. Shae and I have been, we've known each other for some time. Do you know how long Shae? Since November. Since November? I guess you would know. Can you believe that it has not been a year yet? It's been a year anniversary. Get ready. Right. But I was going to say you would know because you have the, you have a network database that shows us both. I do. Yes. Yes, I do. Plus emails. I got a whole track of that. So Shae, you want to share with the folks how we ended up meeting and what your experience has been like on running track one? Yes. So I am very sure that you guys have saw a nice little thing on YouTube. The channel was called key productive. Let me tell you, I follow that page for years and once in a while there's something interesting, but I've had air table since 2017 and it's just set there. And eventually I got on the thing and I was like, oh, let's find out what he's talking about now on key productive. And it's this redhead. Now I have a thing for redheads and Chris doesn't know that. But I was like, oh, let me find out what this person is talking about. And he was talking about air table. He melted my heart. Unfortunately, I watched the video backwards. So I watched it where they just talked about the table and then I watched who the hell Chris was. And I was like, okay, this is overwhelming. But let me tell you, I have watched that video about 16 times now. I was then like, oh, no, I have to somehow talk to this man. Because the last thing he said was, if you need someone to talk to or if you need help, contact me. And I was like, yep, I'm calling him. He don't talk to me. And we're going to figure out how to do this air table. Call him up. He's like, I can't do it that way. Because I asked him about a different question because I was a chicken. And in April, I called him back and I was like, yeah, so I need help with this air table. And then he adopted me and we've been friends forever. And we're going to be friends even longer than that because I adore, adore Chris. Now when it comes up to my track, oh my gosh, we are amazing people. Although we are beginners, I don't think we technically are anymore. We've been doing this for a while. We only have a newbie, but he's not new. He doesn't know it. We have a college student who's adorable and has been doing this trying to figure out how to organize himself for college. Then we have me who's an architectural photographer who has been keeping track of everybody that I have met while the world has shut down. We have an amazing person that decided he was going to make change with his air table and build a website with that. Like, what? And then we have the last but the awesome one that's going to take us into a little bit more difficulties and technicals. And although he says he's a one on one newbie, I doubt that. He just doesn't know it yet. I'm going to work on him. So that is what track one is. I hope you guys enjoy this. And I am going to introduce Nate. I'm mute. Or you could do first. I'm going to do Nate. Okay, Nate. I think I met Nate on the internet too. You did meet Nate on the internet. This is like air table speed dating. Yeah, we are. Actually, we are. Because after Nate called Chris, Chris said you needed to know Shay. And I said, get on Zoom. Let's talk. I talked to him for an hour and a half. Nate's my guy now. He just don't know either. So Nate, show me, share. Let's talk about your database. I want to hear it. I want to see it. I'm so excited. Let's go. Hey, everyone. Yeah. So as they said, I'm Nate. I'm a college freshman. So everything is new to me. And there are just so many resources in college. Like, it's so amazing. Even with COVID, there's so much to do. I'm trying to figure out what I want to do, manage clubs, people, like job kind of prospects, internship. And there's just a lot of time. And I need to be intentional about the way I use my time. Because there's so much time yet, so little time to do things. And so that's where I hopped on air table only about a month and a half ago. Like I am very new. And so this is more for people who are more beginner. Like this is something that everyone can create that really helps them manage all they're doing. I don't have any animations yet, but hopefully in the future, I'll get to that. So I'll go ahead and share my screen. But basically, I just call it a PRM instead, personal relationship manager or professional relationship manager either way. But as you can see on the tabs, I just have contacts, interactions, which is just interactions with contacts, organizations, which includes companies, clubs, this is just all fake data, I just threw in activity is an interaction with an organization and then locations, universities and industries. So if you're breaking down in contacts, I just have, you know, information about them like anyone would linked interactions, linked activities which we'll get to. Then here I have notes about like whether I want to contact them and things like that so that I can have this thing here. It's like, Oh, who do I need to contact? Other information, including university associations, whether sooner or not so I can network with students specifically. And then here I have how I interact with them. And then over here, I'm still working on how I understand my networks, how a professional, social family and how that ties in together. And I think there's a lot of thought that can go into that. And so I'm just getting into that this is my current system. But of course, it will change. I'm sure you guys have great ideas, but just like professional, different designations, how, how top priority are they social and family and so I can easily access them here on the left. And then as you'll see here, interactions, just like I got this inspiration from Gareth, Gareth's personal CRM video, just the interaction ID, information, video call, level of interaction reason, all that stuff. And then here I follow up. So I have like a calendar notes that I took on the meeting. And then a map of that. And finally here I have organizations, which can be linked with members that I have activity, interactions, locations, which, and then activities is just that. And then I'm trying to link together activities. I interact with certain people at activities with organizations and just having that all together in one place that I can access it locations because I want to be able to map out where I know people, I'm going to conference, things like that, and just manage all that once universities, obviously I'm interacting with all kinds of students and then industries, because I am trying to network with people, trying to understand what I want to do. I am an emerging professional, I guess. And so a way of organizing that between business, finance, nonprofit and all that. And so I'm just trying to figure out how to do reminders, how to understand notes that I'm taking, because I don't want to just have data, I need it to be really applicable. And so I can have actionable steps afterwards. So I'm still figuring out a lot of stuff, how the notes all come together. So I can access certain data about people that I know when I'm interacting with them. So it's all pretty new to me, but I found this system is really great way of managing who I know when I interact with people, monitoring what I'm investing my time in. And so how I can be more intentional as a college student during the super pivotal time of my life. So that's my base. And yeah, thanks so much. Wait, we have a question. Okay. What school do you go to? So I go to Northeastern University here in Boston. I'm studying industrial engineering. Ah, okay. Sorry, we need to remove someone just to let you guys know. Next it's me, but we're going to need Chris to unmute himself so that he can introduce May. Hey, May. So am I introducing someone now? Yes, you're introducing me. Shea, hello. Oh my goodness, I get to introduce you. So I'm introducing Shea. Sorry that we had a Zoom bomber. You know, I've heard they're new. So I've known Shea for since November and Shea does the most amazing things. She has a air table base that she's going to demo for you that is absolutely remarkable. And I think when you guys see what she does and you see how she thinks, you'll find why I'm so infatuated with Shea. Shea is one of these people that has the ability to see data in such a beautifully connected way. And it's just not just to how people are related to people, but how people are related to everything. So it's so exciting, and I'm really can't wait for her to share her stuff. So Shea, if you want to go ahead and take it away, I'll spotlight you next. Thank you. Hello, everyone. Like Chris said, I am Shea. I'm actually an architectural photographer. Now, because of that, and the world shut down, that means I can't work. So I decided that I was going to do nothing to talk to people. Now, because this is year 2020, I also decided that I was going to add my spirituality to everything that I did, which means every word, every text, every paper, all that stuff has to be combined with my spiritual practice. Even my emails used to see my client lists are like, what are you talking about? But they now love me. So since November happened, I had to figure out how was I going to keep track of everyone? There was no more business cards. And since there was no more business cards, I basically had a freak out and decided we're going to jump on air table and we're going to put stuff in here. So due to that, I decided, how do I do this? We are going to create something. And I called it nerd. Basically stands for relationship. But not nerd, but wait a minute, but not nerd like this. What do you mean by nerd? Explain that. A minute. It is called networking relationship database. My friend decided that I was really a nerd for calling it that. But that's what it is. It's nothing but relationships. It's nothing but people that I have met. And if I like them or not. And so I'm hoping everyone can see this because I know I can. All I did was take the chats and I broke them up into different categories in the chat. I'm sure as you guys have done this, people put their first name, their last name, their companies, their email addresses. That gave me enough information to do some CSI and FBI and undercover work to find out more information on these people. So I of course had the bird's eye view, which is just raw data. I learned that from Chris because Chris was like, yeah, no, that's not functionable. But it looks pretty. And I was like, oh, so he did tear apart my first one, which broke my heart, but I still love him. And this is how it got even better. So we have the categories, we have the active deactivated. Now, I'm not inactivating you. You're not going to come back. Once you deactivate, you're out. I don't have time for your energy. We're not going down that road. Stand by, blanks always are the people that I'm still working on. I haven't figured out if they're nice or not. And then because I'm doing the networking, it's all about referrals. And so I have a nice little view here that lets me know how many people have referred me and how many times. Most important part besides knowing the person is knowing where they work and what network group I have met them in. So I started a table and I was like, all right, we want to figure this out. I literally manually go through because I have nothing that's automated yet to find out where they work. How I have this connected is once we figure out where they work or where the network group is or anything like that, I connected to the individual person's file from my ingredients. I have the ability because everybody has everything online now where you can get the information on the network group or the business. A photograph. I have email addresses, phone numbers. I'm telling you I am a spy. They just don't know it yet. I have as much information. I even have the link for their websites. Now the one thing that I really love is I could just figure out more about their companies. I'm not just networking with them. I'm also networking with their companies. So that became really important to me. And it also lets me know how many people, how many companies and how many network groups I attended and know. The part that I always live in is my alignments. My alignments is nothing but the interactions. But I didn't like that word. So I realized I'm going to use the word alignments because part of my spirituality is everything has to align. There's nothing that's accidental. Even if I think it is, it really isn't. And so making sure that it was called that was extremely important. Then I had to break it down into the months and how many people I met and what the interaction, sorry, with the alignment type was. So that is broken down into either an in-person meeting, an event, a network group, a Zoom. But I had to figure out how do I get this from my calendar to air table. That's what I called Chris. And Chris was like, we're going to use Zapier. And I was like, no, I don't know how to use that. And he's like, I'm going to have to teach you. He still has to teach you, but I've gotten a lot better now. Deep line. From that, once we got it all set up, from coming to my calendar into Zap, into air table, I was used, sorry, I was able to categorize it, thank you, as an appointment. That's how it always comes in. Once it's an appointment, I then manually make it go into the other categories. The most important thing that really keeps me organized is my to-do cards, because I hate to-do lists. I think people need to make their to-do lists way more prettier. And it's not. And since I'm a photographer, having everything that has photographs helps me stay track. And it makes me think everything looks pretty. And I'm all about that. So what I did with this is I haven't used raw data, of course, just like that. But I use it in this view. For an example, we got James over here. I need to call James. I need to follow up with him. So I added a cute little picture. And I have the time that I created this and the date. And then it's also connected to his interaction. So I have his folder pulled up right here, so I would be able to know who I'm speaking to. The thing that I love the most, which is probably really cheesy, but I love it. Just by me clicking complete, it disappears. Oh my god, do you have no idea how long it took me to do that? I was so impressed with myself. Now it's not there anymore. But it does show up on my calendar. And by showing up on this calendar, it shoots over to my other calendar and everything is in sync and it all works and it goes together. And oh, without this, I would be lost. Not even going to lie to you. Now, I am going to stop sharing, but there's someone that wants to share and I'm kind of afraid of what he's going to share. So if someone would like to remove Matthew JD, I would appreciate that before I stop sharing the screen because the last thing we need is a bomber. Matthew JD has been removed from the chat. Thank you. I will stop sharing. Now, if there's any questions, I'm here to answer because I didn't have the chat open to read it. I apologize. No, you've got a great control of your attention. Did we get all the answers for Nate or questions for Nate? Yes. No more questions for Nate? Okay. I apologize, no. No, no, you're totally good. You're totally good. No, so there was actually some tweets out to you. People got a tweet. Yeah, that's okay. There's a lot to watch. There's our YouTube and Twitter and these chats. So yeah, I just, someone says Team Shea. So people are really in love with Team Shea. Throwing this out there, I started a hashtag Airtable Conference and apparently nobody jumped on me. So if y'all want to jump on board, so it's not only me in that hashtag, I would really appreciate it. Yeah, Shay, what do you think the difference between what you've done in a traditional CRM is? I didn't want to convert my brain to a traditional CRM. I feel like when somebody builds the CRMs, they only want you to think there. They only want you to have it in that timeline. And I think different. I'm an artist. And so for me, it's like, I want something that I could label it the way I want. So my brain goes, that's what that means. And I want something that allows me to have pictures because I don't remember nobody's names ever, but I will remember your face. I'll know exactly what you were wearing. I'll know where we were. Don't ask for your name. That is not happening. And so Airtable really allowed me to go, no, you're going to design this the way you think and it's going to be perfect. So you don't have to struggle and be like, oh, where did I put this information? So that's what I think my database is a lot different. You get to do your thing, think the way you are. Yes, it's already somewhat designed if people want to use it that way, but you still have the right to customize it to your own brain. That's nice. Nice. There actually is a fan group forming for Nate now in the chat. So it's turning into the Shay and Nate conference. I got all of a sudden one question that I did see Nate is 19 years old. Okay. 18. Oh, 18. Crap. Other moderates, do we have other questions? Yeah. So Mona asked a question of Shay. Do you have, I lost my page. Do you have a set time and day every week to update this? I would lose track and get behind. Okay. No, I do not. I do it every day. The reason why I do it every day, I know y'all don't understand. It stresses me out. I have to figure out a way to make it all automated. I haven't gotten to that point so that I don't have to do it. But because I'm, I literally, my computer comes on and that's the first thing that pops up. It's not my email. It's that alignment window. And so anytime I go in there, I'm like, ooh, I got this. And since everything shows up under appointments, it's not like I'm confused of where it's going. And majority of the people that I've met now, they're already in my database. So it's not like I have to keep recreating new files for the people. If I do have to recreate a new file for someone, it's now like five minutes because I've been doing it so long. I know my system. But as soon as I can start making this automated, oh my God, my life would start dating. I don't know. I think automation is dangerous. But I'll talk, I'll talk, I'll talk about that during my session. I just, I'm not a big fan of automation. I just think automation makes bad ideas go faster. That's a, that's just been my experience. We have another question here about, oh, we have someone saying, someone saying I love, I'm working on it, right? We have a love your air table. Shea. So another team Shea. Thank you. Thank you. The Shea love is real. We had a question about social media automation was we have some of that I know coming up in track two in a little bit around social media calendars. Shea, do you have your next speaker ready to go? Do you have someone else who wants to chat with the world? Yes, I do. We are going to have Edmund because he's going to talk about an amazing database that he did. No, wait, the Edmund? Yes. Okay. Yes. Love me. Yes. I met him last night. I was like, who is this guy? Where did he come from? And he was like, awesome. He showed us his air table and I couldn't even get my mind wrapped around how he did it. The interface, nothing like that. I have to pick his brain a little bit more and I will get ready. We're going to be friends after this. But I would like to pass this on. I think you guys are going to love how his air table is not just personal. It's about making change and it's making change for everyone. Edmund, come on. Where are you, man? All right. Can everybody hear me? Yeah. We can hear you and see you. You've got the YouTube going on right now. The Twitter. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Actually, Shea, I'm going to surprise you, but I'm not going to show just one base. I'm going to show three, I think. Oh my goodness. Yeah. And I have 10 minutes. So I'm going to probably take two minutes per base. So hi, everyone. Edmund, you've got more time if you want. We're a little ahead of the schedule. Yeah, we are. You're patient. Okay. All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Edmund and I'm a narrator for a podcast. It's called The Code Less Podcast. I basically live on Twitter. So if you're trying to find me, look at my handle, that's my Twitter handle or look at this page right in front of you. That's my Twitter home. But I'm also an organizer of an upcoming summit working on The Code Less Summit. I used to work in luxury goods in a corporate world, nine to five. And I just didn't want to do that anymore. And now I'm focused on transitioning into like all the other things that I like. My default is to try and help other people acquire leverage. So the podcast is a great way for me to learn about No Code and also share the information. And I just think with No Code, it's not really just about a new software for your resume. It's like it's an infinite game that we're playing here. So whether you call it No Code, Visual Dev, Code Less, the fact is that there are powerful trends in technology that are making it easier for us to automate and optimize our imagination beyond our own limits. And for me, what No Code has done has really helped me expand my creativity. And so today what I'll be talking about is how on my yellow brick road journey into No Code, I discovered Airtable. And I actually discovered Airtable because I found someone who was using it to be like so much more than they were. And of course, that was because I met Chris. Chris was on an episode of Code Less. And it just blew my mind how he used Airtable and Next Door to develop that COVID response template. It really, really blew me away. So I'm going to go through the bases that I have ready for you. But I'm going to go through the bases based on basically like principles that I have. So the first principle I'm going to focus on is I'm just going to tell you if you're working in No Code, if you're working on Airtable, be selfish. Like literally like solve your own problem. And the first base I'm going to show you is based on a mastermind group that I'm a part of. It's called Zero to One Makers Club. And all we do is we meet every week on a Friday and we ask each other questions, like what we've been doing, what we're working on. And we all recommend like products in technology that we think everyone should be aware of. And so with this meeting, what happens is that it happens at a set time every week and people talk, right? But what I wanted to do selfishly was I wanted to create a way for people to kind of like share the information that we're providing in audio and kind of like keep it in a place where you can come back to it. So I used Airtable to create this base, which essentially asked for all the members of the meetup basically allows us to document answers to those important questions every week. What have you been doing? What are you working on? And what would you like help with? And what's a product you'd like to recommend? The cool thing about this base for me is that it's also, I used, I created a form for it where you can basically go in and like fill the form if you're a member of the meetup. But the coolest thing about this was the integration I did with this and Slack. So every day at like 10, 30, everyone in the mastermind gets a Slack message saying, hey, have you provided your update for this week? They put in their update and it comes into the base here. And if they ever want to come back and like, if you miss the meeting and you want to come back and see what happened, you can come into the gallery view, for example, and you can literally follow up with people based on things that are important to you. So the idea is not about really the meetup, but more about the conversations that can happen outside of it. So that's my first base, talking about be selfish, solve your own problem. Another example I wanted to use in that respect is this website called the follow up. And this project was essentially created by myself and three other people that I met on Twitter. And basically the idea behind the follow up is that it's basically a curation of statements and actions that companies are taking in the area of racial justice. And so we created this just like the word is a verb to kind of follow up on things and really follow up on things, especially in the area of racial justice. And so all it really is, aside from a card website, is an integration with Airtable and a database of like notable people and actions that they've taken in racial justice. I'm going to show you the base right here. Here we go. And basically here with the base being dedicated to curate, all we're doing essentially here is we're curating tweets from different organizations. We tag them based on what industry it is. We have pictures. We have whether it's an action or a statement. We're even like taking a note of the Twitter handles of the companies. What's also interesting about this is I have another section of it for user submission, where people can actually go on the site and actually submit a notable tweet or action. That's cool. In the future what we want to do now that Airtable has automations is we want to be able to automate the tweets to go out at a certain time based on a certain condition. But here's the other thing. We want to also be able to collect emails of all the directors at these companies, all the CEOs. And we want to be able to automatically send an email from our base saying, hey, Google, last week you said you were going to do this for founders of color. What's up with that? We want to send it as a tweet and an automated email. So that's a way you can also use Airtable to solve a problem and in a way also solve a problem maybe for other people. And that's what we're trying out. The last principle that I wanted to focus on was basically the idea of iteration. Don't try to make your base perfect the first time. Just make sure that it at least works for you. And the example I'm going to use here is very personal. It's our grocery shopping list for our family. My wife and I use it. And so here's how it works. Here's how it worked before Airtable. We just go out to the store. You have a piece of paper. You shop for what's on the piece of paper, but you end up buying double that because of impulse buys and just wanting anything. And so the reason we created this was we wanted to collect all our desires in a very legible format, but we wanted to use it to budget and to prioritize what we're actually spending our money on, for example. So it has two components. The first table is just all the items that we ever buy from the item itself, the store it's at, the price that it's available at. And then the next table is where we actually go in and we decide based on a priority, you know, what we're actually going to shop for this week or the next time. It's really been helpful for myself and my family just so that every time we come to this list, we know that we're going to spend X amount of dollars this week. Well, what are the most important things we're going to spend it on? And when I'm at the store, I have the mobile app. I literally just go in into an item and I can actually enter a date when I've actually purchased an item in the app. So it's a very, very cool way for us to do something for ourselves and manage a budget and prioritize the things that are important. In the future, I'd like to automate this to where based on geographical data, like if I'm at some place, I get a notification that I need to get something or based on a biological marker, maybe, you know, I don't know, maybe my watch detects that I'm thirsty or something and then it adds something to my list. But that's only because I met Chris and, you know, I went from simple to like wanting something so complex. So that's everything I wanted to present. I just wanted really wanted to rehash the principles. Number one, be selfish, solve your own problem. Number two, you know, really think about what you build as a reflection of like who you are and who you want to be. And number three is iterate. Don't try to make it perfect the first time. Just try to make sure that it works for you. Thank you. That was amazing. Thank you so much, Edmund. Oh my gosh. Yes, more than I could have asked for. This is awesome. Thank you. Go ahead, Chris. I wanted to say something. No, I was just, I was just blown away. I didn't expect all that. So the Rachel Justice System you showed, can you tell us how you've seen that used or how you see that being deployed and kind of the power of this concept of mutual aid? Yeah, so at its, you know, most simplistic form of curating tweets. It just is like a collection, a timestamp. But what we're hearing, especially in feedback from users and subscribers to the website is, you know, some people are wanting it to be not just a curation of tweets. Some people are wanting it to be like an accountability measure. Like they're wanting us to develop scores for companies much in the same way where you have like sustainability scores. Like can we have like racial equity scores, you know, for companies that we're tracking. Reporters are talking about using it as like a database to come back to this topic and like kind of like really like look at a timeline of what's happened from a statement to like an actual action. So it's interesting. There are a couple of things we're trying, but right now the biggest request we're getting is to basically turn what we're finding into some sort of a newsletter to kind of help people keep track and maybe tell the story as it unfolds. Wow, that's amazing. Oh my gosh, you know, we gotta talk more. If there are any questions for Edmund, you can put them out on Twitter. I don't, we don't have a hashtag. I think it's the air table conference. I told you to have a hashtag. I gave you one. We do. I'm sorry. Listen, I'm trying to watch, I'm trying to watch Reddit, Facebook, text messages, Zoom chat, Twitter. My dog is sniffing at the door. Right. When I did this 12 years ago, we had nothing. We had like one channel. Everyone watched it like when we did that last. This, I don't know. So it's hashtag air table conference. Okay. So air table conference brought to you by Shay and Edmund, apparently. And Nate. Hashtag, can't forget Nate, hashtag air table. Well, we got a lot of people come out the rest of the day. No, so Nate, something else. If you have questions for Nate, please put them out on Twitter or put them here in the chat. Nate, I loved, you know, your use. I liked your idea of constantly reiterate. I also liked the fact you kind of dabbled in the future, like, you know, I want to do biological data. And because I know a thing or two about biological. It's all it's all your fault, Chris. Oh, actually, David, David Peterson. I think David Peterson from air table asked about sharing these templates. Yeah, I'm gonna I'll work on that and make those available. Thank you. Yes. If you guys don't know if you're new to air table, there's something called air table universe. You can Google it. Lots of great templates and things like that. But build tools for other people. But I want to go back to something out. You said while we're waiting for any questions that people might have is you said constantly iterate. And I think someone else that during Shay's talk talked about how much time does it take you to maintain your database and Shay was like, Oh, my goodness, it takes so much. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think people are under this delusion an absolute delusion that you can like create something and leave it alone. It doesn't work for babies. It doesn't work for puppies. And it doesn't work for software. So a little bit about how you think about iteration and maintenance. Yeah, like so I think about it in kind of like two to two levels. Number one is like the easiest like way to do it. So at its at its base, like for me, I start all my projects thinking about thinking about it as a database and air table is just perfect in the sense of it's enough for you to get started. It's powerful enough for you to grow. And like, you know, who knows what the future brings. So it's that simple. But coming coming to the second step is for air like like everything else, you really get out of it what you put into it. So your air table base or your automation and the functionality is really only as good as your intention for it, right? If you're intending just to collect a bunch of information, you're probably going to get overwhelmed with a bunch of information. If your intent is to, you know, create some sort of automation that makes your life easier from, you know, when you schedule when someone schedules a meeting on Calendly and uses your zoom link, having it automatically populate your CRM so that you now have the information that can work for you to but it does take some effort to actually invest in yourself, you know, for all these bases, as I've shown them to you, like like the simplest one, the grocery database. I mean, that took me probably about 10 minutes to put up but about two days to like really like perfect. And then I had to actually go out to the store and see how bad of a base it was. Then come back and fix it. So yeah, you get what you put into it. And as intricate as the base is or as beautiful as it looks when you see it, it's pretty much probably like two to three times the amount of work to get it there. So you have to be willing to put a lot of investment into it. I know for my table, I only have that one automatic thing that comes from my calendar to air table. Granted, it's that one thing but it's like the game changer because if I had to manually put in every time I had an appointment with a person, that would go insane. But when I decided to start networking and start keeping track of everybody that I met, I decided that I was literally going to invest in me, making sure that this table, this platform, this software, this whatever was going to not just be my virtual assistant, but it was going to be something that I was literally going to go know you're my baby. We're going to keep track of you. We're going to keep up with you. It's work. It's not easy, but nothing in life is always going to be easy. I think if it's easy, you should run. Yes. I love that I have to put work into it. If your spouse is easy, run. If your friends are easy, run. If your software is easy, run. Edmund, we have a question here for you. It says, you're not in the Facebook group, do you have a page we can follow? Edmund, how can people find you? The best way to find me is on Twitter. I could easily send you to my podcast, the CodeLess podcast, but if you want to have a direct interaction with me, the best place is Twitter at my handle. I'm going to post it to everyone. My handle is at Edmund Amoye. If you want, I can actually, I'll share what my page looks like so people can, let's see, hold on. I did get a question. People want to know if you would turn these into templates for us. Honestly, I'm flattered and yes, yes, I will. I will work on doing that because being able to share it is a very, very big priority for me. Like I said, my default strategy is to help people acquire leverage. If I can share this and someone else can take it to the next level and use it for something that they're passionate about, I'd love to do that. I'm going to work on that. Thank you for asking. Yeah, thank you. And we did have a quote of the day from someone. Mona Scott said, you get what you put into it. Edmund. So we have Edmund quotes now. All right. Edmund, thank you so much for being on this. And gosh, I had so much fun when I was on your podcast with you and Airtable. So if you haven't checked out Edmund's podcast, Edmund, tell everyone your podcast name again. The name of the podcast is CodeLess You can find it on any platform. Just search for the word CodeLess and podcast and it should come up. It looks like, oops, I already left. It looks like this. Let me show you what it looks like. So it basically. Edmund's always giving us examples. This is what you go. Yeah. Yeah, it looks that's the logo. It's basically like a seesaw with the word CodeLess on it. Yeah. Cool. All right. So check out Edmund's podcast so you can find him on Twitter. I know it's shared in the chat now. Shay, we've got more track one goodness. Yes. Does it get better? Oh my God, does it get better? Okay. I think it does. Okay. Now I wanted I wanted this to suck us into how good we are. Okay. Now, Matt decided to play low key. He was like, Oh, I'm just a marketing person. Oh, I just keep track for people to market. And I was like, okay, sure. You're doing like Facebook and Twitter and all that stuff. Okay. And he was like, yeah, you know, nothing big. I have to go to a meeting now. I'll talk later. He then I get him on the call last night and I'm like, well, send me a sample so that I'll know if I should really have you close us in this first hour. And he's like, okay, I have to go. His database was like, how dare you decide that this was something tiny. You need to up your conversation on this because it's amazing. It is beautiful. So I'm all about beauty. But Matt, do not play it low key because your database is beautiful and designed well and functional. And I think you guys are going to love it. Take it home, Matt. Thanks, Shay. Wow. That was quite the hype woman intro. Hi, everybody. My name is Matthew. I'm calling in from Toronto. I invite you to turn on your video and wave back. I don't know about you guys, but I've been on Zoom since about 7am. And I put these headphones on because my AirPods have died because I haven't taken them off since first thing in the morning. So I'm going to dive into my base in just a moment. But wondering if there's a quick show of hands, anyone who's ever heard of content marketing before or interested in it at all. Yeah, a few people. Okay. So that's what I do. I work at a company called Personify and we help nonprofits. We create software for nonprofits. It's like a Swiss Army knife, which allows nonprofit organizations to build websites and emails, manage membership, collect donations. It's like an all in one Swiss Army knife tool. And so at Personify, I'm in charge of the content team for the Wild Apocot business unit. And a content team is like a magazine except you're just publishing to a specific audience and you have goals. It's not, you're not just creating content. So articles, webinars, podcasts, infographics, all that kind of stuff. They serve a purpose. And so content strategy, there's a lot of moving pieces. And on my team, I've got three different people. And on the other team, there's five. So we've got, we've got a video creator, we got a blog writer and SEO specialist. We've got a webinar person, a pod. So I was like, how do I get my head around all the content that we already have and all the content that we want to create next year? And how do I also manage all of these different workflows and use a lot of the rich metadata to actually create effective strategies that will achieve business outcomes. So business outcomes are you want more organic traffic to your website. You want to collect emails from people. You want to get them to start a free trial and you want them to start becoming a paid customer. So that's the context. I'm going to share my base now and I'll just walk you through what it is I built. This is my second company and second kind of iteration of what I call a content asset tracker. The base that I'm sharing with you right now is like a- You're not sharing it. I'm not sharing it. No, not yet. All right. Stand by. Can you see it now? And now there we go. Oh my God, I'm so excited. Okay. So this is the, so also I have to like anonymize a lot of the data. So don't try to read too deeply into any of the data. It doesn't really make sense. Like I found like a random title generator and it made all these titles. So I'll start by giving you a high level of the tables. Five different people a little bit easier. So the first and the biggest table is the blog table. So this is a catalog of all the existing blog posts that exist on our website. In this demo, I've reduced it, but there's about 500 blog posts and there's a ton of metadata that we have spent, I would say, eight months manually going through and tagging each post so that we can understand the relevance and the content, the customer pain points that the content speaks to, the funnel stage, the purchase intent, all that stuff, all tagged in the air table. So let me just go through quickly. So we've got the post URL, we've got who wrote it. This is a workflow status field. We've got the keyword that the post is targeting. This is one of my favorite fields. This is the outgoing links field. So when you're creating content, it's important that your content links to each other, links to itself. You create a post, there's a strategy called hub and spoke or pillar post, where you create a cluster of topics that are all related and when Google crawls your website and they see like a series of posts that cover a single topic, it elevates your domain authority and it makes you show up higher in the search rankings. So having a catalog of all our posts and having a list of all the other posts that a single post links out to and is linked back from allows you to become very strategic about the interlinking on your own website. I'll just go through real quick here. The number of outgoing links. So this is like how many times you link to other posts on your post. We've got the funnel stage. For funnel, I use Avinash-Karsnicks model of see, think, do, care, which is top of funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, and then retention. And then we've got reader intent. So this is like a definition of the intention that someone has at each stage in the funnel because when you're on a buyer's journey, you don't want to buy software from beginning to end. If you're just in the research phase, you don't want someone trying to sell you software. And if you're in the purchase stage, you don't want a high level overview of your big problem. You want to know price comparisons. So super important to take all of this metadata. I'm also really proud of all of the pain point tagging that I've done. So after doing some internal research and interviews, I tried to understand for our personas, what are the main business pains or organizational pains that they suffer from that would motivate somebody to search for content that my company could create to help them overcome those pains? So tagging every blog post by their pain is key. We have a definition of each pain here as well. Then we've got the persona that's pretty straightforward. And then we've got the workflow information. There's a number of dates that you need to keep track of if you're managing a blog. And right now we have two in-house writers and a team of five or six freelance writers. And that's a lot of content to kind of cycle through. And with Airtable now, we can even scale that up. That team of freelancers from six to probably 10 or even 20 without too much hassle. And I'll get to that in the status phase. So then we've got our Google Analytics data. So I've got an integration set up with Zapier to pull a few different metrics on new users, average session duration, bounce rate if they started a trial or not, and total organic traffic. And that populates every week automatically. We've got the date of articles published. The last date it was updated because you want to do a blog refreshes. Here's all the different pains that an article can be targeting. And I think that's most it for the good stuff. Email information. Right. And then website category. That's how it's organized on the blog. That's a quick run through of all of the metadata that we have both manually and automated imported into our base. And there's a few ways that the different people on the team use that data. So the blog manager uses this status view to track her workflow of updating and creating new blog posts. And this is the view which is now linked in with Zapier to automate the assignment of new blog posts. So when she's creating a post, see if I drag this up if you guys can see. So this is a form that we've created and it's linked into our base, which allows the blog manager to very easily select from pre-populated sets of information to sketch out and create a brief for her readers. It's linked into all of the keywords that we want to be ranked for. It's linked into the panes. So it's basically she goes through, adds all the data, adds a description, link to the draft. And when this funnel is set, sorry not funnel status, is set to assign, what happens is we have a assigned trigger view. And anything that appears in this view triggers Zapier. And I can probably do this with our nations now, but I built this before the new release. Zapier will fire off an email to the writer, giving them the brief that they need to look at. And so like far less emailing done in her part, which is great. Powering through, I know there's a lot here guys, content calendar. This is to help us manage when you're managing a blog and you're managing five to 10 writers, things change, urgent topics will come up. So there's always things that need to be moved around. So we can just easily move around deadlines and due dates based on changes that happen. And so that's the workflow portion of how we manage the blog. There's also the strategic element. So with all this rich metadata, it's very easy to surface insights. Right? So on this view, for example, I've got all of the blog content categorized by funnel stage. And I can see at a high level where their gaps are. Looks like we only have three posts right now that are targeting the due stage. And we've got 37 that are at the thing stage. I mean, it kind of makes sense because blog content that's at the top of the funnel is going to be more lucrative and valuable. So you're going to write a lot more of it. That being said, there may be some good opportunities in here to find topics that are resonating and create more content. I want to go through some of these other tabs. There's a lot. But so then we got the videos. So for our video content, we've got a YouTube channel of about 150 videos. And we've got the YouTube data piped in here once a month, views, impressions, average system duration. And it's also tagged by pane and by funnel. So same thing as the blog, but it's just for video. We've also got a video marketing guy who's going through all of our backlog and adding cards and end screens to every video so that none of our videos had calls to action. So they're kind of a wasted opportunity because they're getting a lot of traffic. You don't want the same call to action at every video. If you're creating a practical tips video, then the call to action doesn't really make sense for it to be start a free trial. Maybe the call to action is download this guide with even more practical tips. So having all this data kind of at your fingertips and you can sort it and splice and dice it as you will, it allows you to get a lot more strategic with the content that we have and the objectives we're trying to achieve with it. Moving on, we have our whole email calendar scheduled in here. So various automated and manual email campaigns on a week-to-week basis. They're color coded, so it's very easy to make sure we're not over-sending and we're hitting all of our segments properly. This is the contacts. Again, it's all fake data, but basically we have several different types of contacts. We've got experts that we reach out to. We've got leads. We've got qualified leads. We've got partners. This is where everyone's information lives so that we can keep track of all of those various relationships. And I think three or four different people interact with this table alone. And then on the SEO side, we also have a guest post base. So it's very easy, again, to get strategic when you're reaching out to write guest posts for other properties. You can select a company. You can check through the history. And you can, let's see here, target your keyword. And then you can select which blog post you want to backlink to from your site from the place you're guest posting. And that works from the reaching out standpoint, but also from the backlinking standpoint. So this is incoming and outgoing request to do backlinking. Climbing forward, this is our keyword list. So every month, we'll go into AAH reps and we'll download a list of every keyword that we want to rank for. And we'll update this spreadsheet. And so this way, we'll be able to track the position, change the volume, the traffic, and the keyword difficulty over time so that the SEO team can stay on top of the most lucrative and valuable keywords. Am I going too fast? I'm not really looking at the chat, so I have no idea. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're like perfect. You're like a YouTube video, like I'm talking to you. Yes, you are. Okay, all right. No, Matt, you're right on target. You're doing great. Well, this is fun. This is fun because I spend a lot of time and energy, not just me, but a lot of people populating all the metadata. So the next, I guess, part of what I'll go through is really, I'm really proud of it. When you're creating content, I keep going back to this. Strategy is key. You don't just want to make a post and hope that it resonates with someone. You want to be relevant and you want to meet their needs and you want to do the best. You want to have the best thing of that type that's on the internet so that when it comes to like hand-to-hand combat of which is the best post on this particular topic, your topic is going to win. It's going to rise up the rankings and you can get more traffic. So to do that, I built out a product messaging framework. So each of our, there's a number of different features that our product has, which does a couple of things. It meets an unmet need, it solves an organizational pain, and then it has a specific functionality. By having this information in AirTable, it makes the post-assignment process, which we went through earlier, so much more streamlined because when you're onboarding a new writer, for example, let's see if we can get an example here. So this is the writer's, so this is a view which we would share publicly with the writer so they could check on what do they have to work on next. So this is a little ridiculous. There's a lot of, in reality, there probably be three links here. Again, my data is all fake. But for example, so they get the new post-assignment and they're like, oh, okay, the pain that this post-assignment that I've received on, avoid the 10 mistakes made by beginning joy, whatever that means, is like, this is the pain that it has to solve. This is the funnel stage. This is the intention of the reader who's reading this post. They don't have any, so don't try to sell software. All this information is plugged in from this table over here. So there's a few tables, there's this one. There's an even more robust. So we have the product messaging broken down by persona because every persona has different responsibilities. So the Elaine executive is not going to have the same pain points and then the needs as technical. And then this is the pain database itself. So the names are just the codes and then the definitions are like the context. And then you can even see video count and block count. This is how, like, basically what our distribution is. What percentage of our posts are covering this pain or that pain? None of this information was knowable before I built their table and I started plugging in all of these different data points and doing all the tagging. And to be honest, I just finished setting this up like this month and I'm just about to start my 2021 planning and I'm super excited by finding gaps, finding high performing topics and pains and creating a strategy for next year. Okay, so maybe I'll end with like this part here. So this is some song. Don't end. Please keep going. I mean, I'd love to get people's feedback, having looked at what you have seen so far. I do have a question. So the way I've been organizing these data posts, which are coming from various sources, Google Analytics, YouTube and the Ahrefs. Ahrefs, here, let's pull this. So there's three data tables. This is the keyword data table. So this is a manual download. Which is amazing, by the way. Yeah, it is. It's pretty sick. And this is Google Analytics. Let me go to everything on high all these fields. I was trying to work through this in my break-down room. But like all the data is here. The way it works is every, let's say a week or month, Zapier will call Google Analytics. It'll say, okay, give me all the stats for this post. And it'll plug them in here. And it'll print them. And it'll print the date that it did that. And then every week, it'll add another record with the same post URL with the added new metric. So I've had it organized in this view, where it's grouped twice. It's grouped by the post URL. And it's grouped by the week. So the theory is you see trends over time of this post and, you know, average system duration went from 14.02 that week and then down to zero and then down to zero. But I don't, when I do this and I group it like this, I don't, I can't really do much with the data. You can't sort and filter. And I think I just have too much data going on in here. Love to hear what people's thoughts are and like how I could do that better. This is actually my second attempt to solve the quantitative data problem. My first attempt was I created the fields directly into the blog table itself. And the poll would simply overwrite every week the new data. So, but then what you've got is, you know, you have a lot of lost information. You'd have lost information. You don't get to see trends, right? You'd open it up and you'd see this history of like, all of the, I mean, you can't see it because this is a duplicated base, but you'd see like, you know, the changing number week over week, but the data would be lost. Couldn't you have it where the data came in on a certain date? And then that's how it would change. So you wouldn't lose the old data by rewriting it itself. You'll just have it by date. Well, that's exactly what I tried to do here, but now I've run into the problem of like, I don't really know how to analyze this or how to manage it in a way that I can surface like insights of like gaps and top performance and stuff. Are you linking the records for each individual data pool? Sorry? Are you linking the records? So on that other table, you could link that post URL to a new record. So each week you pull new records and then you can send out. Yeah. So the data table is linked. So it's linked to this slide here, the post URL state. Yeah. Can you use the lookups to pull that, to aggregate that data? I guess I don't understand. So I'm not super technical. I'm not a database background guy. I'm a writer and I just figured this, I figured this stuff out. This is base 101. Okay, sorry. Yeah. So you might have a very good question. I just don't understand it. Although Matthew, I think your next year, you're going to be in base 103 at least. Yes, he is. I'm not sure if this is 101. No. So, you know, I think you can just use some more of the other field functionality to do rollups of that information so that you can see it out of the glance, like high and lows and things like that. So your linking's there. You probably need a couple more fields to manage the data. Yeah. I know rollups is a thing. I could not figure out how to use it. So that sounds really smart. And I'd love to talk to you more. Yeah. Who's speaking, by the way? Jen, I'll be on later. Jen, okay, cool. I'm in track three. Okay, cool. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, any questions? Yeah. Should I be looking at the chat? We actually, I'm reading the chat as we're doing this. In the chat's going really fast. We actually had a really good comment. Someone named Matthew Godfrey said while you were presenting. He said, I feel like Airtable is able to somehow, I feel like Airtable is able to somehow hold, reflect, capture the personality, almost like it's not a database itself that matters as much as the vitality of the relationship between the user and the database. I feel like this gets more interesting as you add more users, e.g., the business. I like how Airtable bases end up reflecting whatever it is they've been using the most. I just thought that was really profound. That is beautiful. Thank you, Matthew Godfrey. That is beautiful. There's no questions for this beautiful database. Come on, y'all. I saw a few more, but I couldn't do that. I know, I lost a couple too. Okay, good. Matthew, how many of you on your team are working on this on a day-to-day basis? So now that I've gotten properly stood up, it's, I mean, I'm in there like keeping things clean and putting out fires. People will make changes and it'll break something. So like I'm in it to do that and also to do the analysis so that I can make my plan next year. We've got a webinar person, an email person, a video person, and two different SEO people. One SEO person who's not, like does a lot of optimization and outreach, and the other one who does writing and freelancer management. Oh, my goodness. That's amazing. Hey, Matthew, I have a question for you. Yeah, yeah, sure, go for it. Yeah, so I love what you've built, not just because you are automating like the communication out, but you're measuring the feedback in, right? So disregarded how long you've been working on this, what would you say after working so long on it? What is like the first thing that a beginner should try to copy in doing this? Let's say we're going to copy everything you did. What would be the first thing we should try to do and not waste our time on a bunch of other things? Yeah, good question. And I had to figure that out. I had to back my way into the answer myself, which is I would start from the end. So like know what you're trying to accomplish first and relentlessly return to that objective whenever you're building something out or it is an infinite rabbit hole of hours and hours which leads to dead ends and not super useful work that you can do. So for me, I have this strategic priority of like I need to increase these targets. I need to increase these three or four things. So what information, and then I would work back from there, what information do I need to do that best? Mona Scott said storyboard your needs. And I can't tell you how many people, just, I mean, air table is so amazing, but it's like handing some on a bunch of Legos without the box. Oh my God. You can't even see what the picture is. Draw your picture first, then get your Legos out. Yeah. So I do have a question. Somebody wants to know, do you use dashboard blocks to manage this? Yeah, to do different things. I, what do I use dashboard for? I mean, I use the DDo and I use the import a lot. I haven't quite figured out how to best visualize the data, to be honest. That's where I'm sure I could learn something, like using the pivot table. I haven't figured out how to use that. I just mainly use the views and these functions up here, the sorting, filtering to kind of zoom in and get the insights that I need. Well, you know, I'm all about beautiful stuff, so I could help you on that. We had, you do show you, you're really beautiful. We had someone named Jason say, hey, I've got five collaborators on my original base, which started with one table. So one table, five people. Within three months, we have 36 bases and 35 collaborators, and the bases are huge and complex, and they now seem to have a life of their own. So looks like people have grown their stuff. Another person said, hi guys, this is my first time seeing air table in action. What resources would you recommend for an absolute newbie about air table? Where would you send someone, Matthew? Yeah, that's a great question. The resources that I went to first were very specific to what I was trying to do. So I was looking for like content marketing air table. That's what I was googling, content strategy air table. Yeah, I mean, that's how I started, because the thing is you can do so many different things. So I found that in my research and learning, I would find all sorts of great content, but it was like not really my use case, and it was too much mental effort to transpose in my head. Okay, they're using this for a CRM. So that means I could use it this way. Can I answer that one? Just, and then my last thing, I promise. I had, I watched a lot of videos. I did a lot of research for two years. Nothing made sense to me, like nothing. And it kept driving me insane. And it literally was not until I realized, I don't know what I'm trying to do, but then when I literally saw Chris's crazy one, it was, that's what made me go, oh my God, I know how to do this now. I still have to watch it a third, 3,000 times to like break down what he actually did in his, but that was the only time that what I was actually trying to do, it made sense. So I think if anybody has to start, you really have to first know what you're somewhat trying to do on it, and then try to find videos that show you examples of what other people did in it. Yeah, I mean, when I started on YouTube, just looking at YouTube videos, I went to the error table community, but I'll be honest, I was afraid. I mean, this is Base101, so I can talk about my Base101 experience. They scared me. These people are like, well, you got to use a formula, make sure you enable your block and maybe you should consider a scripting engine for that. But the API doesn't, I'm like, okay, like guys, I just want a grocery list. I was like an ebb and world, right? I just want a grocery list. I don't, you know, please. And I think, you know, you got to use the tools where you are. The nice thing is there are a lot of people that will help you, just literally. I'm in communities on Reddit. I'm in communities on Facebook. I'm in communities. I just don't really want on Twitter. OpenSide has a big community. Someone just tweeted or shared on the chat. There's an indie hacker. If you go to indiehackers.com, there's an error table group. So I mean, the thing about, I think starting is like find a group that, just like the base that fits you. Like do not go to a group where you feel uncomfortable. Your base will feel uncomfortable, right? Try to like find the people who, I mean, when I met Shea, like I tried to meet where Shea was. When I talked to Edmund, I tried to, you know, be where Edmund was, you know? And I think this is the beautiful thing about data. It becomes who we are. It informs how we think about life. And, you know, find the people with the sexiest, most kindest data and you'll be happy. You know, so that's what I tell any new people. I agree. Any other questions I got? That was the resource question. Indyhacker, we covered that. Someone said, oh, some, of course, how could I forget? I know I was going to say probably the youngest person here. Check out Gareth on YouTube. What's Gareth's company saying? I can't remember. Yeah, consulting. Check out Gareth. Yep. Oh, there's, oh, Gareth has a baby. Yes, that's why I said he brought the youngest one. That was the shortest nine months ever. Okay, forget it. Well, you were just presenting earlier. Sorry, it's a bad joke. No, but Gareth has great videos. Open Side, who's one of our vendor sponsors. They have a huge community. They have a podcast too. So the thing is, there's a lot of resources out there right now for people. Cool. The last thing I would like to say about my beautiful track and my hour is that we all love what we do. Period. And that's why we're all here. And I really wanted to make sure that everyone that was with me really was able to show that. And I think that we all did. And I hope that you guys love it. And if you want to follow us as if I found a lot of people that started following me, if you go to chrisdanty.com slash airtable, you will see a way to contact us. We have our information and our blurbs, blurbs, there you go, to talk more about what our data is. So do not be shy to contact us. We all want to help. That's what this whole thing is about. I thank you guys. I'm going to go on mute back to you, Chris. Thank you, Shay. So that was cool. I am overwhelmed with how well track one went. I'm still not sure what's going on. I did sneak out to the restroom. So the nice thing with this many people is you can go and no one will notice.