Adalo Custom Actions, How to Use Airtable as a CRM
Modern Makers - 07/06/2020
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This week, I spent a couple of hours on Carrd.co, a tool that allows you to create a website in a few clicks. I am trying to put online the "official" website of Modern Makers and Carrd seems to me very relevant for this type of project.
The PRO plan that I bought is available at a very favorable price of $19 and allows you to publish up to 10 sites! (yes, 10 sites for $19 a year). This plan also offers the possibility of adding your custom domain name or even adding some embed code (in my case, inserting a Substack module allowing visitors to subscribe to my newsletter directly from my site).
The free plan allows you to publish up to 3 sites and access many of the features available on Carrd.
Carrd offers fairly advanced customisation options, although some limitations can be a little frustrating at times. A quick tip: remember to save your projects on a regular basis (Carrd doesn’ support autosave at the moment) in order to avoid losing an hour of work following a computer crash for example.
An excellent tool, very interesting for creating a landing page or a portfolio for example. To better realise the potential of Carrd and the scope of the projects you can build with it, I advise you to visit Deck of Carrd which brings together several examples of sites created on Carrd.
Link: Carrd.co
🧰 Product
Adalo continues to add new features and this week announced the beta version of Custom Actions. Customs Actions allow you to trigger an API request and thus generate an action (for example: a user clicks on a button and he receives an automated email). Adalo offers a list of examples of possible Custom Actions on its site. This new feature can really give your mobile app a whole new dimension! All paid accounts now have access to this feature. Some examples of uses are to be discovered in the video below:
Bryter is in the news again this week with a new fundraising of $16M, just a few months after his seed tour of $6M in November 2019. The Berlin based company offers a no-code platform that allows members of marketing, finance or legal teams to be able to create their own applications, chatbots or even automate their onboarding process. As a result, Bryter allows employees without any technical background to become more efficient and independent in their work, without having to constantly solicit their technical teams. In short, a great example of the promise and potential of no-code. This new funding round should allow Bryter to enter the US market. Bryter already has good corporate customer references including McDonalds and Deloitte.
Glide has updated its Link to screen functionality. Being able to make a link which redirects to the same item makes it now possible to use this functionality to generate a "Read More" or "Learn more" button as shown in the example below:
I also appreciate the fact that Glide allows us to create a unique view and design for the items displayed after clicking the button. A good way to further customise your mobile applications created with Glide.
Go to the Glide documentation to learn more about this feature
⌨ Project
#MakeChange is a project created by Michael Gill, a recognised figure in the no-code landscape. The number of no-code projects had exploded during the coronavirus crisis and Michael would like to see a similar momentum created within the maker community following the death of George Floyd. #MakeChange allows people and companies to signal their willingness to help launch or support projects combating racial discrimination.
Link: MakeChange
⚒ Tutorials
Flatfile.io is a file upload tool for web apps that successfully raised $2.1M in September 2019. David Boskovic, the CEO of Flatfile, spoke last week with David Peterson of Airtable. During this 45-minute conversation, David explains in particular the reasons that motivated him to abandon Hubspot, his previous CRM, and switch to Airtable. More importantly, David shares more details on the positive impact this change had on helping Flatfile finalise its fundraising.
Thanks to Airtable, David was able to use shared views to give potential investors, as part of their due diligence, real-time visibility on Flatfile sales pipeline.
The feedback from customers, prospects and end users is also fed directly into Airtable which allows Flatfile’s management team to see what potential revenue could be generated through the development of a specific new functionality.
A very smart use of Airtable which once again allows us to realiwe the rather incredible potential of this tool. To discover in video below:
We continue to talk about Airtable with Gareth Pronovost who explains the interest of using a third-party service to display and visualise data from an Airtable base. In this video, Gareth shows us how a tool such as Stacker can allow you to create a dashboard for team members and condition the display of data for each person. Concretely, the fact of using Stacker can allow you to keep control over your entire Airtable base and not to share it, while nevertheless giving access to part of your data to other people who will access it via this other interface created with Stacker.
Being able to edit data directly within the Stacker interface and seeing this data automatically updated on Airtable is also extremely interesting.
📦 In other news
Le Wagon, the famous coding bootcamp, is organising a free workshop on Thursday, June 18th around UI design and Figma in particular
Jean-Charles Samuelian, co-founder and CEO of Alan (online health insurance), has published an article in which he shares details on his daily organisation. Jean-Charles presents in particular how he manages his to-do list with Todoist
CodeCrumbs is a library of code snippets you can easily integrate into your Webflow projects
Medium enters the booming newsletter market where it will face competition from platforms such as Substack (the tool I’m using for this newsletter) and Revue
That’s all for this week. If you like the content, don't hesitate to share it with your friends or colleagues.
I also invite you to send me your feedback on this project by leaving a comment below.
Have a great week,
Martin,