Airtable Interfaces for people processes

Hey guys I hope you're well uh thought that I would walk you through a couple of new ways that um I've been using Airtable um I've kind of significantly changed a couple of our kind of workflows and processes around our teams using uh Airtable interfaces feature which I have spoken about a little bit before um but I do find that I'm just continuing to use it like more and more

Within my um like literally every single day I've been using it and I've kind of built our team on top of it um so I'll jump straight into like an Airtable database for example uh this is technically a live database that we use but I've just filled it in with dummy data and so these are slave accounts Instagram accounts where normally here would be the username in here would be

The bio but um just to kind of keep things a little bit Anonymous I've just input a load of dummy data here uh for now um and so I'll just like walk you through the table I guess to to start off with um as I mentioned this would be an Instagram username and we're using these accounts for for dating apps um so we are generating for every single

We have a list of Target locations um and we prioritize based on on the population we have a list of Target locations that we are putting creators in and for every single one of these locations each Creator is going to have their own specific Instagram account that is targeted to that location so we have a relational database here and you can see we can just pick off a

Location from there and assign it to that account and so as I mentioned every single location has its own unique Instagram and the reason that we do that is so that the entire funnel can be completely tailored to to the the end user so let's say that we have a Bumble account in Zurich rather than funneling that lead over to like a generic Instagram page

We push them over to an Instagram page that is completely tailored to that specific location so we have a let's say a Bumble account in Zurich that is doing swiping that is then pushed over to an Instagram that is assigned specifically to Zurich we can have pictures of Zurich in the bio it's going to say that she's based in Zurich or maybe that she's attending

A local University or working at a space is specific to Zurich so of course this does mean that we go through quite a few more steps in order to put this together um but yeah and this is just like a basically an Instagram scraping database where we have the the device meaning the phone that it's logged into the followers the age of the account how many posts the

Account has the link that's there uh the login details for the team and then we're also using AI to write sorry to write um a suggested bio which our team will then go and kind of input input into that um we also uh log with we bought followers on that and as well here we have the follower to following ratio because we want to make sure that that

Ratio is very healthy here we then have a number of different formulas and different checks um that are going on so these are essentially checking is the is it a high quality username um is there a link to Linktree because we're no longer using Linktree we had some old accounts that still had links to Linktree that we needed to check is it a healthy follower to following ratio

Does the bio contain the location that we're in so and I'll just show you how we're doing it so um does bio contain location this account is currently assigned to Zurich which we saw earlier somewhere along here and then we're just doing a search does it exist within within there so if it does then it will get a check mark if it doesn't it will return an X

Um and does the bio match the suggested bio so has it been updated or is there something old and the output of this is that we generate an account rating so if all of these scores come back as true or they have a check mark in it meaning true if it passes all of these tests we give it a five star rating and again this is done automatically it's all done

Through formulas so the whole kind of goal here is that we have multiple checks that are running all automatically to qualify whether an account is a high quality Instagram the reason for it to be a high quality Instagram is because it's going to lead to a higher trust score and more conversion rates so um a high quality Instagram is going to be it has a bio that matches the location

It has more than 24 posts sorry it has 24 or more posts on it it has more than 1,000 followers it has a healthy follower to following ratio it has the correct link on it has a profile picture um and they're basically like the main kind of checks that we have and that will result in a five-star um rating but of course it sounds quite easy to do

But when you're kind of doing this at scale things go wrong accounts get left behind things aren't added in properly they're spelling mistakes accounts get assigned to the wrong location um particularly as we kind of migrated onto this system um and we had to change like a lot of accounts around there were kind of things that turned into like a bit of a mess and uh so I'm just going to walk

You through like so now you kind of see like the general structure of our database we have a lot of other fields in there as well that are hidden but this is like the general um core things related to to us generating one-to-one Instagram accounts for each one of our dating apps and bearing in mind once you for some people they'll be thinking this is a lot of effort to go

Through you're only going through this effort once and then you have an account that is made in Zurich that you can use for the kind of entire lifetime of of however long you do dating apps when the account is banned you can just remake another account within Zurich and remember it's not just limited to one dating app as well so we can then set up

A Tinder account in Zurich um Badoo, Happn like what any number of other other dating apps um that that you want um and then like you know I I've worked on the Airtable like for years now I think it's everyone knows and the one negative thing about Airtable it's very rare for me to complain about Airtable the one thing that I dislike is that in order to have kind of

Flexibility over the editing of even what views are visible to people and what is able to be changed you need like Enterprise level features or you need to block off a field to be edited from your team entirely which is slightly annoying um and so we we had a situation last week where just purely by accident but an employee just wasn't aware and they

Made a load of changes within the database which broke a load of things that we were doing um and so this is kind of a solution that I I've come up with so I've kind of run through already what are the core things that we're looking out for and on the left hand side here you can see various different views that either red or orange and I do add in a

Few green ones as well what they're in reference to is red means it's something that is critical so every single day we go and check Instagram followers of accounts right now again this is just dummy data but it was a live database up until a few minutes ago these accounts were not able to be found so it means that the usernames that were here maybe they weren't correct maybe

They've been banned maybe there was a problem with the scraper whatever it may be however it's considered a critical issue because these accounts are being used in a live environment maybe they're attached to a Bumble account now that is doing swiping and if we're not able to check the followers of this account it means that maybe it's been banned and other people can't find it which means that we're

Pushing traffic into literally nowhere and so this is considered a critical issue low followers also a critical issue low following a critical issue if we had an account that was like 5,000 followers but is not following anyone or only following a few people it leads it means the account isn't trusted it looks low quality and it's more likely that it will be reported and banned on Bumble

So self-explanatory but you see what all of like our critical issues these are things that need to be fixed as a matter of urgency low quality username these are issues that kind of are need need to be fixed but just you prioritize everything in red so let me just go ahead and translate this immediately over to um Instagram monitoring which is our main dashboard so the way that these Airtable

Interfaces work I I really love them um you can literally copy the settings from a view so I've made all the views already I can just click that and copy the settings and automatically this is going to tell me I've got 19 accounts in that view that need um need activity on them um so we have 19 accounts today that we weren't able to find we have 21 accounts

That have low followers 20 accounts with low following and bearing in mind I've just built this but the ideal thing is is that you have all of these at zero and when something does appear in here it needs to be like gotten onto straight away because it's a critical issue um bio has wrong location that seems like a very uh it's because I changed all of the bios to give template bios

Anyway that's not actually um genuine um so yeah you can see all the critical issues here and then the thing is so great about interfaces is now I have a very easy way for them to be solved so I can make another interface here where if an account is low followers it means that they can just come into this view all these accounts that you

See on the left hand side again they'll just come in here and we can copy the filters from the view of low followers and it will pull them in here and this is saying to our team that we need to buy followers and by the way it also tells you what all of the issues are there so once they have the phone in their hand they can just run through and

Fix all of these issues once it has been fixed they can click this button and this is what I often talk about about mixing together the kind of skill set of humans and automation um they can just click this button here and it will trigger an automation to go and check the account and it will update all the information in Airtable automatically so right now in the room just next door

To me we have someone who is assigned into this view of going through low followers um and just buying followers and then pressing the check button to update it and that will then be referenced in our monitoring dashboard again this all happens automatically the team simply just need to be able to have somewhere to execute from so the other kind of great thing about this is this can be

Um we can kind of build a standard operating procedure that is interactive so the thing that I find annoying about SOPs is they're a little somewhat disconnected from kind of where you're actually working from however this is literally Airtable data embedded on a dashboard it's interactive um here's a bio we can choose to make the field editable or view only so if we want people to be able to interact with

The Airtable database from this interface we can do or we can just lock off any fields that we want by making them view only from within this dashboard as well I can literally write out a standard operating procedure this is what we want done these are your instructions so they don't need to go and check a different document in Notion or Craft or wherever you're writing out your um

Your SOPs they can kind of just come in here and and see the instructions the bio is written by AI it doesn't always come out perfectly that's kind of one thing to be clear on as well um as much as I love GPT and AI when it comes to writing Instagram bios and a lot of different stuff in 80% of cases it can do very well but then

There's 20% of cases where something goes wrong so all of the suggested bios are written automatically um but still we just want them to be like checked over by the team does it sound good um does it contain an emoji on each line does it contain the location or university is it the bio too short sorry is the bio short because that was the other thing GPT was doing is it was spitting

Out these huge bios and we would say make it shorter but it would kind of it just wouldn't wouldn't sound that great basically so we just want a human to go over it and quickly just verify yeah that's this fits within um within what we're trying to do does it sound like a real person make sure there's no spelling mistakes and so we can kind of make these as

Complex as we want like as another one we have a process here we operate on two different databases so I'm just literally just writing out instructions the book couldn't find the air this account in our other um Airtable database check the account exists in Digify check the phone number of the account it's logged into at the phone number below and they can just literally write the

Phone 55 once it's written this will then be hidden and they just move on to the next one so instead of giving someone access to like working from a database here where you have like tons of different fields something can be changed incorrectly things can go wrong you can just build such streamlined processes within Airtable interfaces just as ways to kind of manage your your data

Um and so yeah I I haven't really seen many people kind of talking about this stuff or even using it I didn't even go that deeply into it until recently um you know as most of you know mostly my work is focused on um automation through code and through kind of humans rather than building out like human processes and so on however recently just to explain a little bit

About one project that we're working on we're building out a Bumble Farm um so we have built out not myself I can't can't take credit for this one I'm working with a developer out here and he has built out a bot that operates on mobile devices um we're currently automating automating Bumble and when I say automating I don't mean using switch control or some of these like other

Things that you may have seen I mean this is essentially end-to-end automation um where we create accounts we plug them into this system it's completely custom built software everything is custom built from scratch um and it will handle swiping it will also do messaging or to the clients um contextual messaging so if it's Friday it'll say you know hey what are you up to what your plans for this

Weekend or if it's Monday you know how's your Monday going um completely in reference um to to the day of the week is to again try to make it sound as real as possible um and it will literally have conversations with with these guys uh it will check that Instagram is on there that the Instagram is correct if it isn't it will add it in so it will

Rewrite the bio um and we also have Bots built out for Tinder for Badoo for TikTok as well and this is these Bots are operating on iOS devices uh I haven't come across anything like this if someone is doing something similar of course I'd be very interested to chat with you I've seen some people doing some things on on Android um who are doing quite well but this is

Like literally the first system of its kind that I have um that I I've ever come across so it's a very interesting interesting thing to build out and we're just rolling out on TikTok today as well by the way doing mass reposting on TikTok through mobile devices using Bots whereas up until this day and still to this day sorry we are using humans

Um and so the reason that we're kind of migrating over to this is because in order to generate for example from dating apps for us to generate about half a million dollars per month uh it would need a team of about 240 people and you know that's not out of the question bearing in mind that's 240 people in Georgia where salaries are much cheaper so it would still be a

Highly profitable business however I've managed big big teams before we managed about 140 to 150 people in my old company that I sold and to be completely honest it was a headache uh and it's not something that I kind of really um I don't really enjoy managing big teams uh I like kind of lean teams working of smart people uh and then we can also

Kind of just build out things like this for the manual processes processes that do need to be handled uh we can build out Airtable interfaces and literally like right now as I'm doing this just as I mentioned in the room next door there's a person that is assigned to each of these views that is going through each of the issues and resolving them to bring down uh any

Issues that we have in our kind of monitoring dashboard to bring all of these down to zero essentially um I'm just trying to remember what uh

Just to show you a monitoring dashboard was it yeah yeah so this is like the monitoring dashboard and sorry and so then the other thing I forgot to show you down here is so here we have like all the critical issues at the top then we have the lower quality issues at the bottom and then down here we have in green like the the progress monitoring

Um I'm not sure why that's just broken but anyway um this builds like a pie chart based on the accounts we've only got one it must be because I oh yeah because I changed all the bios that's why um so this uh builds up pie chart showing you how many of our accounts are in like a five-star status so up the back there it's not going to do anyway on the TV up

The back there I have like a high level monitoring dashboard this one that you're looking at here so I can see everything that's kind of going on um and yeah just when you're kind of building out teams and again here we're talking about building up human processes instead of building out automations I really think this is like a nice way to structure your business you have high level dashboards

Um that give you like an overview exactly like this of everything that's going on and what is taking place within your business bearing in mind this is just for Instagram so we also have this for managing our locations managing our Bumble account and right now we're just focused on Bumble um for no real reason then I prefer not to tackle too many problems at once

Because if you spread yourself too thinly you end up doing nothing which I know from experience um so right now we're just focusing really on tackling Bumble um and then we will be kind of moving on and just kind of copying and pasting all of our workflows onto these other things so once we figure everything out with one platform it's really quite simple to kind of move everything across

Um so each kind of uh Department let's say within our organization can have its own high level monitoring dashboard of what are the critical things for this department in progress monitoring what do we Define as success for this department um and basically just I can just have on a big TV behind me making sure all the critical things are at zero or we're in like a good range

Making sure issue monitoring is as low as possible and making sure everything in progress monitoring is as high as possible so I can have an overview of my entire organization of all of the different departments within our organization very easily and any issues that occur within the organization it's very very easy for the team to solve because the rule that we have is it has to have an

Interface assigned to it so if there's an issue someone can just come in here and it has the instructions on what they need to do in order to solve that problem it cannot cannot be more more simple um and so yeah this like I've just kind of moved on to this system I've built out this system Myself by the way I don't also pretend to be like an expert

In them human processes um but I'm literally just sharing it because this is something that has has been working well for me um that we have just built out and implemented and we're now able to solve problems like a hundred times faster because they're just able to go through things so so quickly um so yeah I guess this is just uh suggested like hopefully some

Inspiration on um on another way that you can use Airtable and just shedding some light on Airtable interfaces which I think is like a highly um underutilized feature like we can build out custom databases uh we can build in buttons if we wanted to link into like a dashboard um or to like whatever whatever page you want um if you had like an internal dashboard or

Like an a standard operating procedure that you wanted to link to um we can also add in uh text and kind of write anything out here um and we can get rid of that uh we can also write out like check boxes so these are your instructions and once it's done on that record they just tick it off and again just to kind of make sure that everything

Um everything kind of is working as it should be um so like I said we're really trying to to scale this out um whilst keeping as small of a team as possible um so we've kind of run some calculations and with about a thousand Bumble accounts we would we would be able to generate about 400 to 500k per month in in Revenue based off off of our

Like current metrics uh so we're just in a process of figuring out how we can really kind of scale this um as much as as possible and that's before we even look at adding in like other dating apps such as Tinder uh Bumble and also our like TikTok reposting um that I'm hoping that that we will kind of uh launch today and so that's

Been the reason for like a shortage of videos let's say from my front um because I'm I I don't consider myself to be a YouTuber um or anything else aside from a businessman like this is what I do this is really what I enjoy doing and then whenever I have some time or I feel that I have something interesting to share like today I like putting a video

Together about it I don't like putting together I need to feel some kind of inspiration to put a video together like I have something interesting to share um I don't like putting not to call anyone out but let's just say like I see a lot of other people doing um just like literally just sharing sharing is that something isn't working isn't value um but anyway we we won't get into that

Um so yeah speaking of value I hope that you did find some value in this video um and yeah I strongly suggest you to play around with like Airtable interfaces for using things like VAs and so on it becomes really easy to onboard people like we have new employees who are starting and rather than needing to kind of explain everything of all the different fields in Airtable you put

Them on an interface the instructions are written there they only have access to the fields that they need to have access to and someone can just kind of hit the ground running um with with an Airtable interface so really really great tool um that I've been using kind of more and more recently and strongly encourage all of you to look into