Question of the Week!

[Laura_McCarthy]

Hope everyone is having a great week! It was fun reading through best practices from last week's question. Special shout out to @Tobias_LGKR for sharing an innovative idea around a "change log function." Check out the helpful tips and product suggestions here. 

This week's question is Have you found ways to replace unnecessary SaaS tools with Airtable to cut out those license costs? We look forward to reading through everyone's response. 

Enjoy the rest of your week and have a fantastic weekend! 

Airtable Community

[alexmcdonnell]

On my team internally at Airtable, we've cut out our need for other ticketing systems and project mgmt tools. We also use Airtable as our source-of-truth for market research knowledge, which we haven't even seen an off-the-shelf point solution for. 

And we've seen customers cut out: 
- Marketing planning tools
- Product roadmapping tools (eg Productboard, Aha) 
- Automation and workflow tools
- HR onboarding tools (eg Envoy) 
- CRM 

[mpark]

This is such a great question and so relevant! A recent Forrester research revealed that large organizations have an average of 367 disparate apps and systems. These often overlap in functionality. For example, orgs have an average of 8.9 tools for project management... which is redundant, costly for the business and also makes it more difficult for teams to be productive since they’re wasting time bouncing around tools and trying to find the right info. 

We’ve been hearing customers replace disjointed project management tools, spreadsheet tools, campaign planning tools, etc…all with Airtable! TOMS Shoes is a great example of a customer who was able to replace 6 tools with Airtable.

Would love to hear more about how others have used Airtable to reduce tool sprawl and spend! 

[Elza_Lambergs]

Such a great question @Laura_McCarthy.

I first heard of Airtable while working at my last company, where I managed our content production. We had been using a few different tools to submit creative requests, plan out email marketing efforts, and schedule social media posts. It was so time consuming to switch back and forth...not to mention the tab sprawl! Building out a calendar view as our source of truth was a game changer at the time.

Love to celebrate these efficiency wins -- let us know what you've been able to do! 👀

[Tobias_LGKR]

We used to be Salesforce customers. Good software if you need EXACTLY what it does. It didn't for us. I was constantly creating custom stuff, spending enormous amounts of time, accomplishing only little things.

Through the amazing guys at Whalesync I then heard of Airtable. I looked at it for a few hours, cancelled our Salesforce subscription and moved everything over within a few days. Since then I have created apps I could not have possibly conceived as a non-programmer in Salesforce. 

We tend to try and first solve our needs with Airtable, Whalesync and Webflow before venturing out to create yet another account with another company that, in the end, only offers another small slice of the pie. We like to keep our focus and data as much in one "place" as possible. And having ALL data connected has been the most potent factor for our work since coming to Airtable.

And yes, as a still very small company we have to look at cost. Having twenty €29,99/month subscriptions would be very heavy lifting for us at the moment. Airtable has not only helped us reduce cost but much more importantly enabled us to things we just could not do before.

[ramonscardua]

We use Airtable in our industry as:

- CRM
- APS (Advanced Planning and Scheduling) - Plan our industry production
- Quality Management System
- Inventory Management
- Supply
- Human Resources
- Finance

 Almost everything 🙂

[Laura_McCarthy]

@Tobias_LGKR We love to hear Airtable breaking down silos, reducing costs and unlocking limitless potential. 

@ramonscardua WOW! Amazing that Airtable has become the go-to solution for (almost 😉) everything! 

[Tobias_LGKR]

I can only second what @ramonscardua said. There is almost no process in the company, including production, that we have not tried to manage through airtable.

[Jack_Manuel]

I created an extension to replace Instagram scheduler, Later. We wanted to shift to scheduling social media content in Airtable but the team missed the ability to visualise the Instagram grid, as it would appear in the future. It was a fun little project and saved us a few quid on the Later subscription.

This is not the only paid product we've replaced with Airtable (there's at least 6 or 7) , it's just the most fun one!

[Laura_McCarthy]

@Jack_Manuel This visual of the extension you've built is awesome. Thank you so much for sharing!