I sympathize with the situation, but not sure what to tell you. The bajillion Universe bases offer absolute variety if it’s building blocks you’re after, but the whole point of a tool like Airtable is to customize it to your needs, so it doesn’t matter where you start so long as you keep at it and you’ll have an impressive custom app or five tailored to your business needs before long.

If you want to fast-track deployment, the people over at the hire an expert section of the forums never sleep, if you can believe it. :grinning_face_with_sweat:

I would considering hiring someone but part of my issue is I don’t even know where to start in a non-airtable sense. So it isn’t a matter of mapping an idea to airtable, which I can do, as much as learning on the fly what I’m doing more holistically.

But this does give me some ideas, so thanks!

Sry, missed this response, hopefully you had some success by now and have a general idea of where you’re headed toward?

As a more concrete example, one of my first uses for Airtable was having it act as a notice board with task management functionality for a small content team primarily communicating via Slack. Over time, notices turned into rules and rules made way for business logic that ended up informing a data-to-text solution I’m currently in the process of wrapping up. Best of all, that app is for a completely different content project but it probably would have never happened if I hadn’t realized how versatile Airtable’s core offering is.

This is a big part of the reasons why I believe most serious users will figure things out. If Airtable checks enough boxes for your particular use case, just stick with it through a free promo month or two and if you’re anyone resembling a technical person, you might suddenly find yourself building things just because you can - and astonishingly fast, at that. The latter isn’t necessarily an indication of a proper, sustainable product (or mindset) but that’s beside the point. Which is that it probably won’t be long before you’re doing your own templates, with or without outside help.

Best of luck!