How do you present your previous Airtable works to potential clients?

[detg]

Hello! First time posting so I'm not sure if I'm posting in the right Location 🙇🏻‍♀️

So I've gotten different kinds of work where I use Airtable as my main tool for project management, client portals, order/inventory tracking, ticketing, etc. And I'm looking to showcase the kinds of work I do with the platform to future potential clients!

I was wondering how everyone else presents their old work (the non-NDA ones at least!) to clients? I'm not sure how to go about building my "portfolio" per se even though I've built some good stuff the past few years (thanks to the community too I've been lurking here for a long time haha!)

It's kinda hard to convince potential clients that I've "been doing this for years" without having a ready portfolio of sorts to show for it other than some relatively safe screenshots (data privacy and all)

Thanks in advance for any leads or advice! 💕

[kuovonne · Accepted solution]

Are you wanting to present your prior work in a meeting or outside of a meeting? I find this makes a big difference.

Showing prior work in a meeting is usually a matter of identifying an existing base that is similar to the potential client's use case and giving a walkthrough of the base in a screen share. It helps to have a duplicate of the actual base with dummy data. When new consultants are getting started, they often offer free intro meetings where they can demo existing work.

Showing prior work in a publicly accessible portfolio is a different matter and a bit trickier. You can do screen shots, but you can also consider brief videos. You may also want to consider other methods of showcasing your skills. For example, some people post solutions on these forums. Others post YouTube tutorials, write blog posts, or create tutorials.

[detg]

Hi kuovonne!

I've been a silent follower of your work in the forums for a long time 👀 Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post! 

I took some screenshots and posted them as part of my "portfolio" on Upwork but it does feel a little lacking. I do show my work to clients in a private meeting or interview. But there are times wherein I thought the meeting would be private but it was surprisingly a group interview so I didn't show my work there;;

I was thinking of a way to kind of showcase work in an online portfolio that can maybe be accessed via a password when showing stuff to clients at the ready? But the public view of the portfolio would have screenshots and sample workflows maybe!

I transitioned career-wise from creative work to no/low code + automations so it may be a personal bias to feel like I think I can do more with it haha

[kuovonne]

To me, the main value of showcasing work in a meeting is that you can tailor the experience to the client--show the features that the client is interested in, answer and ask questions, etc. I wouldn't limit what I show in a group meeting simply because there are more people, although time constraints might limit what I could show.

Similarly, I don't see the benefit of putting an online portfolio behind a password. If the content is designed to be viewed without guidance, then why gate-keep it? However, I also personally believe that my value is in what I am capable of building, not in what I have already built. I do not worry about people seeing my designs and going off and copying them without actually hiring me.

If you want to get fancy, you could build an Airtable interface and then let people join the interface as read-only users. That way people could browse around what you've built for free. On the other hand, I doubt this would be worth the effort because it takes a lot more effort to join and poke around an interface than to watch a video or schedule a meeting.

You could also look at your competition on Upwork and see what their portfolios look like. Upwork wasn't the right fit for me personally, so I can't give much advice there.