Organizing Talent Using an Airtable-backed Portal

Welcome back to the final week of the 2019 BuiltOnAir Summer Series! What better way to wrap up before Season 3 of the podcast (starting next week!) than to bring back the time we brought our first international guest Chinara James onto the show? Chinara is a talented web developer from a small island of Trinidad and Tobago who -since a young child- always knew she wanted to get into the technology world. She’s been helping people and companies build websites for many years. 

Her approach to helping clients always starts with a “results-focused” approach, where the conversation is less about what fancy features and add-ons the client wants on their website, and more about their overarching goals for the site. By asking questions that lead to a bigger results-based picture, Chinara is able to help provide the solutions her clients want without focusing so much on the extra.

Chinara found Airtable in a similar way to many of the other guests we’ve spoken with: through an unmet need. In her case, Chinara was looking for a good project management tool on a limited budget and wasn’t finding many of the other options were meeting her needs. When she found Airtable it quickly clicked as the tool she was looking for, and it gained traction within her agency when her clients and coworkers started to see how applicable and versatile it was. 

An Airtable Database for Talent

Chinara shares a database she built for a client that is a talent agency. The client needed a portal for models and performers to join in order to be added to their talent pool. The people needed to be able to have a login and account, then be able to edit their information and images at any time later. Using a front end app combined with an Airtable backend, she was able to accomplish this and more. 

Here are a few of the highlights from her Airtable base:

  • A login feature allowing a person to access their personal data within Airtable, with functionality to add or delete images or other personal details on demand -all without them knowing Airtable was on the backend at all!
  • A table to store model’s information and organize it according to their talent types (modeling, singing, dance, etc)
  • A whole backend development process (much of her story throughout the episode) behind decoding multiple issues, and how the solution’s development came about

Chinara truly demonstrates not only her enthusiasm for Airtable, but also her talents in strategy and development. One of the biggest takeaways from listening to her is how a person can problem-solve anything to find solutions that really meet needs on every level

Here’s the video of the original podcast, including more of Chinara’s story, and the live walkthrough of the base described above:

Episode Video:

Here’s an audio version of the above, with links to download or share if desired:

Episode Audio

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