3 internal apps you need to set up now using Airtable

Hey there. In today's video, I’ll cover three essential business apps or systems you need to set up so you can focus on what matters.

Many people think they’re not big enough to need these systems or that it’s not a priority when starting out. But once customers or leads start coming in, you want to focus on delivering value, not scrambling to set up systems you should have had in place.

James Clear said, We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. The right systems depend on your work, but these three are essential in my business. Without them, things would fall apart.

CRM – A tool to manage contacts and relationships, whether customers, donors, or partners. It ensures you stay on top of where people are in your process.

Revenue Tracker – A system to track incoming revenue and outgoing expenses.

Project Management Tool – A way to organize tasks, deadlines, and workflows.

I’ve previously covered project management tools, but in this video, I’ll walk through all three apps. My goal is to set up a minimum viable product for each in 30 minutes—10 minutes per app.

We’ll use Airtable since it’s flexible, allowing customization for your business needs. You can iterate on it over time without being locked into an off-the-shelf solution. When ready for a more advanced system, you can easily migrate your data.

Let’s get started—three apps in 30 minutes to help you focus on the work that matters.

Hey there. In today's video, I'm going to be talking about the three business apps or systems that you really need to have set up, locked in, ready to go, so that you can focus on the things that matter.

Now, a lot of people, when we talk about this topic, will say that, "I don’t know, we’re not big enough to need those systems or apps yet," or "We’re just getting started out, and it’s not a priority."

And I really think that that’s just the wrong way to think, especially because once all of that work comes in—once all of those customers or leads start flowing in—that’s when you want to focus on really delivering value to the people that you serve, not going back and figuring out the systems that you wish you had set up already.

There’s a quote that you’ll often hear me reference by the author James Clear when he says, We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. And I think there are a few really important systems, and these can change depending on the line of work you’re in. But certainly, these are three systems that I have set up in my business, and I know that things would crumble if I didn’t have these set up.

The three systems that we’re going to be talking about today are:

First, a CRM—that is an app or a tool that’s going to help us manage the contacts and the people that we work with in our work. That can be customers, that can be donors. It’ll vary depending on what you do. But it’s really important that we manage those relationships in such a way that we can reference them when we need to, or when there are people looking to engage with us. We can make sure that we’re on top of those relationships, or where people are in the process. Super, super important. We’ll talk about that today.

Number two, we’re going to talk about a—I call it in my own business, a Consulting Revenue Tracker. For us, it’ll be a revenue tracker for us to simply identify what kind of resources or revenue is coming in and potentially what kind of expenses are going out. That’s the second app that we’re going to talk about.

And then the third app is going to be a project management tool. Now, I’ve already done a project management tool video or demo on the channel, but in this video, we’re actually going to talk through all three of these apps. And my goal is to do all three of these apps in 30 minutes. I’m going to hold myself to it. Each of these apps, we’re going to spend 10 minutes, and we’re going to get a minimum viable product of each of these three apps set up.

We’re going to be using a tool called Airtable. There are a lot of different tools we can use, but I recommend Airtable to get us started because it’s one subscription. We can build these apps to our liking and how our own business or organization works, and then I love that we can iterate on them over time. If we need a new feature, a new column or something, we don’t have to fit into an off-the-shelf solution. We can simply add on to the system that we built, and when it comes time to have a more sophisticated system, we can simply bring that data over and import that data into a new system.

We’re going to do this. We’re going to do three apps in 30 minutes, and these are going to be the systems that you really, really need so that you can focus on the work that matters.

Here, I’m inside of my own Airtable account, and you can see I use a table for literally everything—both my life and my business. What we’re going to do is we’re going to go into this bottom left corner, and we’re going to click Create. We have this option to either build an app with AI or we’re going to start from scratch. And today, we’re going to build an app with AI.

I typically start from scratch, but recently, in the past year, Airtable has released their Co-Builder tool, and it allows you to really get started a lot quicker. And honestly, it does a lot of the—makes a lot of the decisions that I would make myself. Today, we’re going to go for it. We’re going to build an app with AI. Let’s go ahead and click it.

And the first app that we’re going to build today is a CRM tool. You can see that Airtable in the Co-Builder app gives us a few different options here to choose from: campaign management, content calendar, lead tracking, event planning, all these things. We are going to build a CRM. Today, let’s say that we’re a consulting business. It’s going to be really similar to the apps I built for my own business.

Here, we’re going to say, let’s build a CRM for a consulting business that allows us to track and manage our sales process. We’re not going to import anything; we’re going to start fresh. There we go, click Next. It’s going to take a moment, and it’s going to decide what tables we need within our application.

You can see it’s already starting to build, and for here, it’s building a pretty complex system. We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight tables—that’s more tables than I even use in my own base. Let’s see what we have here. We have:

• Contacts
• Leads
• Opportunities
• Clients
• Sales activities
• Projects
• Invoices
• Sales pipeline stages

This is already a little bit more than I would need personally. I need Contacts. I need to know who are the people that I meet that I need to connect with and might ultimately become clients. For this purpose, I’m not going to use leads. We’re going to use Opportunities, and we’re going to say that Contacts can become Clients.

We’re going to keep this really simple. We don’t need to manage Sales Activities, and we’re going to be building a Project Tracker. Maybe we’ll link this in the next step. Invoices, that’s going to be in our payments. Sales Pipeline Stages, we don’t need that. We’re going to keep this really simple. The main table we’re going to be in is Opportunities, and then we’ll link those to Contacts. Contacts can become Clients.

We’re going to go ahead and preview the app. It’s going to be generating the interface pages as well as the database behind the app. You can see we can preview this interface here. We have Contacts, but I really want to start with Opportunities. It’s given us some sample data here: the name of the opportunity, the stage that it’s in. This is exactly what we want. We want a Kanban board, where we can track these over the process. We want a Dashboard. This is beautiful: Clients and Contacts.

This is already looking really good. I’m going to say, let’s go ahead, and we’re going to create this app. We’re only a couple of minutes in here, and we have the bones of this app. Now we want to make some decisions based on what has been created here.

I’m going to X off some of this stuff that’s getting thrown into my face here, and look, we already have a preview of this app where Contacts, Opportunities, and Clients are already visible. I know there are some decisions I want to make here. I want Opportunities to be above Contacts. If we go ahead and go into the pages, we should be able to move this up. Let’s see if we can traditionally do this on my own. Let’s figure that out in a bit.

The main area I want to live in is Opportunities. We have the name of our opportunity, we have the stage it’s in, expected close date, potential revenue, and probability of it closing.

Really quickly, we’re jumping into the interface. This is typically the last step when I do custom tables. ProBuilder likes to put this as the first stage. I’m going to jump back in, we’re going to go back to Data because I want to see how the data field is going. I’m going to do a couple of things.

I’m going to name this All Contacts. These are a couple of things that Airtable is not doing for us. Contacts, Opportunities—I’ll name this All Opportunities. We might add some other views, but we want to kind of make this our primary view.

There we go, let’s move Opportunities first and then Contacts, and then Clients again. We have our Opportunity name, the stage, this is a little bit different than I would usually do. I’m going to say I like to have a Prospect, Intro Call, Qualified, Presentation, Negotiation, Closed-Won, and Closed-Lost. That’s how I set things up.

What I want to do is group this by stage so we can see, “Oh look, Prospects are up top.” We have a bunch of these; we can close these. Exactly what we want. Expected Close Date, that’s nice to have. Potential Deal Size, that’s great. Probability, I like to do this in Stars—a 1-star, 2-star, 3-star rating. It’s how my brain works.

Lead Source is great: Website, Cold Call, Event, Social Media, Referral. That means over time we can look back at these and see where that lead came from, and then we can help us invest more time in one of these areas—like events or social media.

Assigned To—we’re going to assume that we’re flying solo here, no Assigned To, and then I’m going to hide the Client field because I want to create the client when the deal closes.

A Notes field is really great. Maybe we want to make this a little bit taller so we can read this if we’re in this view. This looks really good. Let’s do a couple other things. We probably want to know Contact, and that’s going to be the big one. We’re going to link this to Contacts and let’s say we’re only going to have one contact per opportunity.

Let’s say this campaign here has this new potential project coming in. We’re going to link this to a new contact. There’s some sample data here. Fun. If we click into this contact, it’s going to have an email address, phone number, company name, job title. This probably will be their headshot. Personally, I don’t have headshots in my own setup, so we’ll probably delete that.

Let’s clean up some of this info. We don’t need headshots yet—maybe at a later date to build this out. Look, Contacts, Headshot, Contact Type—all these are people. Status—great. Potential Client, Current Client, Former Client. When the deal closes, they can become a current client. When the project wraps, they could become a former client. Last Contacted Date—that’s great.

Notes related to Clients—this is the company. You can see what opportunity they’re associated with. Awesome. And then for Clients, we won’t spend a ton of time here, but this is looking really good.

We’ll go back over the interfaces and publish these. Let’s see where we’re at. Here’s our Consulting Business CRM: we have Overview, Opportunities, and Dashboard.

Let’s see our Overview—I like to view this in the Kanban board, that’s how I do it day-to-day. But we have people in each of these stages, and if we want to add an opportunity, here’s a form. Some things I deleted in here. Let’s go ahead and clean up this form a little bit. See? I deleted that. Here we go, it’s looking good now.

Let’s say I have this system set up, and I want to add a new opportunity. This is going to be Website Redesign. The stage is someone that I recently met. Don’t know the close dates, we’ll probably remove this from the form. Don’t know the potential revenue, don’t know any of this. We know that I met someone at an event, and they are interested in the Website Redesign.

But create. See? That’s in here now. What we’ll want to do is delete some more things in our form. We probably want to link this to a Contact. As most people, you’re meeting people, you can add them to a client eventually. I don’t want to do this until they close, but there you go.

Let’s say that we know that this person is interested. Maybe we schedule an Intro Call, and now they’re moved to Intro Call. We track where they’re at. And during that Intro Call, then we can say, “Oh, this is looking really good. This is probably going to close with a really good relationship.”

Perfect. You can set some information here. Personally, I use this note-taking. I have a whole page that is filling in notes from the call, and we live in this spot a lot. I can refer back to how the intro call went. You can move these people along the process.

If you do the Intro Call and they seem like a good fit, move them to Qualified. Once they’re qualified, you’re probably going to schedule another call, or you might put together another proposal. Move them down through Negotiation and then ultimately through to Closed-Won or Closed-Lost, then keep an eye on the metrics in this dashboard. We can customize this dashboard to our liking.

We’re 10 minutes in, and we already have a functional app that we can add opportunities in and track them along the process. What I would do if we had a little bit more time is go through and start building some automations.

Let’s see. A record matches some conditions. Let’s say that the Opportunity Stage is Closed-Won. Amazing, we landed the client, and we can go ahead and create a record. We’re going to create a record in the Client Table. We’re going to say that we’re going to have the client name be the test. I’m running through this quickly, but let’s say that we have a client that has been closed.

In here, we know some information: the Contact and let’s say that we have one more field that is Company Name. And I live in Rochester, New York, going to put “Wegmans” as any new client. We’re putting an automation here. We’re going to say use the suggested record of that new Wegmans Client, and now I can say, “Company: the client’s name is company name,” and the related contact is our contact here.

Now, we can generate a preview of this, and this is going to add a new client with the related contact that the person we were working with. If we run this test, we can create a new client, and in our Client Table, we have Wegmans over here. We can fill out all this information in the automation.

This is what I’m talking about—how we can iterate on this system. When we close the deal, we want to add a new client to our Client Table. Now we have an Opportunity marked as closed, we have a Contact we keep in touch with, and we have a Client that is now in our system that we can now link this to the Revenue—maybe that 80k that came in from this client. We can mark that in our next system in our Consulting Revenue Tracker, and then we can add the client to our Project Management System. We can track the project.

That is our first app. A little bit over 10 minutes, but we’ve built a simple CRM for managing our client sales process. Let’s move on to number two.

Building a Revenue Tracker

We’re going to do the exact same thing. We’re going to go back home, click a new app, and build an app from AI. We’re going to ask the AI to build us a Consulting Revenue Tracker for a consulting business called a simple Consulting Revenue Tracker.

We want this to be a simple Revenue Tracker that helps us manage incoming revenue in one table. Here we go. I’m going to try to make this simple because, personally, my Consulting Revenue Tracker is really simple and beautiful—one table. We have Revenues, and it’s going to build a Dashboard. Love to see it. Create this app.

I made this—I probably spent a few hours building it out, but this is pretty incredible that we can put in some information and let it drop in here.

Here we go, we have our Revenue Tracker. I’m going to go back and edit the app. I know there’s some things I want to do. Date Received—I want to sort by date so that the most recent are at the top. We’ll group this by Date Received.

I want to do Month and Year. We’re going to create a formula that says Month and Year, and we’re going to do a formula in Airtable. Airtable’s AI formula fields, we’re going to say take Date Received.

Oh my, I’ve received and formatted it by Month Year. Generate formula. It’s going to take how I have my data set up for my AI credits for the month. We’re going to make some assumptions here. I usually make this a single select field, a dropdown, and we’re going to do February 2025.

I typically make this formula—it’s a little bit easier. But here is all revenue, and our view is going to be All Revenue. We’re going to group this by Label. We have February, March. You can imagine going January through December, and we can project Associated Projects.

This is wonderful. This is looking good so far. In our interfaces, we’re going to do the same thing. We’re going to group this by that Label and sort it by that.

This is already looking really good. Honestly, no notes yet. What I’m going to do—essentially, one of the coolest features of Airtable is we created this CRM tool over here. I’m going to add or import and I want to bring in data from another Airtable base. The base is going to be whatever we called that previous one. What did we call it? Consulting Business CRM.

We’re going to grab our Clients Table, all clients, click Next. We don’t need a ton of information; we only need the client’s name, contact, value—yeah, we only need the client’s name and some key basic information on them.

Click Next, and we’re going to create a table. Now we’re syncing these two apps together. You can see that this is a synced table, based on this lightning bolt up top here, and this is going to begin to bring in those clients that we had used in there as sample data.

We have Wegmans here. Imagine you close that cell, and instantly this app is now updated with Wegman’s information. Now, over here, we have this sample data Associated Project. We can delete this field, we’re going to delete that field, and now we’re going to add a new field.

We’re going to link to a record in the All Clients Table. We’re only going to link to one record. And check this out—it’s Merch Oceanic Solutions. This came in.

This is good; we don’t need the client name here because this is going to be—typically, I’ll name this Month and Date, and I’ll do a formula here. I usually do Date Received with the Label.

And it should work. Oh, because it’s not a number field. There’s a table’s Co-Builder tool. It adds some stuff for us that we don’t need. This isn’t going to be a number. This is going to be Text. We won’t worry about this now, but this is going to be—for example, February $1,500.

And then, now, we’re going to add a cent, we’re going to have a Green Future, this is EduVision, Forward Wegman’s is over here, and now we have these revenues coming in. Now we have these revenues coming in, and we can say that they’re associated with these clients. We can do things like tally the amount that we’ve earned from each client, and that you could set up a Dashboard that says, How much did we earn from Wegman’s in 2024 or 2025? What anticipated revenue do we have this year?

Another 10 minutes, and we’ve got another functional app where we can track incoming revenues, and the dashboard where we can see, over the course of time, what our revenue is looking like. Another 10 minutes, and we have another simple app where we’re tracking our revenue. Imagine before this, we didn’t have a CRM, we didn’t have a tracker, but now we have these really in the hands of the people who need them—very, very helpful builds here through Edit Tables, Co-Builder Tool.

We’re not in a million different apps, we’re here in one app.

Moving to Our Third and Final App

We’re going to move on to our third and final app for this video today. Go back to the homepage, create, and build an app with AI. We’re going to do a Project Tracker. Let’s build a simple Consulting Project Tracker in one table for a consulting business. The reason I’m saying one table is that, in many cases, you can have all three of these apps in one Airtable base. In some cases, I like to do these separately because you can control the permissions on who gets to see what information.

For example, your revenues—you might want someone on your projects but not necessarily on your P&L Sheet. I’m going to say Projects, and we can do Tasks and Team Members. Let’s do that because we want tasks associated with projects. Then maybe for a project, we might want a team member that’s a team lead, but on a task level, we might want a specific person responsible for a certain task.

Let’s go ahead and create this app. It’s taking a brief moment, and it’s building this Airtable base for us in seconds, which is really, really impressive coming from someone who spent hours building table bases. I think this is a really cool feature because then you can spend more time on the work iterating this app and making it really perform for you.

Here we have Projects, Tasks, Team Members. Let’s publish all three of these, and we can see that we go into Projects, we can look at our sent projects, like this Branding Overhaul. We click into it, see that there’s a start date, end date, status, tasks, and team members that are on this project already.

I’m going back into the data, we’re looking at Projects, and I really want an owner who’s owning this project. We only want one person who’s responsible for this at a high level. Let’s find Max—Max has taken ownership. But then, there are other people on the team for this project. We already know that there are certain tasks associated with this. Again, I love to group this by status—top-down: Not Started, In Progress, Completed, On Hold.

This is already looking pretty good. On Hold is going to be before Completed in my mind. I’m naming this All Projects because imagine in the future we want to add a calendar view. We want to make sure that’s clear, and look, here’s everything on a calendar.

This is already looking really great. Tasks—these are either Not Done or Done. I like that for simple task tools. We can set some dates for these when they’re due and assign a team member to the task. This is already done for us here in Airtable.

Team Members and Task Management

Do all Tasks. You can tell I have some preferences. Then, All Team Members—I love doing this in a gallery view, especially when you have team members’ headshots. Imagine these were all photos of your team members, and you were to upload files here. You’d have your whole team here, and you can view them, see what projects they’re on, see what tasks they’re on.

Projects—I created that field. Really, we want to say Project Owned. They can own multiple projects. Maybe let’s see—we could create a view here that says GA Review of team owners, project owners, and we can filter that when Projects Owned is not empty. We know that one person, Max, is responsible for projects—he’s a project owner. We said, Filter where Project Owner is empty.

These are other employees, for example, or maybe in this context, even contractors. Maybe you have project managers that are on your team. You can see how that’s really customizable. Build it out for your use case. Then, you have interfaces here where there essentially an interface is an app—an internal app that seals a SaaS product. We have our timeline. We have our Kanban view of projects that are in progress, on hold, completed.

Setting Up Automations for Projects

Think about when I move something from In Progress to On Hold, maybe we build out an automation. We can say that when a record matches conditions in our Projects Table or our Tasks Table, rather, where the status is—I think we want to do Project—yeah, when the project is On Hold, maybe we want to notify someone. Maybe we want to send an email.

I’m going to put my name. I own this company, and when Projects are On Hold, I want to know. Let’s call this Project On Hold Notification. I should say, Hey Sean, just to make you aware, the project name is on hold. Here’s a reason. And maybe there’s a field that says Reason why it’s on hold—insert reason. Then maybe we can do a link to that record. I know which one is, here’s my email. I go to my inbox.

I’d name this automation: Notify Owner of Project. In my systems, I like to do a little emoji that has a letter. I know that it’s sending out an email. Yeah, you can start building little things like that. You can see it took me a minute to set up a notification for myself—it’s custom. I could’ve CC’d the project owner in that email.

Wrapping Up the Project Tracker

This is building something really flexible and customizable. If you were building this in something like Trello—those are wonderful tools, but they aren’t quite as flexible and moldable to the intricacies of your own business. And this is why I love Airtable, because within less than 30 minutes, we built three apps.

One thing we can also do in here is, we can again – Airtable, I’m going to go to Consulting Business CRM, I’m going to assign, add clients, sync a table. I only want—I don’t need any of these. I only need the Company Name. Let’s say we might want the End Date. You can choose what you want here, but now, now these projects and these tasks, we can link to Clients.

Now here’s all our clients. All our clients are going to come pulling in, and projects are not done in Silos. These are client projects. Green Vision is in here. You can see all these clients, and we could pull in their contact information. Maybe the contact at the client, and we can include those in those automations.

Maybe when a Project’s on Hold, we’ll see our partner that we’re working with at Green Future, and now I am aware, and the client is aware. We can build those systems in. Because we have this structured data, you know Green Future’s Marketing Manager isn’t floating around in an email somewhere, but they’re in our system. And we can take their contact information and make them aware at critical points in the process.

You might be sick of hearing from me now, but what we did is we created three project trackers for business in the past 30 minutes. We created three critical business apps to our business. Where before this, we had no place to track our incoming clients or prospective clients and where they’re at in this process. We had no way to track the revenue that’s coming in and figure out who that revenue came from. Tally up how much revenue each of those individual clients were giving us and paying us.

And for that, we didn’t have a way to track our projects and tasks. In 30 minutes, we built three apps that are connected to one another that do everything I mentioned. I think this is important because sometimes we fly over building these systems.

To bring that quote back again: We don’t rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our systems. And if you have aspirations to bring in X amount of revenue, or you want to connect with such-and-such a client base, or you want to bring in new team members to run your project, if you don’t have these three systems, I guarantee you there are going to be pickups and challenges along the way.

I hope you’re encouraged that in a short amount of time, following the steps I shared, you can build a pretty robust system for your business on a flexible system, for $10 to $20 a month, that really helps you grow what you’re building.

Thanks again for watching this video. If you’re enjoying these videos, it would really help me out a lot if you could like this video, share it with a friend, and if you want more videos like this, go ahead and follow the channel to be notified when new videos come out.

Thanks again!