Analyze Your Funnel with Airtable

In my previous life as a financial analyst, I was confused by the inefficient systems I was required to use. In one role, I received Excel files with tens of thousands of records from three different vendors. Each of those files was completely different, but I was expected to combine all of that data into one file and generate a report that senior leaders could then use to make decisions about future growth. It was an enormous waste of time and brain power. I often found myself wondering why there wasn't a streamlined system built to serve this function.

This problem is similar to the problems faced by online entrepreneurs. There are lots of tools that go into building an online funnel. For example, let's imagine a free email course. General steps are as follows:

1. The entrepreneur builds a landing page to capture email addresses.
2. Once someone signs up, emails are delivered on a predetermined schedule.
3. Deliver an overwhelming amount of value over several emails.
4. Extend an offer to help further - usually through an online service of sorts.

The model has many variations and different software is used in each step along the way. For example, the opt-in page (step #1) might be built in Mailchimp, Active Campaign, Convert Kit, or any other email service provider - or maybe the submission is captured by a standard form software that adds the new email to the funnel with automation. Then, the entrepreneur uses another software to process their sales (step #4) - this might be Stripe, Paypal, or any other online payment processing system. The struggle is in getting the sales data relating to the opt-in data, since the software used for each step is completely different. Or, if you are using the same software for both steps, the dashboards available to you are likely not adequate to help you track the metrics you want to see.

This is the perfect example of the value of having a 'Single Source of Truth' - aka: Airtable! In this video, I walk through how to capture this information from the different sources and combine them together into one Airtable database. Most importantly, I detail a dashboard for instant analysis. This way the entrepreneur can know the important KPIs at a glance and in real time.

There is a lot of great software out there to help you build a business, but without having all of that data reporting back to one place, you're no better off than I was in my financial analyst role... you're doomed to spend countless hours every day/week/month just collecting data and trying to put it into some coherent report so that you can make proper decisions. Isn't it wiser to build your system once and set it to run on auto-pilot?