[Show IH] Use Airtable as a CMS to build websites without coding.
Hi Indie Hackers!
I finally join the ranks of SaaS owner and I couldn't be happier 😁😁!
I just launched https://table2site.com/ which lets you build websites via Airtable and without coding.
The idea is inspired from @AndreyAzimov 's Sheet2Site (Thanks Andrey 🍻).
The tool is perfect for:
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List/grid websites like NomadList. You can create lists/grids of any data!
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Small landing pages
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Coming soon pages
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Blogs (coming soon!)
You can add things like:
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Newsletter boxes (Mailchimp integrated)
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Lists or cards
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Text sections
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Contact forms
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...
👊 I have a lot to learn so I don't expect this to be a smooth ride, but I'd appreciate your feedback a lot - good or bad. 👊
Thanks!
Nicely done. I'm also very involved in Airtable world. You should do a Show and Tell on AT community. (Here is my recent one announcing my zapier connector for airtable: https://community.airtable.com/t/custom-connector-for-zapier/18073 )
I will be playing around with this some more and see if it makes sense for some of our projects. We can likely partner up on some stuff in future.
Good idea, thanks!
Your connector looks awesome and I can see a good use for it. As an indiehacker, $50 per month is too expensive though.
If you play around and you find documentation/features are lacking, do let me know!
Yes, our pricing currently is geared towards more business use cases. We have plans to come out with lower tiers with limited functionality at some point.
Regarding table2site, I was able to play with it more. When I have time I'll email you some thoughts on how to improve. Definitely a great start. Congrats again.
Looking forward to your thoughts! Definitely room for improvement :-)
@poehah Congrats on the launch.
A few months back I did some tinkering on Andrey's site and realised that with some effort, you can actually produce dynamic content on the site through hacking together some zapier connectors. I was able to create content on the page through excel rows, typeforms, emails. All with relative ease. This makes for a much more interesting website than static content.
If I were you, I would try and focus on building something ttowards that to differentiate yourself from sheet2site.
Hi Colin,
Thanks for you thoughts!
Like with anything that has an API, it's already possible to create dynamic websites. For example, for https://table2site.com/site/demo-site-3 I wrote a simple scraper that fetches jobs from remoteok and sends them to my Airtable base.
I agree there's much more that can be done though! I'm open to ideas :-)
Congratulations. Following :) Would be interesting to know how things will go
Agreed! I'll keep the community posted :-)
Beautiful idea and love the hero section of the website.
When you scroll down, in the "2. Content" section, the green dots behind the image is good, but is there any reason behind that? Looks like that is the only place where they are present at this point in the homepage. Feels a little off.
And when you go to a demo site (https://table2site.com/site/demo-site-2), I was expecting a link to the original Airtable that was used to generate this. Thought that would make the sale easier for you and understanding easier for a person like me.
In the Pricing section, is it "Customdomain" or "Custom domain"?
I thought the footer's social section can have more links than just Twitter. It is lonely out there. :)
These are just a few things I could think of at 2:20am in the morning. Would love to use it later this week. All the best @poehah
Thanks for your feedback ❤️! I'll definitely implement these.
If you play around with our tool and find documentation/features lacking, let me know!
Of course man.
What does it offer that's different from the google sheet as a CMS/Backend one?
Having used both Airtable and Google Sheets, Airtable is much better for building a backend database to be used for something like this, so i would go with this just for using airtable alone.
Google sheets is more freeform while airtable is more constrained. That's why I prefer airtable as a database.
Multiple pages
Contact forms
MailChimp connection
More layout options
:-)
That's pretty cool. For your free vs paid plans, you should show / have a table/graphic what the actual free features are.
Agreed! I have it somewhere in the documentation but it's not superclear. Something to work on :-)
I love this!
I messaged Andrey a while ago to actually build this (I told a few people about it actually) so I'm pumped that you have done it!!!
I'll push it to my community for sure.
Thanks @bentossell. That means a lot coming from you!
I hope I didn't launch too early, I'm a bit scared 😂
I'd love for this to launch on PH in a few days. Are you up for it?
Hello @maartenb111,
Excellent initiative! I have manually dabbled with something similar in the past, but one thing I kept hitting against is the configurability of access token, which are pretty limited.
How do you deal with this? Do you have a proxy for Airtable requests?
The API is quite limiting indeed. I'm storing most settings & content in my own database and use a toggle "development mode on/off". When it's on, I don't cache, when it's off, I cache :-)
I see! Best of luck :-)
I was planning to buy a theme for a job board site, but this one looks interesting and easier. Need some help with it @Maarten
No problem! Here to help @Acheilies :-)
Awesome
Cool! I used Airtable + Wordpress + Typeform to make a platform startup about a year and a half ago, but I would have definitely used something like this instead if it was around.
Thanks! How did the platform turn out? :-)
It worked well for what I was using it for...but it's shut down now :)
You can check out some screenshots of the platform here (and about why I shut it down).
Hi @poehah- very neat, congrats on the launch. Did you find any limitations with Airtable?
We built a tool (https://rhizata.com/) that is similar to Airtable in many ways: Tabular data table, edit functionality, API's.
Where we are different is we also have a REST client and SQL workbench as well as and of other features like public/private keys, webhooks, and code transformations. We can also store tons and tons of data if you want to do more with your website, maybe turn it into an application, in the future.
Thanks.
Thanks!
There are limitations with the Airtable API as they only allow 5 calls per second, so I need to cache data on my end.
Who knows! We might be a good match :-)
Interesting.
If you sign up, let me know and I'll get you started on a extended free plan that doesn't limit your API.
Good luck with the build!
Will do. Thanks!
Rhizata looks pretty cool. Would you consider using Airtable as a storage that you then allowed for sql on top of?
It's an interesting question. We store, create API's, and provide developer tools (REST client, SQL workbench, native code transformations) today. Rhizata is really built to support your applications as the data management layer.
For example, our database structure is pretty darn scalable - a few of our clients are managing petabyte-scale Collections.
We also provision standard API endpoints from the datasets automatically, so you can use to connect with your external systems. Soon you'll be able to create custom endpoints. And these endpoints are fully monitored (built-in) and battle-tested. Our last stress test was 2 million requests per seconds.
The SQL workbench and REST client (so you don't have to use external tools) are available out of the box too.
Airtable is a bit different. We think it's great, btw, so not knocking on it at all. We just want to be more of a development tool than a workflow tool.