When technology sits at the heart of a fast-growing company, sometimes simpler is better. The founders below all landed in the same place: instead of paying for CRM software packed with features their teams would never touch, they built an Airtable CRM shaped around the sales processes they actually ran.

Key takeaways

The 'Halo' effect

That proved true for Kenan Saleh, who built his company, Halo Cars, with a no-frills Airtable CRM and then sold the company to Lyft a year later.

Saleh and two co-founders believed outdoor advertising could be just as targeted as online advertising. So they began testing that theory. They installed five ad screens on top of ride-share vehicles in Philadelphia in 2018 and used Airtable as the database behind driver onboarding, contacts, and inventory.

As Halo expanded to more cities, the founders built a few additional automations, using Zapier to streamline processes like driver referrals and hiring. But the founders never outgrew their Airtable CRM, which they still use.

"A lot of CRMs are fully equipped but don't handle simple use cases," says Saleh. "Airtable is just extremely extendable."

What is a CRM?

CRM stands for customer relationship management, and the phrase usually refers to any software or system that helps a business interact with customers. But since the concept took off back in the 1970s, the definition of CRM software has shifted radically. Salesforce may still be the most high-profile name in the category, but even its uses have stretched well beyond sales.

Where the CRM was once a central place to stash and manage customer data, it's now a system for managing data in all corners of a business. Today's CRMs hold contacts for vendors, partners, outside collaborators, and even internal teams. Plenty of them double as project management and customer support systems.

The "relationship" side of the CRM is changing, too. At the start, the relationship in question was between a company and its customers (or potential customers). When was the last time salesperson X got in touch with customer Y? A record of that interaction would be stored in the CRM.

Now, a CRM tracks the relationships between a huge range of business entities, from customer support agents and their callers to HR staff and potential new hires. Any team that needs a record of interactions with another group can create it using a CRM.

The catch is that most CRMs impose their own structure. A legacy system of record decides what a "deal" is and what fields it carries, and reshaping that to match your business means engineering time, a consultant, or a workaround. A tab in Google Sheets goes the other way: infinitely flexible, but it can't connect a list of contacts to deals, accounts, and activity history without constant manual upkeep. A relational database sits between the two. Linked records handle the connections for you, which is why the same structure can serve a sales team one quarter and a recruiting team the next.

For example, in the early days of Halo Cars, the founders used Airtable as a CRM to handle data and relationships between the startup and drivers. Drivers weren't the end customers (major advertisers were), but drivers were the young company's first important business partners.

Niche CRMs: fancy, but inflexible

Alex Lockey launched his education recruiting firm Bolt Jobs in 2016 and scaled up, adding new employees each year. He ran Bolt on a specialized CRM for staffing companies, Vincere, but quickly started looking for replacements.

Vincere was expensive, required a two-year contract, and the interface seemed excessive. The dashboards were crowded with fields his staff of six didn't need, the sort of thing designed for a floor of sales reps rather than a small team. It also didn't have an open API, and Lockey, a former engineer, found it difficult to build integrations.

By 2020, COVID-19 had complicated the recruiting business. Lockey ditched his office space, said farewell to pared staff, and took the unfortunate turn as a chance to reassess.

Rebuilding the stack (with a stack of resumes)

Traditional recruiters tend to shy away from new technology, since they deal with so much sensitive information. Résumés, headshots, salary histories. It's a dangerous pile of personal information in every staffing agency hard drive.

But Lockey is a serial entrepreneur, not a lifelong recruiter. After a MakerPad class in low-code development basics, he overhauled his agency's CRM and rebuilt it with Airtable, starting on the sales side. No code required.

"I loved how configurable Airtable is," Lockey says. "It was easy to move data in and out."

He began marshaling data in a variety of ways. Starting with a simple Airtable template, he automated the send-out of Bolt's social media posts. He built a series of automations that handled the workflows around invoicing.

In 2022, he launched a weekly newsletter anchored by Bolt's job listings. After just three months, the newsletter had 3,500 subscribers.

Lockey's hunch is that his core audience, academic job seekers, have expertise to offer in the form of courses and curricula, but may not have the right venue to monetize it. He's working on adding a component to his current website to solve that problem.

"I've definitely discovered more of my true calling in the past year," Lockey says. "I'm relentlessly building stuff."

A bird's-eye view of the sales pipeline

When London venture capitalist Amory Poulden considered CRMs, it was Airtable's views that drew him in.

"We needed a Kanban view of how deals progress through our pipeline," says Poulden, who started his firm D2 in 2021 with two partners. "Everyone needed to be aware of the stage of every deal. We needed a single source of truth."

He knew Airtable had worked for other VCs, including Ryan Hoover, who runs the investment group Weekend Fund and is founder of the tech website Product Hunt.

Like other entrepreneurs, Poulden knew his firm's CRM didn't need too many bells and whistles. D2's founders are low-code advocates and can build functionality into their Airtable system as needed. Grid view holds the underlying records, while the Kanban view turns those same records into a stage-by-stage picture of the pipeline. Nothing gets duplicated to make that happen, which is what makes a single source of truth realistic rather than aspirational.

Poulden and team began by creating a dealflow CRM, then added a new table to show which deals they lead, as opposed to those they co-invest in. They use an Airtable form on their website that lets startups seeking funding upload a pitch deck directly into D2's CRM. Eventually, they'll use their Airtable data to analyze which types of deals are most profitable for the firm.

Using valuation data, they can also reassess which sales opportunities they may have overlooked. Though they haven't analyzed the data yet, D2 is using Airtable to track the deals it didn't fund, filtering for each startup's team type, market size, and business model. Poulden believes this will reveal his firm's blind spots and unconscious biases.

By 2022, D2 had logged 1,000 deals in Airtable.

"We're operating like a startup," he says. "It's perfect for what we do."

What an Airtable CRM looks like now

Every founder in this article was solving the same problem: the system of record didn't match the business, so they built one that did. That problem hasn't gone away. It's gotten sharper, because there's now a second set of workers to account for.

AI has already changed how individual sales reps work. A rep can ask a chatbot to research an account or draft a follow-up and get something usable in seconds. But that work dies in the session that created it. Nobody else sees the research, the CRM data doesn't move, and the next person starts from scratch. Agents are only as good as the business context they can reach, and most systems hand an agent a pile of data without a live model of how the company actually runs.

An Airtable CRM is shared infrastructure for both. Humans and agents work on the same data, the same workflows, and the same surfaces, inside one permission model.

Shared operational data

Most Airtable CRMs start as a handful of connected tables: companies, contacts, deals, activities. Linked records tie them together, so one contact record shows every open deal and every touchpoint across the sales cycle. Custom fields let you track what your process actually cares about, whether that's ARR, a pitch deck link, or the recruiter who sourced a candidate.

Configuring that structure used to be the hard part. Now you can describe it. Omni, Airtable's built-in building expert, works with you to architect the schema and reshape it later, no engineering ticket required. If your company already runs on something else, Sync pulls data in from warehouses, CRMs, and ERPs, so a team that keeps Salesforce or HubSpot as its system of record can still work that data in Airtable alongside everything the two systems don't cover.

The important part is that the data stays live. Every time a human or an agent updates a record, the picture gets more current, which is the opposite of exporting a report and watching it go stale.

Durable workflows

Automations handle the deterministic parts of your sales workflows on shared triggers: routing an inbound lead to an owner, moving a deal stage when a contract is signed, nudging a rep when a record has gone quiet.

Field Agents handle the parts that need judgment. They run AI over your records at scale, doing things like researching an account, pulling structured detail out of a stack of documents, summarizing a long activity history, or categorizing inbound requests. For teams managing leads at any real volume, that's the difference between a database that stores information and one that moves work forward.

Both live in the system rather than in one person's head or one person's chat history. Build a workflow once and the whole team inherits it, agents included.

Open surfaces

Sales reps live in grid view. Managers want dashboards. Founders want a summary. Interfaces and Canvas let you build all of them on top of the same CRM data, with data visualizations of pipeline by stage, source, or owner, plus portals for the people outside your core team who need a narrow slice.

Your team also works in a dozen other tools, and each one can be a door to the same records. Omni in Slack or Teams answers questions where the conversation is already happening. Through Airtable's MCP server, you can work with your Airtable data from Claude, ask what's slipping in the sales pipeline, and have the update land back in the CRM rather than in a transcript. Integrations connect the rest, from Gmail to Zendesk for customer support tickets, with Zapier covering most of what isn't native. The Airtable mobile app puts the same records in front of sales teams between meetings.

Governance

Handing agents access to your customer data only works if you can see what they did with it. In Airtable, every action, human or agent, runs inside the same permission model and audit log. Permissions scope exactly what an agent can touch and who on the team can edit versus only view. The audit log captures who, or what, made each change. Approvals stay in human hands.

For a three-person startup that's a nice-to-have. For a company with sensitive customer data and a growing sales team, it's the thing that decides whether agents ever get to work on real records at all.

Ready-made CRM templates from Airtable

Airtable has ready-made CRM templates for a number of different teams. They're flexible and customizable, with AI built in to improve both your workflows and your customer relationships. Every Airtable CRM template is a starting point rather than a fixed structure, so you can add fields, views, automations, and agents as your process changes.