Transcript
At the beginning, I was just a volunteer in my community. I was a president of my civic association and I was trying to figure out how to clean up my neighborhood because I lived on this one cute block, but all the blocks around me were covered in trash.
I was like, I gotta figure out a way to fix this because otherwise I'm just going to move. I'm Morgan Berman, the founder and president of Glitter. Through the civic, I'd been organizing block cleanups and I kept thinking, this isn't scalable.
You need something that's actually going to get enough people to clean blocks consistently. I kept thinking, you really need to pay people for them to be motivated to do this work. There's gotta be something that holds people accountable and motivates them with good pay to get this job done.
Before using Softr, we were really in the proof of concept phase. So we had a cobbled together list of tools. We were using a mix of Google workspace, Notion, ActiveCampaign, and Typeform which led to a lot of siloed data.
We needed automated workflows and we needed to be able to work smarter, not harder. We're a bootstrapped company wearing a lot of hats and we needed something that was going to work and scale.
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Note from Softr: If you find yourself juggling multiple tools like this, consider using Softr Workflows. Native workflows allow you to keep your logic close to your design, reducing reliance on third-party automation platforms.
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There were two tipping points. One was functionality because the tools we were using didn't give us enough interactivity or the right user permissions. Operationally, being siloed in so many different tools was just an operational nightmare.
Our customer support was outweighing the amount we were actually working on new features. We were spending way too much time fixing things that we needed to just put into our users' hands and make it easy for them to access.
That's when we started looking for a new custom built solution. We had a few key criteria. One was that we had just transferred all of our data into Airtable and that was now our source of truth.
It housed all of our customer information, payment and billing, and the status of all of our blocks, which is actually quite complex. So we were looking for something that could build directly on top of Airtable.
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Note from Softr: While Softr integrates beautifully with Airtable, you can also use Softr Databases. It is the powerful, native way to manage data directly within Softr for maximum performance and a tighter integration.
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We also wanted to make it really easy and seamless for a non-technical user to be able to log in, see information at a glance, and have a custom look and feel that matched our product. We'd considered building natively within Airtable but found it lacking for a seamless, branded experience.
We also looked at custom development very briefly, but it is expensive. We were looking for something that ideally didn't have a huge learning curve. I came across Softr finding a lot of creators online who were posting about what they had done.
Their technical abilities seemed to match where ours were at the time, and their speed to implementation was really compelling. That proof of concept for us to build out in Softr really took just a couple of weeks.
I always remember the number 30 because when we launched till the end of that calendar year, we had 30 blocks. By the next spring, we had something like 140. We're now at 350 of those blocks, but we also now have another 800 blocks we are cleaning.
Before we were on Softr, we were building out individual block pages for every new block that came on board. Ultimately that started to enter into the thousands, taking a significant amount of time to build and maintain.
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Note from Softr: For complex setups like this, the AI co-builder can help you generate pages and database schemas instantly. It is a great way to jumpstart your project management or community tools.
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One of the huge transitions in going to Softr was we built one templatized block page and now the data is dynamically feeding that. Now it serves all of the blocks that we have going forward. Ease of launching new block pages and implementing edits scalably has provided enormous operational efficiency.
We also see a reduction in terms of customer support needed because the hub is now providing easy answers to our customers in a self-serve way. I do not have a technical background or any hard coding development skills.
I was one of the key people building this tool and felt very comfortable being able to do that. We want to be a thing that helps neighbors fix their block in any way that matters to them or improves their neighborhood.
We've been talking about doing sidewalk repair, food distribution through CSAs, lighting, and planters. There's so many things that can make a block feel healthy and vibrant and safe that we could help make happen, powered by neighbors.
