Multiple tools and "single source of truth"

August 10, 2022 · ooc-design

I started writing up a reply to in the OOC tool stack thread that got long enough that I figured I’d pop it out as a standalone.

So with the caveat that this is total overkill for day 1 and getting started, here’s how we’re handling tooling & data in a slightly more mature system:

In terms of our tooling, Airtable is the “glue” between all our other tools & tech pieces, which also allows us to treat it as our “single source of truth” for member data. 

When you first get started with just a couple tools, it’s easy and common to just connect stuff directly, e.g.:

1. circle->zapier->convertkit. 

But then you decide to add some sort of fancy analytics for event tracking (or whatever). So now you’ve got:

1.  circle->zapier->convertkit 

1. circle->zapier->analytics
2. convertkit->zapier->analytics 4+. (and as you add more bits, this list goes exponential, since everything ends up connecting to everything)

Beyond the challenges of debugging all this, each piece “owns” slightly different (always overlapping, sometimes contradictory and outdated) data about the same people.

So we go:

1. all tools->zapier->airtable
2. airtable->zapier->everything   We still end up with lots of zaps, but they’re a lot easier to debug/manage/update/understand. 

This means that *everything* goes through airtable, and allows us to treat airtable as the “single source of truth.”

So if a member asks us to cancel their account, we just: mark them as unsubscribed in airtable, which then propogates everywhere else. 

Without this setup, we’d need a big checklist and remember to remove them from convertkit (email), paddle or gumroad (billing), circle (community), helpthisbook (bundled saas), and whatever else we add in the future.

This is also helpful for customer support and business insights, since we can find the “canonical” answer by checking one place (airtable) instead of having to look at a half dozen of them. As the team grows, we can turn airtable into a universal analytics/CRM/admin interface, allowing better insight & customer support, even for nontechnical team-members.

All of the above is overkill if you’re only using vanilla tools (like circle with built-in stripe signups), but is quite helpful as a design pattern if you’re planning to pull together multiple pieces and/or integrate the OOC within a larger business.

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