Welcome to BuiltOnAir, a podcast and video series about all things Airtable. Each episode, we talk with someone active in the Airtable community to discuss their experiences and showcase an interesting way they’ve used Airtable in their work.

This week we welcome on the show Nat Eliason, founder of Growth Machine. Nat was a blogger, app developer and digital nomad for years before creating his current company. Now he uses Airtable internally to help businesses master their content strategy and development on any subject or market segment.

Growth Machine is currently a 7 person team of people working together with the common goal of enabling businesses to tell a content story with their message. Things have been going so well that Nat’s recent time has been taken by hiring more people to double their team size. He talks about the pros and cons of transferring to being a founder that runs the company instead of doing the majority of his work “in the trenches.”

Nat lists the top tools used in the company including Zapier, Asana and (obviously) Airtable. The company is using Airtable particularly to help streamline a “writer matchmaking” service that allows them to find good writers quickly for each project or subject matter. As part of the development process, Growth Machine opened the door to writers on every subject to figuratively raise their hand and become a part of their database of writers, so that when the company has a need for a particular subject they can connect their clients to the work quickly via their writers database.

The Airtable walkthrough Nat shares is a personal CRM he built to keep track of contacts in his circle. The base allows for categorizing contacts based on their primary work industry, interests and location. Filtering contacts based on these things then becomes an easy task, and Nat actually used the feature to find people in his circles that do sales as he was looking for a new team member in that field.

His base also tracks the company each contact works with, and “how they met” in order to provide a quick memory jogger and give easy icebreakers when re-connecting. He also takes random notes on relevant details of the relationship with each person he includes in his CRM.

The brilliance of Nat’s personal CRM he built within Airtable is that he made it to match his way of working, and kept the whole thing very simple (and free).

Visit the Growth Machine website for blog articles and resources |

Learn more about Nat on his personal blog |

Connect with Nat on twitter | @nateliason

View the video demo from this episode |

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