Deal Flow Hub

Problem

We used to use Affinity for all things deal flow at Ascension but found it was quite an expensive solution for the small team we were at the time (3 partners and 2 Associates) and that it wasn't as extensible as we would have liked (note: this was in 2019 and I understand that it has improved since). We were using Airtable for managing our investments and LPs (see Managing VC Portfolio with Airtable) and so decided to give Airtable a go for deal flow as well.

In our head, the requirements for a strong deal flow system were that it had to be:

1. Easy to add information;
2. Easy to query;
3. Simple enough for the whole team to use but configurable enough that we could add automations and workflows on top without having to rebuild everything.

Number three is a particularly important point because a system is only as good as those that are using it and the name of the game is consistency.

With its ability to link records in different tables, Airtable was an ideal choice of platform to build upon. While the bases are fairly intuitive for anyone who has spent time in excel / google sheets, “views” can be a complicated concept for someone to wrap their head around and navigate. Additionally, Airtable’s lack of universal search would quickly drive frustration within the team.

Example situation: a co-investor sends a business they are looking at. You need to figure out whether you or someone in your team has already looked at it. If so, you need to understand what happened. If not, ideally you would like to have quick way to add it and any relevant information to the system. To do this, you would have to navigate to your base and then search within a view that has no filters on it to ensure you are querying the entire sheet within the base. One solution here is to just bookmark these views in your browser. However, our base quickly soared to 5000+ records and that made for a slow and clunky experiences. Importantly, this broke rule number 3 above of being simple and intuitive enough for the whole team. This also doesn’t solve the quick capture in the case the record doesn’t exist.