VC Weekly Meeting with Affinity Pack (#8 on Product Hunt)

Today we released our “VC Weekly Meeting Team Hub” on Product Hunt

(check it out - it hit #8 already!)

This template is an ambitious use of Coda, made possible by the pioneering work of @Jono_Bouwmeester in developing the Affinity Pack.

It puts many undocumented features to use (thanks @Paul_Danyliuk!) and is my first template.

One notable achievement:

Edit the Coda tables with two-way sync to the CRM
The “Deal Flow” and “Port Co” tables sync to lists within Affinity in both directions.

The #1 use case we see for Coda with CRM Packs is working with the CRM data in Coda.

Sync Tables only let you view information, not change it in the table. We (aka @Jono_Bouwmeester) powered through 1,000s of lines of code experimenting with ways to solve that challenge.

We needed to solve for that, but it also had to be fast & stable. The point of the doc is to enable VCs to capture notes & todos in real-time during their meeting, as well as add new entities from Coda.

If you look at the hidden pages, you’ll see the DB Deal Flow and DB Port Co cache the values pulled from the API to columns.

After the initial download of data, this allows for cache busting at every level (chip, Pack, doc), making the responding updates fast. We use “Affinity Sync” column to aggregate button actions to give the user a sense of flow as they pace through updating the data in Affinity.

I was lucky to get to develop this template working side-by-side with Jono every day for the last few months. We’re looking forward to bringing you a much deeper dive on the solution (and it’s many challenges!), but don’t hold back:

What do you think?

We’re excited to learn together with you!

2 Likes

Nice!

I haven’t used the doc, only scrolled through the gifs. But looks very polished and feels like a proper app. Great work you two!

P.S. In CodaTricks, @Artem_F once worked with Affinity and one client of ours — I haven’t seen it myself but I’ve heard that their API wasn’t the friendliest to work with. We’ve developed a very internal and not-public-ready integration for that. Glad to see it done properly.

And I like the approach. Sync tables are pretty constraining. I find myself using local tables with either custom formats or just POJOs more often lately.