Making Taterater (a potato review site) with Airtable & Softr

Building a fully functional review site like Yelp, only for potato-based dishes, using only no-code platforms

7 min readApr 7, 2023

First, why Taterater?

A few months ago, I met a girl at a party who reviewed sparkling water brands and flavors on Instagram. I thought it was a funny niche to focus on, and I loved her commitment to the absurdity of it.

Later, I was joking with Shawn about how I should write reviews for fries and breakfast potatoes because I love them so much. And we already rate them to ourselves when we go out to eat, like how people talk about a nice glass of fine wine.

Eventually, we came up with the name Taterater, which was so perfect I couldn't let it go. And the more I thought about it, the more I loved the idea:

Everyone loves potatoes. They’re ubiquitous across cultures and cuisines, so a wide range of dishes would apply.
They’re typically cheap, accessible, and can be enjoyed by my vegan and gluten-free friends.
It’s a great litmus test. I tend to find a positive correlation between the quality of the potato dishes and the overall restaurant (but I’m still collecting po-data on this theory).
The name sounds funny and is fun to say out loud. And I have so many great potato puns just ready to go!!!

Making it real

Then I discovered the domain name was available, so suddenly, it went from a silly joke to an actual thing.¹ After mulling over it for a while and trying out some alternatives, I eventually landed on these tools²:

Airtable for the backend
Softr for the front end
Square Online for a shop (Of course, I need potato merch)

Airtable

The Airtable base is simple to start. I have tables for each collection of items, which are linked together:

Reviews: The primary collection, which includes a headline, photo, rating (number of spuds), the full review, link to Restaurants, the dish name, link to Author, the date, and a check for if it's featured or not. I also have a saved view of the featured reviews on the home page.
Restaurants: Originally, I had these within the Reviews table, but I realized I might have multiple reviews from the same restaurant, so I split this out. It includes the name, address, website, lat & long coordinates, links to neighborhoods, and reviews. For now, I manually copied and pasted the restaurant's lat & long coordinates from Google Maps. But this could be automated from the address field.
Neighborhoods: I still need to show these on the site, but I'd like to create neighborhood-specific pages in the future.
Authors: This is my Users table. Right now, it's just me, but you can apply to be a taterater! Here, I have the name, email, avatar, bio, role, link to reviews, and hero image. The nice thing is that Softr has a user management system, so when a user is created, it gets added to this table.
Applications: Since I don't have any fancy content moderation set up, I made a form people can fill out, and I can manually approve new users for now. (I don't want people spamming the site with hot dogs. OnlyPotatoes!!!) The application form linked above automatically populates this table as a holding area where I can review submissions.

I love controlling how my data is stored and the various fields and the relationships between them. One of the most frustrating things about working on projects with old legacy databases is finding out that the data is not structured in a way that can be consumed by the front end as designed.³ Being able to do this myself makes it easy to iterate on both sides simultaneously.

Softr

I looked into Softr as a front-end solution a few times. I ended up using other platforms (Pory for my planning portfolio or Super for my product design portfolio) because it didn’t quite have what I needed at the time.

But it looks like they’ve pushed out a lot of features that are making it pretty competitive, and they recently announced action buttons that open up a lot of possibilities for making CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) apps.

I made a proof of concept for a freelance client with Airtable & Softr last week, and it only took about two days of playing around off and on to get something up and running. So I decided to try using it for Taterater as well.

Some notable features:

Easy drag-and-drop blocks with pre-built layouts for dynamic and static content, which you can mix and match. For dynamic range, it’s super easy to map the UI component to the field in Airtable. The content loads slower than I’d like, but it’s ok.
Decent customization of little details like font size, padding, color around buttons, line heights, fonts, etc. I want more control over the layout or more variety of layout templates, like having multi-column containers, but it seems fine as a starting point.
Easy to create conditional rules for what to show. For example, when looking at the details of a review, it also shows the info about the restaurant. And the user’s timeline page only shows reviews by that specific user. Also easy to create filters for the lists; I just wish there was a way to add UI controls for sorting as well.
User management and user groups. It’s easy to create new users and assign them to different groups. By default, there’s already a logged-in and logged-out group so you can have different views for those two categories. At the paid tiers, you can do things like hide and show items based on the groups (like admin, editor, and viewer roles).
Maps!! You can show maps from Google Maps or Open Street Map based on the lat long coordinate fields. I’m using the Open Street Map version because I don’t want to bother setting up the Google API key. The default base map options for Open Street Map are kinda ugly, but I’ll live with it.
Preview and build for different screen sizes, hiding and showing blocks based on screens. I just optimized for the desktop for now, but I’ll return to the mobile version.

Square Online

Softr has the functionality to integrate with Stripe, but since I already have an online store set up with Square, it was easier to use that system.

I love that Square only charges me per transaction rather than a monthly subscription. And it has all the standard e-commerce functionality. In addition to having a complete online storefront, you can create embeddable buy buttons or links for specific products.

Obviously, I only want to sell potatoes⁴ on Taterater rather than distract people with the other random stuff I make, so I just created a link to this one item directly. Yes, if you buy one, I will really make one for you.

Launched!

So that’s a launch! Plenty of things to iterate on and improve. But for a basic functional app with actual data in about three days (not including all the time I spent eating and thinking about potatoes in preparation), I think it’s not too bad!

I know it's a pretty silly project, but I think it’s a pretty good indication of how simple it is to set up a site like this. If it were complicated, it wouldn’t have been worth the time investment for something so silly.

After playing with it, I see how it can be used for more serious applications in the future. It’s a great way to spin up a listing-type of product for testing so you can spend more time on the business model and content, the stuff that really matters for real businesses.

Anyways, let me know if you want help setting up a similar type of site, want to join the taterater street team, have good recommendations, or want to share potato puns with me! 🥔

Notes

I have a terrible habit of collecting domain names for various ideas well before anything has materialized for the concept.
Full disclosure, I'm an Airtable partner, so when you sign up with my link, I also get credit.
Hearing backend folks tell me, "Unfortunately, that data is just contained in an unstructured blob of text on the backed," breaks my heart every time. BUT WHYYYYY? WHY NO STRUCTURE?!?💔
Thinking about what product to sell for merch, I landed on handmade potatoes because I can make them on demand. I already have too many unsold stickers and prints, so I don’t want more inventory. And I think it’s safe to assume I’ll be able to manage the demand for potatoes at this MVP stage. 🤞 But also, did you know there are at least four different websites where you can mail someone an actual potato?!? The demand is there.