For many marketers, managing data across different platforms is a constant headache. From pulling campaign metrics into Airtable to building reports that actually make sense, the process often eats up hours that could be better spent on strategy.
Andy Cloke, founder of Data Fetcher, joins the podcast to explore how no-code integrations can transform the way marketers work with data. Andy shares how Data Fetcher makes it simple to connect Airtable with your popular platforms, automatically update dashboards, and streamline reporting.
He also discusses the growing importance of APIs in marketing, why integrations are becoming non-negotiable, and how even non-technical professionals can harness these tools to work smarter.
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About Data Fetcher
Data Fetcher is an Airtable extension that lets non-technical teams connect to any API without writing code. Launched in 2020 as one of the first extensions on the Airtable marketplace, it now serves hundreds of customers who pull data from over 5,000 different APIs.
The tool offers pre-built integrations for popular services like Google Analytics, Stripe, and OpenAI, plus the flexibility to connect to any REST or GraphQL API. Users can schedule automated syncs, transform incoming data, and build powerful workflows directly within their Airtable bases.
As a bootstrapped and profitable company, Data Fetcher focuses on sustainable growth rather than chasing venture capital metrics. The extension has been featured by both Airtable and G2.
About Andy Cloke
Andy Cloke is the founder of Data Fetcher, a bootstrapped SaaS that helps teams connect APIs to Airtable. After teaching himself to code and working as a freelance developer, he built and sold his first startup before launching Data Fetcher on the Airtable marketplace.
As a solo founder, Andy uses Twitter to share his experiments, failures, and wins openly to help other bootstrappers. He focuses on leveraging platform ecosystems to find underserved niches and advocates for staying focused on one project rather than chasing shiny objects.
Time Stamps
00:00:17 – Guest Introduction: Andy Cloke
00:01:49 – Previous MarTech Venture: TikTok Influencer Platform
00:02:39 – Introduction to Data Fetcher
00:05:10 – Ease of Use and Integration with Airtable
00:07:26 – Challenges Marketers Face with Data Tools
00:11:46 – No-Code Movement and Its Impact on Marketing
00:13:18 – Marketplace Insights for Software Vendors
00:19:27 – Leveraging AI in Marketing Workflows
00:20:25 – Best Marketing Advice Received by Andy
00:21:31 – Advice for New Marketers
Quotes
“Data Fetcher basically lets people have an escape patch, like a really flexible tool that lets them connect to anything, pulling the data from other places.” Andy Cloke, Founder of Data Fetcher.
“An API is just a way of them saying, here’s how you can get data out of this tool or write data into it in a kind of predictable, robust way.” Andy Cloke, Founder of Data Fetcher.
“If SEO and YouTube are working, just focus on those, just double down and just nailing one or two channels is much more effective than trying to be everywhere and to everyone.” Andy Cloke, Founder of Data Fetcher.
Follow Andy:
Andy Cloke on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andycloke/
Data Fetcher’s website: https://datafetcher.com/
Data Fetcher on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/datafetcher/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Andy Cloke at Data Fetcher
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Andy Cloke
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Andy Cloke, who’s the founder of Data Fetcher. Welcome to the podcast, Andy.
Andy: Hey, it’s great to be here.
Mike: So we always like to find out a little bit about people, you know, when they come on the podcast. So can you give us a little bit of background to your career and why you ended up deciding that you needed to find Data Fetcher?
Andy: Yeah, of course. So I started off as a front-end developer and I was freelancing for various startups, doing React.js development and trying to launch my own thing on the side. So nights and weekends, I was just launching side projects, like little businesses, trying to get something going. And one of those ideas was, an IPO alerts newsletter, so managing all that from Airtable. I was trying to get financial data into Airtable. And that pain kind of led me to this idea of how do you connect Airtable to other platforms? I should probably say what Airtable is for anyone not familiar. So it’s basically Google Sheets or Excel. It’s a spreadsheet kind of UI that lets you build automations and visualizations into it. So it’s kind of like Google Sheets on steroids is how a lot of people know it. And so yeah, back to my problem of trying to get data in, which became basically an Airtable extension, which is Data Fetcher, which I launched about five years ago. And then it’s been growing steadily since then.
Mike: And it’s not your first company, is it? I mean, you’ve previously had a MarTech company that was all about finding influencers on TikTok. Tell us a little bit about that and what happened with that company.
Andy: Yeah, so that was my previous project, which was basically a discovery platform. So I’d figured out a way to scrape TikTok and I was basically packaging that data up and helping agencies and brands find TikTok influencers to work with. And it was just brilliant timing because it was the end of 2019, just before the COVID lockdowns, when TikTok just absolutely blew up. Even my mum had TikTok for a bit. And it was just brilliant timing, rode that wave, but then realized I didn’t love being in the influencer industry. It was quite faddy. The scraping it was built on could kind of keel over at any point. So I made the decision to sell the business, which bought myself a few months of personal runway to figure out the next one. But yeah, I learned a load just building it up steadily and getting it just to a few thousand in MRR.
Mike: That’s fantastic. I mean, let’s talk about data fetcher now. I, and you know, I’ll be honest to people listening to this. The reason you’re on the podcast is we had a real problem. We use air table. We’re trying to pull data in. We tried some of the other tools that are available. They’re all quite complicated. And I stumbled across data fetcher and it solved my problem almost immediately. So I was super excited about it. So could you talk Andy a little bit about what data fetch would do and maybe what someone in marketing might use data fetcher for.
Andy: Yeah, of course. So as I said, Airtable is a super powerful tool, but the hard bit is getting the data in there in the first place. So you might have data split across Google Analytics, across HubSpot, across multiple different tools, and you want to use Airtable as kind of your source of truth. So often people end up kind of exporting CSVs and copy and pasting data or trying to use Zapier or one of the other tools to get data in, but they’re not quite flexible enough or robust enough. And so Data Fetcher basically lets people have an escape patch, like a really flexible tool that lets them connect to anything, pulling the data from other places. And it kind of sits in this sweet spot of being approachable for people who aren’t technical, but they can use our pre-built integrations, and then for more technical people who maybe have some coding knowledge or some technical background, they can use the custom integrations to put in the API details themselves. So then it just handles all the authentication, pagination, those kind of slightly more technical things. It handles all that without them writing code. In terms of marketing, one of the big ones we see is people pulling in campaign metrics, so pulling in Google Ads and meta ads and Google Analytics, so pulling that into Airtable and then building out visualizations or client dashboards for their agency, things like that. Another big use case we see is programmatic SEO. So people have got a list of blog posts in their table and they want to create like the SEO meta description or like the cover image to post it on social media or anything like that. So transforming one type of content into another or creating some sort of automation around, yeah, programmatic content, I guess. And then the last one I’d just call like marketing ops. So just moving data between different tools. So between one CRM or Google sheets, whatever tool into Airtable. So they’ve just got that one centralized place where everything is.
Mike: So there’s quite a lot. And I mean, effectively what you’ve done is you’ve built this interface between Airtable and between these tools. So it’s almost pre-done. You just connect it, tell it what to do. And away it goes. Is it as simple as that?
Andy: Just about, so yeah, so we started with just the customer requests. So people needed a bit of API knowledge. And then what we saw is there are some integrations that just come up again and again and again. And so we made those kind of like built-in integrations, like a Zapier or something like that, where you can just point and click. So you can just say, select application, Google sheets, authorize, and then just like, which sheet do you want? It’s as simple as that. But we’ve always got that balance of then having the more flexible, uh, customer requests where people can put the stuff in themselves. We’ve got a free plan which lets people try all of that for free and they can basically use pretty much every feature. It’s just when you want to then automate that that’s when they upgrade. But the beauty of having that free plan and letting people mess about with it for free is people can just test it themselves and see how they get on.
Mike: I mean, there’s quite a lot to test. I mean, I was surprised you’ve got an integration into a website scraper. So I don’t know, for example, someone involved in PR, they could potentially go and scrape data off publications, websites to analyze what the publication is covering. I mean, is that the sort of application you see people using as well?
Andy: Yeah, we see a lot of scraping and a lot of screenshotting of URLs. So a lot of people actually think it is a scraping tool itself because of the name, but we’ve built like a first class integration with those scraping tools because people want to do like competitor monitoring or, you know, price checking or stuff like that. And yeah, it’s super powerful for that kind of use case. The most popular ones are like AI stuff, Google Sheets, and then the reporting ones. But we definitely see a bit of scraping as well.
Mike: And why do you think, you know, marketers in particular seem to need a lot of these tools? I mean, it seems like, you know, marketing is all about trying to pull data from different systems. In fact, I mean, I’ll tell you, I used to be a lecturer in PR and I used to tell the students that the one skill they really needed was Excel because it’s almost ubiquitous across, you know, PR agencies. I mean, why do we get into this problem in marketing that we struggle to find tools that actually do what we want and we need to pull data elsewhere?
Andy: I’d actually say it might be the availability of tools of really specialist tools that like causes the issue in the first place. So basically I think marketers want to use the best in class CRM or, you know, ads platform, whatever it is, they want to use the best tool for each job. And there are so many tools, like good tools available that you end up, yeah, with, you know, 20 or 30 different tools. But then it’s like, how do I actually have an overview of all that data and these different tools? So I think that’s why I end up always reaching for an Excel back in the day or a Google Sheets or an Airtable now, where they just want that one source of truth. And once you’ve got that and you’ve set that up by copy and pasting, the next step becomes an integration tool, whether it’s Appia or Make or Data Fetcher. So that’s kind of where it fits in.
Mike: That makes sense. I mean, I’m interested. We talked a lot about markets, obviously, a marketing podcast. But do you have some examples of some of the other customers you have in different industries? And can you tell us a little bit about, you know, some of those more interesting applications that they’ve got?
Andy: Yeah, I mean, one of the things building the company is just the range of different APIs and legacy systems that people are still using, but they want an escape hatch from. So for example, I’ve got someone who is a front end developer, and then she set up a chain of yoga studios. And she uses MindBody online for the booking, which is just like the industry default there. But it’s kind of super old school and enterprise. And so She basically pulls all of her data out of MindBody Online into Airtable to build automations, whether that’s welcome emails or whatever the platform can’t do, she wants to build in Airtable using her front-end technical background. Other ones I’ve seen are a logistics company called Fox Logistics, who basically do all of their driver vetting through Airtable. So they basically are constantly hiring new drivers. And so they let their drivers kind of onboard using like a no code portal, upload their ID, so they’ll upload the driver license or whatever. And then they use data fetcher to connect to open AI to scan the driver license to extract the details from it and then verify whether that person can drive for them or not. And that’s happening like in real time as soon as I could drive it on boards. And then they’re using Data Fetcher on the other side to do route calculation between destinations. So yeah, we see all sorts of different use cases. People have connected to over 5,000 different APIs using Data Fetcher, which just kind of boggled my mind that there are 5,000 APIs. There’s probably a lot more.
Mike: So, I mean, you’re talking about APIs, you mentioned APIs a few times. I don’t know, let’s go back to some basics. I mean, could you explain, you know, to people who are maybe marketers not really into coding, what an API is and why it’s so important?
Andy: Yeah, of course. So if you imagine a tool like Twitter or a tool like Google Sheets, whatever, your data is kind of locked in there, right? And an API is just a way of them saying, here’s how you can get data out of this tool or write data into it in a kind of predictable, robust way on their terms. So it’s kind of like, I guess, a technical gateway to the data that’s in there. And what that means is that we can build integrations on top of that and service it to our users. But it means users can also connect to that API directly without writing complete scripts or code. They can just put in the URL for the API and a header and a fairly small set of instructions that let them automatically and reliably connect to that system. So I like to talk about apps and APIs as what Data Fetcher connects to, but it’s all kind of, the underlying thing I guess is APIs that it all runs on.
Mike: And this is all kind of, you know, this no-code movement, isn’t it? I mean, APIs ten years ago involved getting software engineers to write code. You know, I think today a lot of marketers might have come across some of the tools you mentioned. So, you know, Zapier is one I think most people have seen, although it’s kind of limited in what it can do. You know, we also use tools like Make, but some of those tools can get really complicated. So what is it you do to make sure that people who aren’t programmers can actually make use of data vector and get the data they want easily?
Andy: Yeah, so we’ve focused on one particular workflow that people like to set up in Make or Zapier, which is connecting just Airtable to another tool, another app. So rather than trying to be everything to everyone, we’ve just really focused on letting people set that up really easily and being slightly opinionated with, you know, when we get the data back from that tool, this is how it will map to your Airtable records, and then letting people customize it if they want to. But by default, we just try and handle everything for people. We’ve also got a real focus on long tutorials and really detailed steps on letting people set that up so that we get people who haven’t got an API background or a technical background, but they can set that up themselves. And then finally, our no-code integrations, just let people set those workflows up without having to learn about APIs themselves.
Mike: I mean, if I’m to summarize it, it sounds like because you’re basically literally just pulling data into Airtable, that removes a lot of the potential complications, which means that you actually know what people want a lot better than if you were trying to make an incredibly flexible tool like Make.
Andy: Yeah, exactly. And then another factor is that we’re a first class Airtable extension. So we are on the marketplace and we actually sit in Airtable in terms of like, you’re in the same tab that you’re already in when you’re working in your Airtable data. And it’s just, you know, sits within that. Whereas with Make or Zapier, you’re kind of switching between the two and you’re losing a bit of context each time. But it means we can see the live data straight away. We don’t have to wait for it to load or anything. And you can kind of see the effects of what you’re doing straight away.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I have to say, when I tried it, pretty much worked automatically first time. I couldn’t believe it. So it was a great tool. We’re obviously a marketing podcast. And I think, you know, a lot of our listeners, they’re in the engineering sector, the B2B engineering sector. And that’s the sector that’s changed a lot, because it’s moving away from selling, you know, purely products to actually having a large element of software. So it’s interesting to hear how people market software. You know, so at a high level, what’s your marketing strategy for Data Fetcher?
Andy: So we have a real benefit just from being on the marketplace and we get a steady stream of pretty qualified leads just from being in a fairly small marketplace and that’s probably about 50% of our new leads. But outside of that we do content marketing, so we focus on integration landing pages with full tutorials within them so focusing on kind of seo for those and then each tutorial will have a youtube video that goes with it so people can learn kind of however they prefer and the volume’s really low honestly some of our youtube videos will have like a couple of hundred views but then i know from looking at the conversions that we’ve had like 10 customers off those so it’s just like the intent is super high and so it’s worth the the roi of kind of making making that content even if the the headline stats look super low and then another big part of it has been the free plan so because people can see the tutorials see the video and then just try it themselves it means sometimes they’ll they’ll test out themselves and then six months they’ll have another use case and then they come back and upgrade and so The longer in the market with that free plan, the more we just have kind of brand awareness of the product, I guess.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. I think it’s interesting you talk about marketplaces because, I mean, Airtables at all, it’s got a marketplace. You click there, it gives you all these additional vendors you can work with. That’s interesting because a lot of the listeners will be thinking about creating marketplaces for software partners. We’re seeing a lot of that happening in the B2B space. So as a software vendor, what makes a really good platform? What makes a platform something that you want to participate in and support?
Andy: Yeah, it’s an interesting one, because they had a real marketplace focus a few years ago when I launched, and now it’s very much in maintenance mode. So I don’t think they’ll ever kill it, fingers crossed not, but they also don’t seem to be, they haven’t really changed it in about five years. And it’s, yeah, it’s been an interesting journey. I think one of the things that has made a huge difference is just the size of the team that they’ve got focused on it. So there was a point when they really neglected it, when it would take me a couple of months to get an extension approved, so to get an update approved. And then now it’s super quick because they’ve got a couple of really good people on it. So just having the, you know, enough resources dedicated to it to kind of bring those communication times down is massive. And then discovery as well, I think it’s really important. So yeah, letting people discover new things through the marketplace, whether that’s featuring featuring listings, having good categories, having good kind of marketplace SEO and predictable SEO within the marketplace. So yeah, one of the points of building for it, right, is to get some distribution through it. And so that’s, yeah, that’s kind of like huge as well. And then the last thing is probably just the technical side of it. So the SDK, which is what you use to build extensions, is just really, really robust and friendly and well-documented. And that makes a massive difference. I had a a brief foray into building a monday.com extension to match Data Fetcher and it was horrendous and I went back with my tail between my legs to Airtable just because it was so difficult to build on Monday. Things would change, you know, month to month things would change, things were totally unpredictable and they didn’t really see the issue with it. And you see that with really mature marketplaces like Shopify and stuff, they’ll still just rip out whole parts of their, of their SDK and stuff like that. And it’s, I’m really grateful to be on quite a stable one, even if it’s a little bit neglected.
Mike: That’s really interesting because it sounds like, you know, what you’re saying is if you make it easy for the partners and you also make it predictable, there’s no unpleasant surprises with, you know, your product suddenly stopping working because something’s changed. That’s what’s really going to get engagement. I mean, those are key parts. And maybe that’s something that marketers building marketplaces might not think.
Andy: Yeah, I think so.
Mike: So Andy, I mean, we’ve talked, you know, quite a lot about what you’re doing and, you know, about marketing. I mean, I’m interested. Are you using Data Fetcher in your marketing or how do you see Data Fetcher and other similar no-code tools changing the way marketers go about their business in the future?
Andy: Yeah, I think it’s definitely lowered the bar to what you can build as a marketer, right? So you’re not waiting on developers anymore. It’s massively reduced that friction, I guess, to spin up an internal tool, to build a certain visualization, to do something like that. The way that I use it as a marketer for Data Fetcher itself is for content. So for that content marketing workflow that I explained, we basically managed all of that from Airtable and Data Fetcher is pulling in the YouTube stats, it’s generating the SEO meta descriptions, it’s doing all that kind of That stuff is pulling in the analytics once a landing page goes live. And so it’s just pulling all of that kind of content stuff into one place and then experiment with Google ads. I can pull in the ads metrics as well. But in terms of, yeah, where that fits in generally, I think it’s, it allows people, even if I didn’t have a technical background, I could set that up myself and we could basically have all of our content reporting and workflows like within one tool, um, which is super powerful.
Mike: And it’s interesting, I mean, you’ve mentioned a couple of times, you know, your ability to integrate with AI. And I think the example there of writing meta descriptions automatically is a great example. I mean, do you see this being more and more important for marketers to actually identify where they can use AI to simplify and speed things up?
Andy: I think so, yeah. So everyone knows about, you know, chucking stuff into chat GPT to create a landing page or to create an event description or whatever it is. But I think being able to do that at scale is kind of the next logical step. So being able to use, yeah, an integration tool like Data Fetcher to connect to Anthropic and generate, you know, the intro paragraph, whatever it is, being able to take old content and update it or repurpose it for, you know, hundreds or thousands of blog posts, it feels like the next kind of step, as well as, I guess, repurposing where you’re taking blog posts and generating images for them or generating shorts or something like that, that feels like they’re kind of next, the next step, I guess, with AI.
Mike: This has been fascinating, and I think, you know, the best thing I can say is people need to, if they’re using Airtable, try Lola Fetcher. But before we let you go, Andy, there’s a couple of questions we always like to ask people. And so the first one is, what’s the best marketing advice that’s ever been given to you?
Andy: So early on with Data Fetcher, I was trying to do everything, especially because I didn’t have a marketing background. I was trying to try every channel, you know, post to Facebook, get SEO and YouTube working and even do a bit of sales and stuff. And I was telling someone about this and they basically told me that if SEO and YouTube are working, just focus on those, just double down and just Nailing one or two channels is much more effective than trying to be everywhere and to everyone. And so I think that advice is just, yeah, it’s proven true over the last few years. And it’s really tempting, especially when a channel slows down to then think there’s a silver bullet of a new one. Um, but actually that’s the time to, to iterate and to get even better at that channel. So that was the best advice I got.
Mike: I love it, that’s great advice, focus on your strengths basically. The other question we always like to ask people, and I know you didn’t start your career as a marketer but you’re doing a lot of marketing now, is if you’re talking to someone who was just entering their career, just beginning their career as a marketer, what advice would you give them to make them successful?
Andy: I’d say probably just ship things. So yeah, just build stuff and get it out there and try and get anyone on the internet to care about it. Because that’s the hardest bit. It’s so easy to do a course or to learn a theory and stuff, but you don’t really learn until you actually start doing it. And so making those mistakes and having those learning experiences are probably what will lead to the next thing succeeding, even if you can’t get the first few things off the ground. It’s been true for me at least. I love it.
Mike: That’s brilliant. I mean, a really optimistic, positive way to end. I mean, Andy, if somebody has been listening to this and maybe they use Airtable already, they’ve never used Data Fetcher, how do they find out more about the tool and actually get to try it?
Andy: Yep. Just go to Data Fetcher.com or search for Data Fetcher on the Airtable marketplace and sign up for a free account and you can use basically all the features.
Mike: That’s awesome. Really simple. Andy, thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
Andy: Thanks so much.
Mike: It was a pleasure, Mike. Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
