How Redrock Entertainment built a Custom Operating System and Cut Software Costs by 60% with Noloco

“We needed a simpler way to keep Airtable as the source of truth while giving employees, vendors, and clients controlled access to it. Noloco gave us a more robust front end to unlock new capabilities and reduce costs.”

The Company

Based in Los Angeles, Redrock Entertainment (“Redrock”) is an entertainment company that delivers live events, media productions, creative services, and talent management through its four business divisions.

With more than 30 years of experience, Redrock has produced over 400 events worldwide and built an extensive network of artists, vendors, and partners across the entertainment industry.

The Challenge

Redrock first adopted Airtable to operate a custom CRM, but what began as a simple use case quickly grew into a more complex system. Teams were using it to manage projects, finance, vendor onboarding, contracts, time tracking, budgets, and cross-team operations.

As the business grew, so did the number of Airtable seats, interfaces, bases, and workflows Jesse VanDenKooy, Technology Solutions Architect at Redrock Entertainment, had to manage. Different teams needed different views, forms, and workflows, but duplicating Airtable Interfaces created maintenance issues. Each duplicate could also create related record detail pages, leaving Redrock with multiple versions of similar pages to keep in sync.

Airtable “really became a nightmare to manage, so it did not scale well,” says Jesse.

Cost was the second challenge. At one point, Redrock was paying for over 100 Airtable seats, even though many users only needed lightweight access.

“Someone to be able to edit a record, they have to have an editor seat, even if it’s just toggling a checkbox,” Jesse explains of Airtable’s pricing.

Redrock needed a simpler way to keep Airtable as the source of truth, while giving employees, vendors, and future clients controlled access to the workflows and data they needed.

The Solution: building a custom operating system

Using Noloco, Redrock built a company-wide operating system for project visibility, time tracking, vendor workflows, internal forms, contract processes, finance-related operations, and cross-team work.

Noloco’s custom code options allowed Jesse to incorporate custom branding and colors to make it feel like a completely custom app.

The build was still a significant project, so Jesse worked with Noloco experts to accelerate the setup. Today, Jesse manages the system on his own with a lean no-code and low-code stack that includes Airtable, Noloco, n8n, and other tools.

“Noloco is the hub that pulls all of our data and tools together into one place”

Why Redrock chose Noloco

After comparing Noloco’s capabilities with alternatives, it became clear that Noloco was better suited to the complexity of Redrock’s internal workflows.

Noloco delivered a scalable app layer on top of existing data sources like Airtable, with more flexible permissions, one centralized experience for different divisions, and role-based access for each team.

Most importantly, Redrock did not need to rebuild its operational data from scratch. Airtable could remain the database, while Noloco became the application layer that employees worked in every day.

“The feature that got us fully locked in was Spaces.” - Jesse

Spaces allowed Redrock to keep different divisions inside the same app, while still tailoring what each team could see and do. Shared workflows, like time tracking, could be exposed across spaces without being rebuilt for every division.

This image is a sample Noloco workspace shown for illustration purposes and does not represent Redrock Entertainment’s actual implementation.

The Results

“We’ve probably cut our annual software cost by about 60%.”

When Jesse pitched Noloco to leadership, he framed it as a more robust front end that would unlock new capabilities, unblock internal requests, and reduce software costs. Redrock reduced its seat-based pricing tools to less than a quarter of their previous level after setting up Noloco as the central hub.

The savings were significant, but the operational improvements were just as important. Redrock replaced scattered bases, interfaces, and division-specific hubs with one centralized place for teams to work, all while continuing to leverage Airtable’s existing integrations.

Airtable remains the source of truth for operational data, while Noloco turns that data into the custom operating system Redrock runs on.

To learn more about how Noloco could potentially help your business, contact the team at sales@noloco.io.