ZAPIER TUTORIAL: How to Use Zapier to Automate Your Work (FREE COURSE)

Hello and welcome to this training, From Zero to Automation Hero: How to Use Zapier to Automate Your Work. This is Isaac from Upstart.co. I'm gonna be walking you through this training in detail today. At a high-level overview, what we're gonna cover, we're gonna cover why Zapier is the ultimate automation platform currently and when you may wanna consider alternatives. We'll go through over-the-shoulder tutorials to show you how you create Zaps from scratch. These are the automations that you can create within the tool. We'll go through different examples of how to use some of the advanced built-in tools that Zapier has, and we'll also walk you through our thought process and philosophy on how do we— where do we start when we want to automate something? What are the different steps we take to automate anything? Even things that Maybe as of now you think are not possible to automate. This training, it's intended for not only business owners who want to leverage automation, but also for professionals who may want to learn how to use Zapier and how to use it maybe for the company they work for, either internally or maybe as a contractor. And internally, honestly, we will use this training not only to train team members, but hopefully we'll also share with the clients and prospects. that may wanna learn more about either how we work or how we think about the tool, or just wanna learn the tool for themselves. Now, why Zapier? This is a question we get asked often. If— why don't we often consider other tools? We've worked with other tools, we have tested other tools that are Zapier competitors, and we are honestly tool agnostic when it comes to what tools to use, what tools to recommend. For our clients and for our audience. But to also say that we believe in using established tools, and I wanna tell a quick story of a client of us that came to us and they was trying to save, maybe potentially trying to save money and was like, you know, I don't wanna use Zapier because it's expensive for us. We run a business that doesn't, that currently doesn't have very high margins. So we wanna fix that. But for now, we wanna use this tool called Automate.io. I told them like, okay, we can work with that. We don't have a problem with working with different tools. But I warned them that sometimes those different tools will take us longer to set up, et cetera, et cetera. And we went on and did that project literally 3 days, 3 days before we launched. A bunch of automations, the platform got acquired by Notion and shut down. So that really taught us a lot because I feel like a lot of people want to look for the cheap solution sometimes, but we believe in just opting for the little if you can afford it. And as of this writing, Zapier, it's the tool that has been around the longest, that has the most amount of apps that you can connect to it. And as a result, It's nine times out of ten the tool we recommend. If that changes at some point, we'll happily change our mind and change our recommendations. But that's that's how it is today. So let's go into zapier.com and start walking you through how to actually use it. All right. So this is currently Zapier's homepage, and we're gonna go ahead. And click on this button at the top right here. I'm going to sign up. We already have an account with this particular name, so I'm gonna go ahead and just add something here so that we can simulate that you're signing up from scratch. Okay, you go ahead, your work email, first name, last name, you click on Get Started. Let me use random password here. And they go ahead and ask you a couple questions. I'm gonna skip this because this might not be as relevant for you, but you would simply fill this out according to your own description and your own situation. Okay, so now I'm in and I can see the dashboard at a high level. And what I can see right here is that actually in the onboarding process, I selected the tools that I use. I selected only 3: Gmail, Google Sheets, and I can't recall what the other one was. But you can see right here, they give you direct recommendations of different automations you may wanna set up. These are typically very simple 2-step automations. But here in the sidebar, you can see Zaps. This is where you create the automations. And within the apps, you will see that you have the ability to create different folders, both private and shared, in case you intend to use this with a bigger team later on. Right now there are no folders, just homepage, but this is where you click a private or a shared folder. Here's where you can start creating these apps, which we're going to do later in this training. Another important part, these are some beta features I'm not going to walk you through on this particular training, but A very important one is My Apps. This is where you would manage your connections. Okay, this is where you would add the different tools that you use and the different accounts. So if you have— if you intend to use Gmail, for example, and you wanna send emails from 2 different email addresses, you would have to make sure you add those 2 connections separately here, and here you'd be able to manage them either by renaming them Either by retesting them, making sure they're working correctly, or deleting them potentially. Here in the Saps story, it's where you use— it's what you use to monitor the automations, and you'll see the runs, and we'll walk you through this a little bit in more detail later on. Alright. So a big part of Zapier, a big part of what Zapier does, it's connecting to So as a result, it's sometimes important to understand what are the different tools that you can integrate with it. And they happen to have an app database, kind of like their own search engine on what are the different tools that they can integrate with. And you can easily search for the tool that you need. That database that I'm referring to, you can find it at sapier.com. .com/apps. I'm going to— before I create your first app, I'm gonna quickly walk you through what are some of the most popular apps that we see on the partners we work with. And yeah, so let's go from the bottom to the top and see some of these categories that they have and some of the most popular tools within them. So we have sales and CRM, very popular tools here that people use. So CRM, I click here, Pipedrive, Salesforce, very popular tools, Close, Zoho. Those are some examples. Another category is forms, very common as well. Of course, you have Google's native form resolution, but you also have things like Typeform and Jotform and Gravity Forms, which is used a lot in WordPress sites. You also have scheduling solutions. So the most popular one by far is Calendly, but there are others like OneStop and Acuity Scheduling. Also tools for you to design. So these are typically used for contracts, proposals, things of that nature. DocuSign being the leader, but a lot of other tools that are frequently used in the small businesses we work with. Are here as well. Okay, we also have marketing productivity as very common categories within marketing. You will see that you have different things, but marketing automation, based on the fact that that's kind of like what we do, it's one of the most common ones. Hotspot and ActiveCampaign by far being the leaders. Lead connector, also sometimes referred to as GoHighLevel is also a very popular one. Klaviyo, for example, for e-commerce companies and a lot more. In the productivity category, we have project management, of course, very popular for companies that wanna manage their projects, whether it's Jira if it's a more software-related company, but also Asana, ClickUp, Trello, and Monday as some of the most popular ones here. As well. Also have databases depending on how big the company is. If they have it like a very big analytics, a lot of things to track, maybe even a team that's dedicated to data specifically, they might have some SQL databases in place. But some of the companies that we work for like to stick to low-code or no-code tools or relatively small. So they might stick with something like Airtable or Knack, for example. If we go into the content category and files, of course, the very most popular file management tools available, Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive, and also some of the more cloud-based solutions for enterprise like Amazon S3 will be here. Very common as well is communication, typically either internal or external. We already mentioned Gmail, of course, and Outlook as the most popular email tools where you can connect them to Zapier and trigger things from emails you receive or send emails automatically. But we also have team chat. The most common ones are Slack and Microsoft Teams, Google Chat. Some companies use that as well. And of course, video conferencing tools like Zoom and Google Meet. Zoom is what I'm using to record this right now. So lastly, I want to walk you through commerce and artificial intelligence. Commerce, pretty popular tools here from payment processing perspective, Stripe and PayPal. Of course, all the businesses need to have a way to process payments. If not, you know, they wouldn't be business. And also proposals, which there's a variety of options here from Ignition, Proposify, Better Proposals. And this is very popular for especially service-based businesses like agencies or firms that pretty commonly in their sales process, they send proposals to their prospects for them to accept and move forward. Lastly, and this has been something that has been popping up a lot recently after the ChatGPT rise, it's artificial intelligence. And of course, the first one is ChatGPT itself. There are other tools that are valuable for specific use cases like Raxonic for content, Descript for transcriptions, and a lot more. So that gives you an idea of the different tools you can connect to Zapier and hopefully gives you some ideas of how you can integrate things between them. We'll walk you through a few examples in a second. Right now we'll start simple and we will build from there. But let's start right here. Alright. So let's build a simple step where when someone fills out a form submission, we wanna create a deal in a CRM like Pipedrive. It's beyond the scope of this training to dive into how to use each of those platforms. You should know is that Paperform, it's a form solution. Simple enough. And Pipedrive, we'll just look at their pipeline functionality here. Well, you can see that you'll simply use it to keep track of different cards. You could create one here as an example. You will use it to keep track of certain deals and prospects and the different stages in your sales process. So I'll quickly go ahead and create a simple form here and come back in a second. All right, so I've created a simple form here. It's asking for full name, email, company name, and source. I'm just gonna look at how it would look for the customer. Okay, this is the form. Let's actually give it a name. Okay, I proceeded to call it Zapier Training Test. Which will come in handy in a second. For the sake of example, I'm just gonna make sure I populate something here just to give it one data point to work with. And in a second, I'm going to go back to Zapier and let's see how we would build this particular Zap. Okay, so let's go ahead and create— click on Create Zap in the sidebar on the screen. And you will always see the same pattern here as any workflow needs the first step, which would be the trigger, and all the other steps will be actions. In this case, the trigger we want to use, the when do we want to start the workflow, it's Paperform. So we've got Paperform, and we see the only event it has right here is a new form. Submission. So I'm gonna click on that. I'm gonna click on continue, and I'm going to connect the account that I'm using. Okay. Technically, you could go into my apps and first connect all the different tools you can use, but it's more efficient just to get started with the workflow and connect them as you go. I click on sign in here, and since already signed in, you can see that that process is instant. It's not always the case. Sometimes you have to either introduce your credentials again, or you have to look for certain keys to allow you to connect to Zapier. But in this case, pretty simple, pretty straightforward. Let's click and continue. And here's where I'm gonna be able to select the specific form where we'll like to trigger this workflow from. Okay, click that. I'm gonna see Zapier training tests right here. I'm gonna click continue. And when— and it allows me to test the trigger, and what it does is it tries to find a data point. So it tries to find the last response. For example, this is one of the reasons why I first gave it some sort of data early on, so that it could pull it up accordingly. You can see that it did. All right, here's my name. Here's my Email, my company name, and the source that I filled out. Okay, so that's step number one. That's effectively achieved and done. Now if I click on continue, now it's going to lead me to the second step. And as we described, we want to create a deal in our CRM. We go back here, we go to deals. You can see that We only have one deal here right now, which is the example that I created earlier. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to look for Pipedrive. And while I create this app, I will test while I create it, but I'll also like to test once I finish. Okay? So it gives me the option to create certain things. And here what we said we want to create, it's a deal. We're going to go ahead and click on create deal. We can continue. And similarly, you're going to ask us to connect Pipedrive. I'm going to click on sign in. I'm just going to follow the instructions that they give me. Something went wrong. Let's try that again. Okay, looks like they might be having some issues on the server or something like that. I'll just simply pause this not to waste your time and come back to you once I find a resolution for it. Alright. So I am back. But now I am on, on our actual account, because looks like PyBright might have a limitation of how many to how many Zapier accounts you can connect a Pipedrive account to. So they might have that limitation built in. And that's probably why with that new account we created, I couldn't connect our account. But now I went ahead and recreated this Zap on our actual account and go ahead and went ahead and plugged that in. So let's just click on continue. Ignore that little technical issue right there. And let's see what Zapier requires us to give them as data. Okay, we have to give them a title. You can see the asterisk and the fact that it's required. And I think that's probably it. However, you can see that it allows me to give it a lot more if I want. It allows me to give it the particular status. By default is open, but you know, it could potentially be different for different situations. The stage, the stage is important because the stage I want the person to, for example, start here in the qualified section first, or if I wanted to put them on another, any other stage, any other column here that could change that, right? Actually, I'm going to go ahead and Make sure I put that on the qualified of the simple pipeline. Let's see if we can find that sample pipeline, I should say. Okay, so here it is, qualified sample pipeline. I'm gonna select that. Let's leave all the other things as is, but let's try to fill out the details that they gave, that they the person gave us in the form. Okay, so you will have the email address. You can see here email address answer. You'll have the name. Let's use the name in the title. Let's do full name here and let's do source. Company name should be somewhere here. Here it is. And for the source, it's interesting that the source here, it's a dropdown field that's going to require us to add an additional step. But I'm trying to keep it simple. Let's just say we fill out the email address, the company name, and the title as the full name for now. And we're gonna go ahead and click on continue. And I'm gonna click— you have the option to test the action right here just to see if it goes through before you even publish this app and get it running. You can see here, you can click on it. We have a new deal called Isaac Pro Demo. And you can see here the email address and the company name populated. So that's just one quick example of how you would create a very simple 2-step SAP. And just for the sake of finishing here, let's go ahead and publish and turn it on. You can see how the process looks like. And let's call it a quoting. Zapier training. I like to call it, you know, trigger with a specified form, then arrow, create Pipedrive deal, just to make sure that later on you know what that Zap is doing. So it's best practice to use some sort of naming convention that You and your team can agree with. Okay. Now, since this is now live, technically I should be able to come here, fill this out, and see that that deal come in without touching Zapier. So we can go ahead and try that now. Just use a different name, James Doe. Okay, let's submit that. And if we wait for a few seconds, we're— oops, it's— we are ready. Awesome. James Doe. You can see email address, company name, and the name in the title. So that's an example of how you will get Create a very simple 2-step SAP. But as you noticed, there were a couple of things that we, if we wanted to do, we would have to use other tools. For example, what if you want to split the name with the first and the last name separately? Or if you want to make sure that this source is mapped out properly to the options that you have on your source on Pipedrive. That requires knowledge of the different Zapier built-in tools that are available, and we're gonna cover that in a later section. Alright, let's move a level up. Now let's try to create a multi-step Zap, a Zap that requires a couple of different steps, and see how that plays out. Okay, so let's assume that this particular person that just qualified After filling out the form, I wanna make sure that they can schedule a call of some sort, as you can see here. And I want that deal to move automatically when that happens. Okay. And for that call to be booked, we're gonna use a scheduling solution like Calendly in order to process that. So I'm gonna go ahead and go back to Zapier. And create a Zap from scratch again. Okay, so in this case we're gonna be using Calendly as the trigger, and I've already created a separate event on Calendly called Zapier Training Consultation. Gonna go ahead and just run an example here. So we have some data to work with. Gonna schedule that event. Okay. And now I'm gonna go back to Zapier. Okay. As a trigger, we just said we're gonna use Calendly. And in the events, we only have 2 options: whenever someone schedules an event or whenever someone cancels an event. So gonna click here on when invitee is created. Click on Continue. The account's already selected in this case. Click on Continue again. I'm gonna test that trigger. So you can see here we have the name of the event called Zapier Training Consultation. You have the specific ID of the event, which is actually what I like to use as the filter moving forward. And why I say the filter moving forward, that's something you might be asking yourself. What am I talking about? Well, at no point did I tell Calendly here, hey, only trigger this when it's this event that we're talking about. Technically, if I create a different event and I try, this is going to trigger, and I don't want that. And that's when you have to use SAP Universal Building Tools. Like filter. These allow you— this allows you to stop the workflow if it doesn't meet a certain criteria, and that way you don't even get charged as a task for this actions to run. So let's put here event type. You could use name, for example, and say if the name contains Zapier training, you could use that. For example, in this case, it should tell you that yes, it would have continued. I personally have found over time that I rather use the event UUID. Sorry, the event type UUID, as you can see here. And I just use exactly matches the UUID that this already shared. The way you get that ID, as I just showed earlier, is you see it right here. And if for some reason you can't test it in advance, In the Calendly page itself, you can actually get it by looking at the page source, and you find for UUID, and you're going to see it right here. Just the things you've learned, we've learned over the years of how to do this, because here's the thing. What if the client or the person handling the Calendly decides to change the name from Zapier training to automation training, all of a sudden this would stop working. So as a way to make sure that the event itself continues running regardless of whether the change— the name changes, we opt for using the ID instead. Okay. From here, what we wanna do, remember we said we want to update one of these deals and move it to the demo schedules stage. However, we don't have that deal right now, so we have to find it. And typically you have to use a variable here in order to know based on what will I find it. Typically that's when the email becomes valuable, right? Like this person signed up with a particular email and that email should already be here, right? So in this example, this is me. So I'm going to go ahead and say I want to find a deal. The account's already connected. I want to find it through— find it by the email address. Okay, email address. It's, uh, this custom field right here. So, uh, it's going to tell me, okay, what email address you want to use? I'm going to use the email address of the invitee that just got a call. If I do that, then I click on continue and I click on test action. The system will try to find that deal on the backend and come back to me with a result. So you can see here that the ID, the deal number 11, which right here, deal number 11, as you can see in the URL. That's called. Let's see, where are those values? Well, let's see. Isaac. Yeah, here it is. Title: Isaac Bergamo. And you can see here the email address. Now it's it's it has an a weird ID, but you'll see later on that it's it's easier to see it when you find the update field event instead. So let's look at. Create another step where we want to update the deal of the existing deal. Click and continue. Click and continue again. And here is going to tell me, hey, what? What's the deal you want to update? And here what we're going to do with we could technically give a deal. We're gonna say, hey, take that deal from the previous step. That's what the custom tab is there for. When that value, it's not a static value but a variable. So I'm going to click on find deal and I'm going to select the specific ID that I found in the last step. Okay. And here the only thing we said we want to update is the stage. Okay. Let's click on that. And let's look for the demo scheduled stage. Gonna go ahead and click on continue, click on test action. And we should see that stage move here. If it's easier, if we just get on the higher level view here, you can see that now it's on this column. So perfect, we succeeded. Let's publish this app again and let's run another test live. This is just best practice. I always like to test both, um, when I'm building and also after. Okay, let's quickly name this. Okay, so let's go ahead and book another call at a random time, and instead let's use The email address that we use from James, though. This is james@opsa.co. I'm gonna schedule that event. And let's see what happens here. There you have it. So that's an example of a multi-step SAP. And we can actually go ahead and go back to this app here, to this app. And if you click on history, you'll be able to see the runs. This was— this comes pretty handy. For example, it didn't run and you want to understand why it didn't, or if it runs and gave you an error, this is where you go ahead and look at exactly what happened at exactly what time, and you'll be able to monitor here Whether there was something wrong. So that's just a very simple example of how you would build a 2-step Zap and a multi-step Zap within Zapier. Now let's talk about the different tools you have available. We already noticed that, for example, here we had to use a filter. That's one of the Zapier tools, but there's a lot more. Of course, filters, arguably the one that's most used. From a programming perspective, it's essentially the equivalent of an if statement. And what it does, as you saw, is that it stops this app if the conditions that you tell it aren't met. It's often used right after the trigger, just like we did with that calendar event. And that's essentially a way to add more filtering, add more conditions to that app that you just created. You just want that to run specifically for that Calendly event. And if the trigger doesn't have that filter built in, like the pipeline, like the paper form one did, then you have to add that step and create it yourself. Another of the basic building tools that Zapier has is just a delay. If you want to delay this step for a specific period of time, you would do— you would add it in, and you can have either a predefined delay, like you You want to delay it for 2 hours, you want to delay it for a minute, you want to delay it for, you know, 7 days, or you can have some sort of variable and delay it until specific time if you give that data point. I want to go ahead and edit one of the steps that we created here so that you can see how that looks like if I add an action here. And let's just say that after you update it, you want to send some sort of email that seems like, hey, 2 hours later, when I send an email that looks manual, you can see here you add the delay application, the delay tool. And in the event you'll see, okay, delays for set amount of time. You also have delay until. This is typically the 2 that you use the most. Arguably delay for almost, you know, most of the times what you'll be using. And they ask you for units, and they ask you for a value. Now, what you can do here, it's put minutes, hours, days, or weeks. Let's just say minutes. And although here they tell you, you can use 1 as the minimum, you can actually— a little hack here— you can actually use decimals and say 0.1. So that way you violate this rule essentially, and you can have, say, like a 6-second delay, right? If it's 10% of a minute. But let's see, you say you wanna put 2 hours, you would simply go ahead and do that. You click on continue. Sometimes you can technically test it just to make sure that it would work, but it's kind of pointless to a degree. And here you can see it says today at 3:37 in this European time zone, which aligns with, you know, what would be, what time it would be in 2 hours. There's an example of how the Zapier delay tool works. Let's look at another basic tool that you may want to use regularly, and it's the schedule. Essentially what it does, it allows you to run a Zap periodically. Essentially what it's, it's, it's name suggests. Okay, you can do this every hour, every day, every week, and you could use the filters that we just talked about to even further refine this. Okay, so let's actually go ahead and create a Zap because this is a trigger, so you can only use it here in the first step as far as I understand. If I click— if I look for schedule here, you'll see it show me that there's no action available. And here you see every day, every hour, every month, every week. It actually allows you to, for example, if it's every day, you can pick this specific time. If it's every month, you can pick the specific day. And it's every week, you can also pick the specific day. Now, of course, you can get a lot fancier. For example, if it's every hour, But it's only between hours 9 and 5, for example, 9 to 5, right? You could actually do that with filters, and that's kind of what it was suggesting. You would have this, but you tell it to run time hour when the time hour— it's 1 PM in this case, but you may want to tell it only run, you know, when the hour right here that you gave me, it's between this and this. Or maybe it only runs hourly, but on specific months or specific days. You can see how you can start combining these relatively basic tools to run through different scenarios. So that's in— that's it on the basic tools. We'll talk about 3 other that are intermediate that are pretty common. When we talk about 3 advanced tools moving forward. So let's get into that. Okay, let's talk about path. This is a very useful tool to have in your toolbox. This is essentially a set of if statements. It allows you— it allows the Zap to run perform different actions based on certain conditions. By default, you're capped at 5, but I'm gonna show you how that looks like. So following the example of the schedule, it's typically not— you might have other use cases, but for the sake of explanation, you can see here that I can add 5 different paths. And let's just say that for this example, I wanna run it every hour. But if it's 9, 10, 11, 12, or 1, each— in each hour I want to run a different set of actions, I'll be able to use that here. Another good example we could use here is here. in the Zap we created earlier. You notice that we created this Zap and we put them— we created a deal and we put them on the qualified stage immediately. But imagine that we had a question in the form that said, hey, maybe some sort of qualifying question. What's the team? What's your team size? What's your budget? And depending on the answer, we may want to put them either on a qualified stage Or maybe an unqualified stage based on their answer. So that's another example of how you'd use paths to have, you know, if this, then that, but in multiple scenarios. It's capped at 5 paths, as you saw by default, but it's actually possible to increase it if you talk to Zapier support. Over time, I feel they've been more resistant to the idea. Previously was like you just send them an email and it did it. Now they kinda ask you why you wanna use it, and it looks like their, their reason is always that it makes it harder to troubleshoot in case you ask for support. So that's kinda like the reason behind the cap for them. I wish that wasn't the case. But yeah, that's, that's what it is. Let's keep going. Let's talk about loops. Loops. It's essentially the equivalent of a for. I didn't put that here in the presentation, but it's essentially what it is. You want to run a set of actions iteratively. You don't want to run those set of actions multiple times, and you only stop it when the condition is met. Typically, the condition is just that a list is exhausted, and actually they have a very visual— Zapier has a very visual thing here on their website that allows you to understand what we're talking about here. So you can see here that if you give it 4 different items, it will run 4 different times and it will run, you know, a specific set of actions for each one of those items you gave it. That's an example of how that tool works. And another tool that's pretty powerful And it, it can be helpful in a lot of different scenarios is the formatter. I, I argue it does a lot more than formatting because it's specifically when you think about formatting something like Excel or, or Google Sheets, you're thinking, oh, I'm gonna put the name, the number with the more decimals or with the currency in front of it. And it can do that, but it's, it's, it can do a lot more. It can work not only with numbers, but also with tags with date and times and has some utility functions as well. We wouldn't have the time to dive into all of them, but I do wanna show you a couple just to start giving you ideas on what you can do with it. So it's always here, or at least at the time of this recording, it's here because it's one of the most popular tools that they have. And regarding date and time, just a couple of events and transformations that you can do. It's, for example, you want to format the date differently, right? There's a lot of different date formatting standards that you can pick from, like this, right? Or January, or you don't even use the name of the month, but the number of 01. And there's a lot of variety here. And you can actually not only use these by default, but you can even create your own custom format in case that's helpful. You can also add or subtract time, right? You can say this date plus a year, this date plus a month, let's say plus a week. And you can also compare dates. So if you have 2 dates and you wanna know the difference between those dates to use that value later on, that's something you can do as well. In terms of numbers, there's a lot of things you can do. As I mentioned earlier, Not only formatting as numbers, as currency, as phone numbers, but also perform specific operations and have even spreadsheet-style formula when you can tell it to, you know, round up, multiply, divide, a lot of mathematical functions that, you know, realistically we haven't used some of these like tangent and sinus, because come on. In real, in real business, like, it's rarely used. But this— some of these things might help, especially like the medians, max, minimum, average, things like that. And it's pretty useful when you want to do, you know, multiple operations at once. This spreadsheet formula comes very handy. You also have text. So let's go through some examples and some options you have here, simply like capitalize Have a default value, struct specific email or number or pattern or phone number or URL of specific string, finding a specific value in it, having the length, replacing something, splitting the text. This is actually something that I would have used in that first step that we created because it gives us the full name in the form, but we wanted to split it with a space to have the first and the last name separately, and a lot more. Okay, so those are tools that you have at your disposal with the Zapier by default. There's also utilities. This is a little more complex, but typically here you would work with strings or line items, and you would have, you know, lists if you want to pick from a list, you want to pick the first or the last. Item from the list, or the nth item from that list. This is something you would use, and other interesting things here that you can leverage to format and manipulate data. So that's it on the intermediate tools. Let's talk about a couple tools that are a little more advanced, and you'll probably come across as you build more complex workflows. Here's the SAP Year Manager. It's actually not necessarily an advanced tool from a usability perspective. It's relatively easy to understand. But what we found is that clients rarely use it. Professionals rarely use it once they are, because they don't really know when it's most useful. Now we're gonna tell you, we've used it a lot for task limit usage. So essentially at a high level, what, what Zapier Manager does, it allows you to have triggers and actions within Zapier itself. So it gives you data from your Zapier account. Things like if an error comes in, notify me. If Zapier is turned off, notify me. If the task limit is being reached of 80% or 90%, Also notify me, let me know. And these are things that we set up for clients that we work with. If we are, you know, managing their account so that we can keep track of and tell them, hey, Mr. Client, your account is now at 80%, and we have been adding a lot of automation. So it's quite likely that we'll have to upgrade this month or maybe next month. And that allows us to keep track of the different errors, make sure that the steps we turned on don't get turned off, because sometimes Zapier turns off certain Zaps if they have frequent errors. I want to make sure we are aware of all of that. So this isn't necessarily advanced because it's difficult to use, but advanced because most people don't know that's there and don't know in which uses, in which use cases it can be useful. The other 2 tools I'm gonna mention here. Well, I'll discuss in more detail later, but it's the webhooks and the code block. So the webhooks, at a high level, this isn't, you know, beyond the scope of this training to, to go into detail on what webhooks are. I'm gonna have a separate lesson for that. But essentially, at a high level, you use a webhook in the trigger step, in that first step, when you wanna receive a message from a service. And you use a webhook as a, as a, you know, action step, either the second step or any step that's not the first one. If you want to send a message to a service, that's kind of like super simplification, because again, I'm going to be discussing this in a lot more detail later. This is very useful for automations, especially when you don't have the actions you want natively on Zapier and you need to use the application program interfaces or APIs or certain services or tools to actually do what you want. Then there's code. Self-explanatory. Essentially allows you to create a block of code when sometimes maybe the no-code, the no-code or the low-code tools or the built-in Zapier tools are not enough. You can use JavaScript or Python to go beyond that. Of course, I'm not gonna teach coding in this training, but I'll discuss a little later when it is actually useful to use code and when we suggest to use code, because we get a lot of developers that wanna apply to work with us for clients. And sometimes we've noticed that they're tempted to always use code. And that's kind of like Defeats the point of using a tool like Zapier in the first place, to a degree. So it's important to understand that we have that option, but we don't want to overuse it either. That's going to talk— that's something I'm going to talk about later. There's a lot of other tools. I'm not going to have the time to discuss them all. We've used tools like Storage, like Subtask, which is the equivalent of like separate functions, Digest as well. And these are some of the other ones that you can use, like sending emails, sending SMS messages, parsing an email, trying to kind of like extract certain data from it, translating, shortening a URL. These are things that you have at your disposal. And Zapier is good at every so often releasing a new tool and releasing to the public. But that's it on tools. I think with a couple of the ones that we'll probably use the most are the most useful. These are here in case you ever find a use case for them. But yeah, hope that helps. Let's move on to the next lesson. Let's continue. But before I do that, feel free to grab a snack. It's been a couple of, probably more than an hour at this point. So if you need automation, if you're in your business and this has been interesting, but maybe a little bit over your head, feel free to visit opsword.co/consultation for us to talk to you and see if we can help you in any way. And if you do this for a living or you're considering doing this for a living, you may wanna apply for one of the roles that we have in our company. Check out opsword.co/careers or simply comment down below if you're a curious viewer. Uh, wanting to learn about Zapier and you've found this helpful so far. Let's move on to the deep dive on webhooks and API. This is a very important lesson. I want to start explaining why, why are webhooks and APIs useful when it comes to automation? Well, they essentially enable you to automate actions beyond what Zapier's default trigger and actions are. Meaning Zapier by default set up some basic triggers and actions, and not always those triggers and actions cover every action you can do with the API. So they essentially not only allow you to go beyond triggers and actions for the tools you may want to be, you may want to use, but also if there's a tool that is not integratable with Zapier, it allows you to integrate it seamlessly into your systems. And we're gonna see exactly how. Let's start with webhooks. What is a webhook? I like to think about it as just a simple WhatsApp conversation between 2 people. And in this case, those 2 people are 2 platforms, right? This is our one platform and it's sending it to a URL. Technically speaking, and it's saying, hey, this just happened, and the other one is receiving it accordingly. So it's essentially a way to allow for real-time communication between 2 software systems. You're sending a notification when a specific event occurs in one system. An example would be Pipedrive saying, hey, Zapier, XYZ just happened. An activity just got updated. A deal just got merged. A person just got created. And then Sabio said, awesome, received. Thanks a lot. Okay. This is just a visual example of what that would look like. We'll, we'll do it. We'll actually go ahead and do it on the screen in a second. So let's just say you want to send a text message when a Piper activity is updated. Okay. Now, if you follow the hierarchy we talked about earlier, You would look for Pipedrive on Zapier's Pipedrive— Zapier's integration database, essentially. And you'll see, and you scroll down below, that you'll have certain triggers and actions built in. Okay, if I click on triggers, remember what I want here: when a Pipedrive activity Is updated. You see here, this is when a new activity is created. So it's not— this is not useful for us. Let's look for updated instead. And I can see updated deal stage. I can see updated deal, updated organization, updated person, but there is no such thing as updated activity. That's one example where, okay, The trigger is not— the trigger I want is not here. So we're gonna need to use Pipedrive webhooks. And let's see exactly how you would do that. Okay, so I'll start by creating a trigger webhook in Zapier to have my URL. Okay, I'm going to log in. Okay, let's continue creating the steps we were on last time. Let me just delete this real quick. Let's create one from scratch. So in the first step, since this is a trigger that we're talking about, I'm gonna create a webhook. You can actually see the webhook right here. If not, you'll simply type it in and it'll come up. Okay, here I like to do catch hook typically. It's the easiest one to work with. In both cases, catch hook or catch raw hook, you're going to be presented with a URL and you're gonna copy it. The difference is I'm actually gonna show you in A second. Here you'll get all of the variables that come in from the data point, sort of like formatted to an extent and separated. If you use the raw hook, it just comes all into one body, and you have to then format it accordingly. So typically this is the first option I explore. Now I have my URL. Perfect. Let's try to look for the webhooks in Articulate even, even has it, right? Sometimes you are doing this process, you don't necessarily know, you're hoping it does. But if you look on Google, PipeDrive webhooks, and you'll see, oh, webhooks they have in their knowledge base. Let's click there and see what it's all about. So they tell you that you can set up a webhook. And in order to do so, you would have to go to tools and apps and to the webhook functionality. In order to create a webhook. So let's do that right now. Let's go into company settings. They suggested tools and apps. You can see it right here, and you can see here webhooks. I set one up earlier today. I'm gonna delete it just so that we can do it now on the screen. So I click on create new webhook. And you'll see 2 things. What is the object I'm going to be looking into, and what is the action I'm gonna trigger? This asterisk means all events. So if I say activity in this case, and I pick asterisk, whether an activity is added, deleted, updated, or merged. It's going to, in all of those cases, it's going to send the message to Zapier. In this case, let's just use added initially for simplicity so that we can actually test it quickly on our end. So I'm going to click, I'm going to copy paste the URL that I took from Zapier. I'm going to click on save. Okay, now what I'm going to do, just going to go ahead and create a— let's open up a deal on the ones we created earlier. And I'm going to create an activity. Okay, let's call this activity Sample Activity Number 1. Save. And that activity is just saved. It's just added. If I come back to Zapier, let's see if that quote unquote message got sent and got received. So oops, looks like we found a request. Let's look into it. Let's look at the data. As I told you, the data comes already broken down because I picked the hook. So Zapier is doing that on its own. I can see added. Perfect. I can see all domain. Perfect. Let's look if I can see something that identifies this particular call. Here's the subject, sample activity. Awesome. It's a call. There's a lot of empty values, but I can see that it's related to this deal, which is deal number 11, and that the activity ID is number 2. The owner— I can see a lot of things, and this would allow me to say Hey, now that this happened, let's send a text message. If you have a sales team, for example, you could even say send it specifically to Roland if you had— if you wanted to go that far. I'm not gonna dive into the details. I just wanna show you specifically how the webhook would be set up. And this is one way which Moving forward, every time— let's go back to the webhooks. Every time an activity is added, you can perform a set of automatic activities, automatic actions within a particular step. Okay, so we followed the article. And we test it accordingly. Let's go into APIs because I feel that these are the 2 sides of the same coin. Essentially, webhooks, as you saw, will be used kind of like for triggers and when it's from Pipedrive to Zapier. And API will be the exact opposite. It will be for actions, and it's when you want to do something from Zapier On Pipedrive. Hope that makes sense. I like to think of an API as a robot's login page and dashboard. It's essentially a way that you allow a robot, you allow, you enable, you are able to programmatically access an account and do something with it. If you think about a user interface, which is what we call when, you know, the login page and the dashboard of a software tool, when the human can log in and do a variety of things once it's logged in. It's the same thing with the application interface. You are able to authenticate, okay, aka log in, and then you're able to do certain things. And an API documentation Tells you exactly, hey, here are— here's how you perform these actions. Okay, so there's the visual. Here's a little robot, and it's looking at a login page. Of course, it doesn't look like that in real life, but that's the analogy that I found that makes the most sense, and it's easier to understand. Let's do an example. Let's say you want to delete a Pydot activity. You just created one. So let's say that when maybe a use case that you can think of is when this person cancels a call, maybe on Calendly or other platforms, all their activities are deleted or their activities related to their deals are deleted. That's like a use case. I wanna delete an activity as an action. So I'll go ahead and repeat the same process. I'll open the Pipedrive integrations. And remember, you can always get here by going to zapier.com/apps, looking for the specific app you're talking about, and this page will come up. I scroll down and I look now for actions specifically. I can see that I can create a new activity. That's great. But remember, I— here I wanna delete it. I can see that I can update an activity, and that's awesome. But I want to again delete it, and I do not see an option to delete it. So what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to follow the Hypergraph API documentation to get this done. Let's see how you do this. So one thing I think is very important is first to understand terms, because you can get— you can— it will make it easier for you to find what you want. So in this case, activities is the name that Pipedrive uses, but other platforms may call these tasks. You have deals, you have person, you have Contacts, you have products. It's important to understand these terms from the get-go so you know what you're looking for. So in this case, I'm looking to delete an activity, specifically deleting an activity. Some again, some other platforms you may have to look for delete meeting, delete appointment, delete task, and you need to make sure that you are aware of the different things. And for the sake of this conversation, I'll call each thing an object. You need to know the exact name of all the objects involved in that platform, and you simply Google the platform and API or developer docs to see if you can find something in Google. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm gonna search for Pipedrive API. And here's the first link. You can see developers.pythons.com. That looks promising. Sometimes you don't actually find it on the first listing. There are other platforms that exist that kind of like keep track of APIs. So you sometimes may need to go a little deeper into it to find it. But here we found it. here in the first URL. So I'm gonna open it up and let's see what it's up. You can see here endpoints. There are 2 things we're looking for. Let me see if I have this. Yes, we'll first find— trying to find the authentication instructions. And here I see endpoints directly. So I'm gonna open up the developer documentation as well, and I keep these 2 open. Okay. In the developer docs, Here we should find authentication somewhere. That's typically— if, if you can't see it here, it's probably under Getting Started. But here you can see there is indeed an authentication page that it's telling us, based on whether we want to create an app or we're working on API token integration, which is our case, we just need a token. And you can find that token and put it in the URL. You are given the keys. You're given the username and the password to the robot, essentially to log in. I'm gonna keep that open, and I'm gonna keep going with my instructions here. You may— you also want to find a list of endpoints. Endpoints are typically composed of different things, which I'm gonna walk you through in a second. But here you can see endpoints, and you're gonna look for the object you want to deal with. Remember, we are dealing with activities in this case. And when you open up the different, um, the endpoint or the object, the endpoints related to the object that you want, you're going to see the different actions you can do with it. So you can see here, you can get the details on an activity. You can get all the activities. You can update an activity. You can add an activity, which we can do through Zapier, remember. But what we can do in Zapier is delete an activity, and we can do so here. So I'm gonna click right here, and this is going to be— this along with this is going to allow us to delete that activity directly on Zapier. Now I want you to pay attention to all the components of an endpoint. You have a URL. In this case, it's truncated, but it's because the base of it, it's the URL of the account, which they actually share here in their request page. Let's check that out real quick. So URL naming, typically you have some sort of structure and you can see here company domain name dot Pipedrive .com/api/v1, and then whatever it is that you have on the URL, in this case activities/id. You have an HTTP method. There are a couple ones. The most useful ones to, to know about are the GET, where typically when you are, um, finding or getting something, as its name suggests, the DELETE to delete something, You have POST to create something. You have PUT to update something. For the most part, those are the 4 most popular ones. You also have parameters. You need to give it some data specifically. In this case, we only need the ID of the activity. Sometimes you need a lot more until you have parameters that are optional. And sometimes you also have parameters that are not necessarily on the path on the URL, but, uh, they might be in the query parameters, they might be on the header, they might be on, on a body. And we're gonna explore that a little bit further in a second. And you also have an example response of how it should look like if it is successful. So you can see here, it's gonna give you the data and it's gonna give you a success equals true. Now, in order to authenticate, as we just saw in their documentation, you simply need to have an API token. And you find that API token through— let's click on that link just to know. Here you can see you can get it manually on company settings, personal preferences, and API. So you would go to your own account, company settings, personal preferences, and API, and you would copy that API key to do what follows. I'm not going to, because you need to be careful not to share API keys with anyone because it allows access to all your data within that account. It could be deleted, it could be stolen, it could be whatever. Need to be very careful with that. Now, knowing all this, we're gonna use Postman, just a tool that allows you to test this API. It's faster in my opinion, and especially when they have an API collection. It's just like a plug-and-play system that tells you substitute this, substitute that, try it out and see if it works, or what is working. I'll show you how to transfer over to Zapier. As a webhook. Okay. So yeah, let's, let's work with Postman. If I click on Getting Started here, not all APIs have this, but if you see some sort of Postman, you can typically do a search. So you do a search around Postman to see if you can find anything. Both in, in all the documentations and all the official documentations that you find. So this is just an example, right? Running Postman. I found it here as well. So I'm just going to click here and it's going to ask me to fork a collection. If you don't have an account, you can create one real quick. I happen to have one already. I'd be logged in, so it's just going to ask me for a few Questions, and I'm gonna fork that collection. I'm gonna copy paste that collection session. I already had it, but this is the one I just created. And the the benefit here, as you can see, you have all your endpoints here already. And when I click on, for example, what I want, which is to delete an activity, it's gonna tell me exactly: Hey, substitute this with your API key. Substitute this with With your base URL, and you're ready to go. Essentially, I'll go to body. Typically, in body there might be something else you may want to fill out, or in headers. In this case, it's just two variables that you for the sake of sample, I'm going to pause this for the sake of security. I should say I'm gonna pause this and come back once I fill this out. And yeah. Okay, so I've taken— I fill out the API key here. I'm not gonna show it. And I'm going to also substitute the URL, which is absurd.pipedrive.com. And the only thing missing here is the ID of the specific activity we wanna delete. If you remember, when we catch the activity that was created, it told us that its ID, it's 2. So if we go ahead and just for testing purposes add a 2 here and click on send, you should be able to delete this activity. You saw how that happened immediately. That's an example of how you do that. And here you can see success is true and the data, uh, it's DID number 2 because you didn't have, uh, more data in this particular Instance. Now, essentially, you can see how quickly you can test an endpoint on on Postman. But let's go ahead and replicate that on Zapier. Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware of, there's no way to do that. Like, there's no way to do that. Like immediately, like just like copy paste. You have to kind of like build it one step at a time. So when you put webhooks in an action, you'll actually see as you get POST and POP. Those are the three most popular ones. If it if the one you want is not here, you go ahead and create a custom request. And when you create a custom request, it asks you for the method. Which in this case is going to be delete. And now it's asking for the URL. We already tested, and this works. Okay. In real life, this, this number will be, remember, not necessarily the A2 always, but rather you'll take it from a previous step so that it's dynamic, as was mentioned a few times. So I'm For the sake of example, this will be like a pointless step, but I'm going to create a Zap that creates an activity, sends it to Zapier, and then deletes it right away to see, just to test. So here, remember that I'll have to add API token and then add my token. And technically there's nothing in the body. So that would be about what I need. If I go to headers, there's an accept application/json. Sometimes that's not really required. So actually try to go ahead and test like this. Unfortunately, I have to show my API key. I'll have to blur it when I edit the video. It's just something I wanted to do, but whatever. Let's do it. Okay, I'm gonna add it here. Sorry about that. Let's go ahead and click and continue. I'm not gonna test this because I already have the activity number 2 deleted. I'm just going to skip this test, and I'm going to publish this tab again. Remember that this is just for illustration purposes. I want to show you how you use webhooks to trigger. How you use webhooks for actions in an API. This particular Zap is pretty pointless based on what it's doing, but it's for testing purposes. So let's go ahead and go back to deals and let's create an activity. Let's see what happens. Activity sample activity number 2. Let's go ahead and save it and let's wait. There it is. It just went really quickly. So if I go to history, I'll see that effectively I've been able to implement both sides of the coin that we're exploring right now. It's the webhook. How do I send data to Zapier that I would not have been able to otherwise because the trigger is not available. And how do I perform actions that are not available by default? And again, this is in the context of an app that's supported by Zapier. Sometimes you have apps that are not supported by Zapier at all, and you have to rely on webhooks and APIs and APIs to pretty much do everything. So that's an example. I do wanna give you some other potential methods that you may encounter when you read API documentation. In this case, you saw that pretty simple. It was based on the API key on the URL path. But sometimes it might be based on username and password. It might be based on token. But in any case, the API should tell you how to authenticate and should be relatively clear to the point that even if you don't have like huge technical expertise, you should be able to figure it out. Of course, it's just, it's beyond the scope of this training to cover every single API authentication, but I hope that this serves you in some way. Also, I should mention that there are different ways to share data. You saw how in the URL path, by adding in the URL, by adding the API as a query parameter and adding the ID in the path itself. We were able to delete that specific activity on that specific account. Sometimes maybe the API key is in a header instead or in the body. And the way that looks like on Zapier, it's— let me show you real quick. You might have noticed that here you have data, right? You have headers as well. You have basic authentication. This is for One of the methods that uses username and password. But again, it's beyond the scope of this training to dive into all of them. Just know that it's something that you may want to keep in mind. In terms of the body, typically you'll have a lot of different ways. If the platform you're using has a collection, it will be selected by default. But sometimes something you have to figure it out by some degree of trial and error. So that's it on webhooks and APIs. I think— I hope that even if you knew absolutely nothing about this, it helped you to understand it at a high level. And if you had some experience, it gave you something new to work with. Now, when and why to use code. This is very important because we touch on that hierarchy, that integration progression pyramid, that you may want to explore code and scripts at some point if there are things you can't do with Zapier. But sometimes there are things you actually can do with Zapier. That's just for, for you to save time, for you to save tasks. You may want to go ahead and use code. So this was a few examples where I've personally used code. And where I've just tried to document this for our team members and for other people to have those. So if you have any thoughts, feel free to comment. But essentially we use code when there are formatting that, you know, would have taken just too many steps to do on Zapier or too many tasks or too much time. Sorry, I'm gonna go ahead and show you a couple examples. There are sometimes just complex loops, like if you have a loop Within a loop, that would be a tough one. Or if you have a loop where you have to do different actions based on the specific iteration you're in, so that would be like a path within the loop. If you have multiple conditions, we talked about how Zapier only allows you to have up to 5 by default. So if you have probably more than that, that could be one example you might want to Use code for complex manipulation of data that you get from a webhook. If you get— if you catch a raw hook and you want to parse that data and then do something with it, that's probably a good example. And also task efficiency. So if there are things you can actually do with Zapier in 20 steps, but you happen to be able to do it in 3 with code, then You know, that's sometimes something we do. Now, I should mention, on the test efficiency part, typically I would rather have all of those 20, 25 steps initially, and then once I see they work, I kind of like compress the code once I see, you know, it's running without bugs essentially. And the reason is, again, remember that I said earlier, The more you get into this more complex methods, the harder it is to troubleshoot. So you're typically better off just creating it as simplest as you can with Zapier tools if possible, and then use code if you want to save on tasks and maybe save money on your client's accounts, save money on your own Zapier account. So I'll walk you through 2 examples that I came across recently. This is an accounting client that is using a particular project management tool to keep track of the tax returns they have to do. And if you know anything about taxes in the US, there are different types of returns and they each have a different due date. So in this case, it's like the new return The new tax return comes in and depending on the task that it is, there are 3 different paths depending on their due date, right? Either March 15th, April 15th, or May 15th. The challenge is each, with each task, you may wanna perform a set of actions. In this example, I have 4 different actions that I wanna do. And all of them depend in one way or another on the due date. So I can't have them before the paths. I have to have them after the path. The challenge is, as you can see now, I have 4 different— 3 different paths and 4 different actions within each one. So I have like 12 different steps. And later on, if I need to update something here, I'll have to update it here and here too. So that makes it a little bit harder to deal with. So here, example, example, if you use the code block, to run and the different ifs and give you the specific due date and other parameters that were needed based on the specific tax return. Now you can simplify it and only have 6 steps, the trigger and 5 additional actions where one of them will be a code block. And that would be one example where it was very useful for us to use code. Another example, it's a client that had a subscription product and they wanted to remind paid subscribers of their upcoming bill. Now, challenge is they actually wanted to make sure to exclude monthly subscribers because the people that subscribe monthly do not want to receive so many emails, but the people that subscribe quarterly or annually or biannually semi-annually, however you wanna call it, every 6 months, do get value from having a reminder. And essentially we had a daily schedule within Zapier that acquired or got all those paid subscribers in a list. And what it did is, for each subscriber, it filtered out the criteria, right? Like it, the Film Freak Frequency has to be equal or technically equal or greater than six months. Apologize, there's a little mistake there. Or technically not. It's the frequency is lower than monthly, right? Because it's oh it's less frequent. So frequency is equal or less than monthly. So it's as I said earlier semiannual. Quarterly, annual, et cetera. The billing end date is in 14 days. So that's another criteria because we want to remind them 14 days before their upcoming bill. And for each one of those people, we wanted to get their email address, tag them on a CRM, and send them that reminder email. Now the challenge is that if I had done this with Zapier tools, this had to run 5 different steps technically, right? Like 2 filters, 3 steps for each subscriber. So if this particular client had 1,000 subscribers and this is running daily, all of a sudden you can see how this would be unsustainable. So that's one example where I daily ran just one piece of code that did all of this, and only if it got a result, then it proceeded to do the different tasks. And the way that looks like, it's as follows. Essentially, now every day we're having one code block do everything. It's getting and filtering the paid subscribers, and we have a filter that says if result are found, then we have a loop that gets email, text contact, and sets that email. So essentially you can see the difference how here every day we'll be running through like 10 different, like 1,000 different people potentially. Whereas here, if there's a specific day where there's no reminders to send, we'll just use one task. So that's one example. Of there are multiple things going on here. There's task efficiency. There's technically some complex data manipulation. There are multiple conditions. There's also loops. So there's a variety. Essentially, probably like all of these criteria are being met by these particular example. So hopefully that gives you an idea on when you want to use code. I do want to put a warning that because sometimes we get developers. developers either that want to apply to work with us or again that we work with them for one reason or another. And sometimes they're tempted to use code for everything and that's kind of like what they do for a living. So totally understand. But the value that we provide clients really when we use these no-code tools is the ability for them to troubleshoot and edit these things on their own. Later on, if needed. So ideally, I don't like to use code initially. I try as best as I can to build everything with Zapier blocks, and later, if I continue working with them, there's something that hasn't given us any bugs, and I am confident that we'll have no need to troubleshoot that further. I may compress it via code if needed, and of course, I also walk you through a couple of Examples of how, of scenarios where you want, you may want to use code yourself. Last but not least, visit us at abstract.co if you want to learn more about how we can potentially help you implement automation in your business. I'm always happy to talk about automation, something I enjoy a lot. So even if you don't think we might be a fit, or you just want to discuss the topic, I'll be more than happy to talk to you and see whether we can help you in one way or another. And please like and subscribe for more. This is the first time I create a long-term presentation, so give me a like if it's something that you enjoy so that I know to create more resources like this and subscribe to the channel as well. I just put subscriber by having a couple typos today, but doesn't matter. It's— I hope that still the, the video was valuable. That's it for me, and I'll see you on the next one.