I'm Leaving Dubsado...for Make (formerly Integromat)! (Part 1)

Almost since my business began, I have been using Dubsado to help me manage all of the things that were involved in a client service business. And Dubsado, like other tools in the business management category, is pretty awesome. Because inside Dubsado you have a lot of features that you would normally need to look for outside tools to handle. Because we all like the idea, at least of having everything in one place. But as we know from other tools out there, the app that does everything rarely does all of those things very well. And when we look at a tool like Dubsado, we know we are giving up certain things by that convenience. Ultimately, when it comes down to picking Dubzado, you're deciding whether you want kind of an average at everything tool but is all in one place, or do I want to shop around and find the best tool in every category and connect it together using my own kind of methods or automation options. When I was early in my business, the decision to keep everything in one place was really appealing and that is why Dubsado won the day. But after about my first year using Dubsado, I became very frustrated by the interface, the aesthetics, the lack of quality, and a lot of the features inside Dubsado just made me realize that I can do better and I should do better. I spent years looking for all in one alternatives to Dubsado and every all in one I tested, you know, Plutio, Honeybook, 17 hats, you know, all the ones, none of them were significantly better than Dubsado and honestly, none of them really solved a lot of the fundamental problems around customization that I was looking to solve. So rather than just switching from Dubsado to Honeybook or Dubsado to 17 hats, I am not switching from one all in one jack of all trades master of none to another jack of all trades master and none. I'm switching my overall strategy from picking one tool to manage everything to instead picking a suite of tools, each one best at what they do, and connecting them together using some kind of glue through the Internet. Now what exactly do I mean by glue? This is basically replicating the benefit that Dubsado was giving me, right? One of the things that got me stuck on Dubsado is their workflow automation. I love that I could have data from my appointment scheduling form and have that show up in the proposal we which would also show up in the email automations. That kind of connectivity was really, really helpful. And so when it came to building out a new stack, I wanted to make sure that whatever I created was glued together in Some way. That way the data in one tool, like the appointment that someone booked or their phone number automatically showed up in the other tools. So no one, including myself, was retyping information manually. Now, the glue of choice that I'm choosing for this particular setup is going to be Integromat. It's going to make sure that data from one tool can be sent to to another tool. Now, some of these connections can happen automatically. So for example, Calendly sending emails. I don't need Integromat for that. That is something that Calendly can do natively. But certain things like Calendly creating a task in ClickUp, well, Calendly can't do that. However, when I use Integromat in as kind of the glue here, Integromat can watch Calendly appointments and when an appointment is scheduled, it can create a task in ClickUp. It's basically managing the whole process and acting as my workflow automation tool rather than using Dubsado's workflow automation features. Now, I know at the onset this is going to look quite confusing. It is indeed adding more tools into the mix, which I know many people just don't want to do. But the fact of the matter is, by having all these modular tools, I'm able to switch things out. I have a lot more control than I did inside Dubsado because maybe I want to have variable appointment booking. Well, I could switch Calendly out with. You can book me and that would allow me to have appointments where people can pick how long the appointment is. Not something I can do with Dubsado Scheduler. Maybe I want to have repeating sections inside my form. Well, Cognito forms can do that, but Dubsado forms natively cannot do that. They're too simple for that. Maybe I want to save a lot of money on my processing fees. Well, QuickBooks Invoicing has a much lower processing fee than Dubsado invoicing through Stripe or PayPal or Square. And so in this way, yes, I am adding more tools and I will show you at the end of this what the cost breakdown really is. But ultimately the benefits that I'm seeing in terms of features, even, even if the cost is more to me is worth it. And that's why this best in class strategy is something that I really would lean into as your business is starting to grow and you really do need a little bit of extra power than just what Dubsado can handle. Okay, so enough abstract talk. What exactly am I replacing if I switch from Dubsado to this best in class tool. Well, it's actually quite a bit of things. Dubsado currently handles these categories of tasks inside my ClickUp and sorry, the slightly blurry picture here. Those to me are the main Dubsado features that I'm going to be looking to replace in in my best in class strategy. So this is kind of like my to do list in terms of what I need to do in order to make this new strategy be more valuable than what Dubsada was in the past. Here we are looking side by side of the Dubsada features and then on the right side, the types of software I can use to replace these different categories. This new setup would run me about 17 to $39 per month instead of $27 per month. Still crazy cheap for the amount of time it will save me. And for many of these things, this is not going to be the only time I can use these features. That's another big benefit. Best in class versus all in one. For Dubsado, I was pretty much only using this for clients, period. But with this kind of more versatile stack, I can use the same technology for other parts of my business. So I could use Google Calendar for personal use. I could use ClickUp for personal use. I can use Calendly for other types of appointments I might need to have. And Integromat. Oh my gosh, use Integromat to basically save me money and time across my entire business. Which reminds me, Integromat actually reached out to us after our last video talking about how I'm personally using Integromat and how much I love the tool and all that good stuff. So I up here you can watch that video. And after that video, Integromat actually reached out and gave me a promotion code that all of you guys can use to get a free month of the standard plan of Integromat. The link is in the description below, but if you use that link you will get a free month of the standard Integromat plan for a whole month. So I would definitely check that out if you're looking to explore this kind of setup. Now that's enough about the abstract wonder of Integromat. Let's actually go into the tool and I'll show you how I'm replacing. Let's just, let's focus on the appointment scheduling. Today I'm going to show you one piece of it and if you guys are interested, we can do more videos like this, breaking down each piece of the Dubsado replacement puzzle because it is A multi step journey. All right, so this is the scenario that I'm basically using to replace these scheduling features inside Dubsado. Basically what I have going on is a bunch of modules inside Integromat and if you're not familiar, modules inside Integromat are basically like the connection points, these are what they are gluing together and these little dots represent the glue, the connection between different tools. Every time you add a module, data can be sent to and sent from that particular piece. So for example, let me just walk you through this finished setup and I'm going to break down how we can build this piece by piece. So the very first piece in here is Calendly watch events. This is basically just saying watch all the events in calendly and when a new calendly event comes in, start. That's it. Okay, so here we go. When a new event comes in, it gets that data. And when we click on these little guys here which appear, as soon as you run data through it, we can see exactly what data is received. What data is this going to shoot out into the next module. So here, if I expand these, we'll see there's questions, there's really nothing helpful because it's just nonsense text. We can see the event details, we can see who's invited to that, we can see tracking codes if we want to, and we can also see what event, what event name do we want to have happen. Now I'm just going to admit here that this looks very intimidating, but it really shouldn't. This is nothing more than a spreadsheet. It's just laid out in a slightly different way. There's a header and then there's values. Okay, so when an appointment called a clicking up welcome call which is 30 minutes long is booked by this person's email address, then that information is is sent through to Integromat to the next piece in the journey. So what is the next piece in the journey? Well, in this case I want to send a follow up email just like we would in Dubsado, but using Gmail. So we've got the calendly event, we've got all those details received. Now I'm going to go ahead and send an email. This is using the Gmail module inside Integromat. All I do is select what action I want to have happen, which is in this case send an email and I just set up the module. The menu that appears are just the questions it needs to ask you. So it knows how to format that particular step in the Journey. So, for example, here is the Gmail module. I have it connected to my Google account, which I literally just follow the prompts, click continue and log in with Google. There's nothing fancy happening there. And once I do that, I can send emails from this connection. I can choose what email address I want to send from and who I want to send to. Now here is our first moment where we're able to start using data in a clever way. Remember I said that Integromat is the glue in this scenario and this is a perfect example of how that glue really works. So inside here, rather than having to type in a manual email address, instead I can actually choose data from the step before. That's why it's this weird blue color. So as I go in here, I can add recipient and I can choose any of the data that came in in the first step. Okay, so in this case I want to send it to the email address of the person who emailed me. And that's what's already here. So I'm just going to leave it as. So do you get that? Do you get how that's pulling data from earlier on and putting it into the next step without me having to retype anything? That is just like the workflow automations or the client database features inside Dubsado. And we just keep building on this to build out the rest of the flow. So here we are, we're also going to send a confirmation email. I wrote the word confirmation, which is just me typing in here. And then in the subject line I'm going to do the name of the event. So in this case clicking up welcome call. So if I get rid of this, I can click on name and that's going to replace when I actually send the email with clicking up welcome Call. Similarly, I can write a whole email here. This is replicating email templates inside Dubsado, but I'm able to use fields that I create from Calendly. So here we've got hey, first name. Thanks for booking your event name. Your appointment has been confirmed for start time and you should receive a calendar invite. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Talk soon, Layla. I can add additional details here if I wanted to, but honestly I probably am not even going to need this step because Calendly itself does email confirmations. This is just kind of like a double check. Also, you notice how in this I say you're going to receive a calendar invite as well. Nothing magical I need to do there. That's something that Calendly automatically does when someone books and this is yet another example of how using best in class tools gets you more features than what a generalist tool can do. Dubsado, at this point in time, it sends you confirmations and confirmations and confirmations, but it doesn't actually put a calendar event on people's calendars, which is something people expect. And when that doesn't happen, I don't know about you, but I've had people miss appointments. So having that feature, thanks to Calendly, it's going to make this whole thing run a whole lot smoother. And again, if it costs me a little bit more to get this kind of customization, I'm all for it. So that wraps up our manual extra confirmation, which I could do through Calendly, but I figured why not do it here so we can see what it would look like then? You see, in Dubsado, everything is arranged by a person's project. It's all kind of in these small silos, which for me at least was frustrating when you had a lot of clients in a particular thing and you couldn't really see the overview of everything. So I'm taking a slightly different route in this workflow where rather than having individual project folders or project overview areas, which I could have maybe created in ClickUp, rather than doing that, I'm going to use one central database for all of my data, rather than having one folder for John Doe, one folder for Jane Doe, and having to send the data to all of those places, which I could do with Integromat, I don't really want to. I don't need that for my model and where I'm heading. So instead I'm going to create one central Google sheet for all of the call data. So this Google Sheet, if I just click on here, you'll see it load open. But this is going to be my call tracker, my log of all the different calls booked, and the very first module here in Integromat, you can see how it's set up here. What I'm doing is I'm having Integromat search that spreadsheet, and I think it's going to make sense in a moment why I'm having it searched. So maybe just bear with me until then. But this Google Sheets module is again a little app. You click on it and it shows all of the different possibilities of what you can have Integromat do for you. In this case, I'm choosing the search row up here. I clicked Add and I connected it to my Google account, following the prompts it could not be easier. Then I told it what spreadsheet in my account I wanted it to look for, and what sheet or tab in that spreadsheet did I care about? And what exactly did I want it to look for? What this is doing is it is going to search the whole spreadsheet for that person's email. And the reason I'm doing this is because for me, I want to know if this person is booking multiple times or if this is the first time they booked. And that's why I'm doing this search. Again, this is something we couldn't quite do in Dubsado, which is why this is not a one for one recreation. This is really pushing it forward further. But for these welcome calls, the thing that I'm actually building this out for in real life, for my business, I only want people to book them one time. So if someone's already on the list of people who have booked, it's either a rescheduling or something is wrong. And that is what this search step is doing. Once that happens, I want to have one of two things happen. So this is what this router is doing. A router in Integromat is kind of like a fork in the road. I mean, it visually looks like a fork. Again, not something you can easily do with Dubsado. Basically, these routers allow you to choose different paths for the data to go. So, like here we see that it all kind of goes the same way. Things go from Calendly to Gmail to Google Sheets, kind of one step after another. Well, with this one, we have a choice. And in this case, my choice is based on the result of this search. So you see, if I click on the little magnifying glass to look at the data that was sent through Google Sheets. So here we can see that the result of the search is under the output section. And the output is the fact that, yes, that email address is already there. And in the results, see, it said rebooked. And let me just show you the spreadsheet that searching, it searched this spreadsheet and it saw that this guy had already booked in the past, and that's why it's giving me that strange result. So, and the fact is, if someone booked and they were not on this spreadsheet, there would be no search result. The output would be zero, because there was no search result. That person's email address was not on the list previously. So back in here, I we have two choices. If they are already in the log, meaning that the number of search Results that came in this guy, this number of bundles. If there were no bundles, then I wanted to do the top path. And if there were bundles, meaning that there was something already on the list for that email address, I want to go the other path. Okay, so let's just follow up that top path. If they're not in the log, what we want to do is add a row to the spreadsheet and it takes a second to load here, but basically that row is going to add another one of these. It's going to add a new row to the spreadsheet if they're not already on it. But if they are on it, if they are already on our list, then we want to add this kind of label of rebook. We want to add the word rebook in there so we know that they've booked twice and it's not going to add a new row to the spreadsheet. This is just another detail. But this is what is going to give me good data and clear data. So I know how many people have booked and how many people have booked more than once, whether it's for rescheduling or for some other reason. So here we go. We can see exactly how that spreadsheet line is created. We said again our Google connection and then we also said what data we wanted to put in. So once again, when I click into these areas, it shows me every piece of data from every step beforehand. The Gmail stuff, the calendly stuff, everything that happened beforehand here is now showing up here and I can put any of that information inside. In this case, I want to put the email address from the calendly booking, which is what I have here. I don't want to put it in there twice. So I'll delete that, but that'll replace with the person's actual email, just like we see here. And then I want to put the link, and honestly, this link for me at least, it's not doing very much, but it's just helping me confirm that it is indeed booked. So again, I can pick any data here to put in. So maybe I'm going to pick location. Finally we have the result column. This is something that I'm actually using internally to know whether it was rebooked, whether it is a no show, or whether it was a successful appointment, meaning the person showed up. It's almost working kind of like a status field at this point. I'm going to leave it blank because at the time of booking I don't know if it's going to be Successful appointment or not. So I'm just going to leave it blank. But that is all that this add a row spreadsheet is doing. From there it's going to create a task inside ClickUp to tell me that I have an appointment booked. And this is just because I want to have a ClickUp task for every client engagement. Whether it's a welcome call, whether it's a strategy session, whether it's a full on 10 month project. I want to have that inside ClickUp as a task, a folder, a list, wherever I normally put it. So in here you can see I've chosen my workspace that I want to go into what space in my ClickUp account folder and list. Basically where do I want to have this be created? And then I went ahead and gave it a task name. And this works just like the ClickUp task automations where I can again pick a dynamic field from anywhere. In this case I want to get the invitees full name so the client's name and then I put the word welcome call after it so I know what the heck it is and I can choose to bring in additional content. So this is the description of our task in ClickUp. Maybe I want to put in the questions that they answered. Any sort of thing I can go ahead and put in here. So here's the question. Please share anything that you need for before this call and then here is their response. I can have all of that come into the description of the task. This is where the glue comes in. Do you see that? Like I'm not needing to type anything manually, it's all just coming into the right spot. And unlike Dubsado, I can actually customize what information shows up where, which has always been a frustration with Dubsado's appointment scheduler. So there's that the appointment as my time and then I'm just going to click okay and that's it. It's creating a task every time an appointment is booked on the other side if someone is already in the log. The only thing that is different here is that we have update a cell rather than add a row. This is again just a different option down here when we added in that module. And here all I have happening is that if someone's already in there, add the row number of the result, meaning where are they before? And change the word to rebook. So if someone's trying to book with the same exact email address, it'll look up the row, it'll look up where they are back here and then just add the word Rebook in this step here. And again, this is a little quirk of my own workflow that I wanted to build in here. This might not be relevant to you, but I want to just give you the full picture. As you can see, or as you've probably already heard me do in other videos, the actual builder inside Integromat is really, really slick. And when you go to add additional modules or additional steps in here, it's as simple as clicking that little plus like you just saw me click here and adding any other app you might want to connect to. So, for example, maybe after all this is done, I also want to connect to QuickBooks and I want to create an invoice. Or maybe I want to also connect to airtable and create a new row in my spreadsheet. I can do any sort of connections here. Kicking off from this initial moment of an appointment being booked, this is just one piece of an otherwise quite exciting puzzle. So I'm just going to go ahead and test this out. We're going to pretend that we are trying to book for the second time. So I'm going to pretend I'm this person. The test two fake email address. I'm going to pick an appointment time, confirm. I'm going to put in John DOE Email Address Test 2. I'm trying to book twice and schedule the event over here in Integromat. If we run this here, we should be able to process existing data and it's going to watch the data that comes in and see what happens. That's pretty cool, isn't it? I love that animation. So if I click onto these magnifying glasses, we're going to see the data we just submitted. So here we go. If I click on bundle one, which is the output, the stuff that happened when an event was booked in calendly, we see, here's when it happened, here's what happened, and here's who it was. We've got John Doe time zone. All the questions that we had in our calendly form all show up here. Then we have the email being sent to John Doe with the example information. And if we pop back in here, we should see it. Searched the Google sheet did it. It looks like this is what went in and what came out. Is that, yes, in row 33, this email address is already there. Okay, well, that should tell us something. This itself is just searching and it should have decided which path it went into. So if it was not in the log already, meaning there was no search result here, it should have created a New row. But since it was already in the log, it followed this path instead and it should have just updated the cells. So, moment of truth, people. Let's go look at the spreadsheet and see if it did the right thing. Ha ha. Yes. Okay, awesome. So it did indeed add the word rebook on there to let me know that this person had rebooked a second time. And if we go back to Integravat, we can see that same thing here. If we click on the magnifying glass, we can see that yes, the total number was not zero. So it continued in the log. And what it did, we see that it updated one row and one column, AKA one cell, which is exactly what we see. And it created a new task in ClickUp. So again, I'm clicking on the magnifying, it's showing us what data went in and then what data came out. A new task basically came out called John Doe's Welcome Call with these dates, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. So let's go check ClickUp to see if that shows up. And we can see that we now have John Doe's Welcome Call with a tag called Potential duplicate with the due date of tomorrow, which is when it was booked. And anything else we wanted to have come in here could come in here as well. Now notice it does have the tag Potential duplicate. And this is something I forgot to point out to you earlier. This is one of the only differences between the top leg of the journey and the bottom when it comes to creating a task. So if I actually load this here, I went ahead and made sure that anytime a duplicate person came through, I wanted to also notify myself inside ClickUp so I wouldn't, you know, not notice it. I just want to make sure in case I'm not checking that spreadsheet. So inside here, I did everything exact same. I just cloned this module and moved it down below, with the exception of adding a tag. So you see, it pulled in every tag I have in ClickUp here, a lot of the duplicate silly example ones. And I just checked this box to assure that when a task is created here, it pulls in the duplicate tag as well, which is what we see when we're actually inside. Click up here and we see Potential duplicate. By now you can probably see how freaking cool this tool is. So if you are someone who is sitting there and you're used to Zapier or you're used to Integrately and you have never used Integromat to manage your work and you've never gotten to Play with all these fun features that you can do inside Integromat. Check out that link in the description below for the free standard plan trial. It is a sweet deal and this tool. I'm just, I'm upset. I keep joking my husband like this is going to be the thing after ClickUp. Like no offense, I love covering ClickUp, but one can only do it so much and this has become my guilty pleasure of trying to just really, really master Integromat. It's just so much fun. So much fun. Such a. Anyway, back to the story. I know that kind of look like a lot and that might be feeling a bit overwhelming. You might not need that much data. Maybe you don't need the spreadsheet part. Maybe if you want to keep things really simple, really all you care about is ignore everything in between. You just want to calendar the appointment to create a task and ClickUp go right ahead. You don't need to keep it as advanced as this is because when you're doing the best in class strategy versus the all in one, you're 100% in control. So customize this to what you want. But I wanted to share at least how I'm doing it here because I know many of you were interested in it when I mentioned it in the last videos. And like I said, this is not the end, right? Appointment scheduling is not the only thing that Dubsado does. It's not the only thing that I need to recreate when I'm switching away from Dubsado workflows into a best in class strategy. So just to revisit this visual here, yes, I've knocked out appointment scheduling. That's one feature of Dubsado, but gone. And if you're, you know, really being generous, we could also say we knocked out forms, email templates and workflows. We end client database, right? We touched on a lot of things here, but this is by no means a complete replication of Dubsado yet. But hopefully I give you some ideas here of how you could recreate every feature. In fact, that's what I'm going to be doing over the coming months here as we switch everything over from Dubisado into Integromat and a suite of tools. So if you would like to see those other steps, the other pieces that I mean to build out. I know these are a little bit techy, but if you want to see that, just let me know in the comments. Put the word Part two in the comments here and I will make sure that we create a part 2 video link it together with a playlist and maybe we'll even be a part three, because there's certainly going to be a lot of pieces to recreate Dubsado in a more flexible but, you know, slightly more set up structure using best in class tools.