Here's how we use Zapier at Zapier

Something strange happened this week. I was on our weekly all-company Zoom call. You know the drill. Then I noticed something different in the gallery of faces.

Someone's display name was no name at all. It was a bit.ly link. And in his video you could see a lit-up sign hanging on his back wall. It was a Zapier logo sign. It was flashing different colors.

I was so curious as you can see here (I'm transfixed):

Turns out that bit.ly link sends you to a form. The form allows you to change the colors and pattern of the Zapier logo light in real-time.

A Zap or two works behind the scenes triggering from the form submission.

If you're curious, here's the link: bit.ly/zap-light

And Ben goes into how it all works here: https://zapier.com/engineering/raspberry-pi-led/

This is how we Zapier. Thank you, Zapier.

We have fun with our robots, but we also work well with them, too.

Here's a short list of other ways we use Zapier at Zapier

We have some themes. The first is that we work out of Slack. That means most of our automation lives in Slack. Reminders, updates, notifications, reactji triggers, etc.

The other big theme is reporting. We use Coda as our collection point for reporting. Coda has a great Zapier integration. So, we'll take data from all of the different places and feed it into Coda.

I forgot to mention in last week's post about Notion and Coda that Notion does not yet have a Zapier integration. It's because they haven't released a full API, yet.

Most of the Zaps that I skimmed through today use some of Zapier's own apps like the Formatter. We have to do a lot of formatting to get data from one app to look good in another app.

Okay, here's the short list:

• Track customer feedback -> Airtable form
• Send weekly reporting data from Coda to Slack to update the team
• Weekly standup posts sent to Slack to kickstart discussions
• Awarding participation points in Slack. You can reactji someone's message with a :coin: and this will give them points.
• Send out monthly Zap challenges from Airtable to Slack to keep people fresh on their Zapier skills.
• Support uses a Slack slash command to get daily ticket numbers from Help Scout.
• Recording customer churn comments from Help Scout -> format the text -> send to Airtable.
• Post internal blog posts to a feed channel in Slack. Zapier's built it's own "Async" tool which is our internal blogging platform.
• Track home office orders and send Apple information if someone requests Apple gear. Slack -> filter for word "apple" -> Slack
• Notify the team if we receive an inbound press email.
• Updated matching Jira tickets from Asana task updates
• Distract employees during Zoom calls :)

If you have any questions about how we use Zapier, let me know! I'd love to fill you in on other ways we work with robots to make our jobs easier.

Happy building,

Bryce