

Ask HN: What are your favorite recipes on IFTTT/Zapier? - adilmajid


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patio11
I'm a _huge_ fan of anything of the general form:

When <X> happens, send a brief, well-considered message to the appropriate
channel in our company's Slack account. (Hipchat/Campfire/etc also an option,
but I prefer Slack for UX reasons.)

For example, when a new lead is added in Close.io, send to #ar-sales:

New lead for AR: Customer Foo ( foo@example.com )

[https://app.close.io/lead/$REDACTED](https://app.close.io/lead/$REDACTED)

Dashboard:
[https://www.appointmentreminder.org/a/admin/show_account/$RE...](https://www.appointmentreminder.org/a/admin/show_account/$REDACTED)

This lets people who care about AR sales have conversations in that room about
it and get notifications right when a new lead happens. Then someone can say
"Spiffy, I've got a minute, I'll give them a call." "Gave them a call. Not a
great fit for our solution, but we'll try again in a few months." or "That
looks to be a doctor. @patrick can you deal with them? It will likely involve
the HIPAA discussion." "Can't do it right now -- do me a favor, call them and
get as far as you can, then do the HIPAA handoff over email if they express
interest in it." "Turned out they didn't ask." "Great, thanks for handling
that."

I'm Slacking up all the things these days. It's easier for people to subscribe
to Slack notifications (by being in the right channel) than to have them spend
days configuring Gmail to e.g. filter out notifications from the monitoring
software except when, spreads out the knowledge of events among time and
people, and helps make the company feel like a community of purpose rather
than N disconnected inboxes which happen to receive checks from the same bank
account.

~~~
147
Do you use Slack solo? Or do you have people working with you on AR now.

~~~
patio11
I have people working with me on Appointment Reminder. This is a very recent
thing. Writing about it today, actually -- essay will be out to the mailing
list later about sales processes.

------
mikeknoop
I'm kind of cheating here, but one of my favorite set of Zaps is brand
monitoring.

Basically, get notified whenever your company is mentioned in RSS feeds,
Reddit, Hacker News (ahem), etc...

We actually did a pretty long write up on this exact use case here:
[https://zapier.com/blog/monitor-brand-
mentions/](https://zapier.com/blog/monitor-brand-mentions/)

------
maguay
I'm cheating here a bit as well, since I work on the Zapier team, but some of
my favorite use cases are ways my wife uses Zapier for her small business.
Whenever an Ebay or Etsy sale comes in via PayPal, Zapier records the sale,
along with fees and shipping price, in a Google Docs spreadsheet, and then
copies the shipping address to a plain text document in Dropbox to easily
print out address labels. It's a tiny thing that saves a ton of time.

Then, I've got Twilio integrations with Zapier that let me get Twilio SMS
messages on my phone, and more, which I wrote about here:
[https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-twilio-international-phone-
nu...](https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-twilio-international-phone-number/)

