Lesson 1: Lecture and Quiz
Welcome to Zapier 101!
In the first lesson of this course, you'll learn what Zapier is and how it can be useful for automating your workflows. You'll also learn some common Zapier terminology.
Do you learn better through reading? We've got you covered! Underneath the review session, we've provided you with a full transcript of the video lecture and below that are a few helpful links.
Lesson 1 Review Quiz
Lesson 1 Lecture Notes
Hey there! Welcome to Zapier 101. My name is Joey and I'm here to help you learn about Zapier so you can gain internet super powers.
In this lesson, we're going to talk about what Zapier is and how it can be useful to automate your workflows, and we'll define some common Zapier terminology that you're going to see again and again.
Zapier is a tool that lets you connect your favorite web apps to each other and move information between them automatically. For example, with Zapier you can connect MailChimp, Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, and over 1000 more apps to each other.
When you connect two or more apps and automatically perform repetitive tasks between them, this is called an "automated workflow" - a Zap - and it can save you a ton of time! Imagine having new Salesforce leads added to a MailChimp list automatically, instead of having to import or create them manually.
With Zapier, you don't need to be a developer to automate your app workflows! In just a few clicks, you can easily and automatically move information between the web apps you use every day, and spend your valuable time on your most important work.
Let's try a live example! Say I get a lot of emails with files attached in my Gmail account, and I'd like to save those attachments to Dropbox. With Zapier, you can connect Gmail and Dropbox. That way, instead of having to open up each email, click on the attachment, and then save it to Dropbox over and over, you can have Zapier do this automatically for you, saving you loads of time and effort.
With Zapier, there are thousands of different workflows you can create. Here are just a few more examples to help inspire you:
- Automate your social media presence by sending new RSS items from your blog to Facebook as posts...
- Stay in touch with prospects by adding form respondents from Typeform directly to your mailing list in MailChimp...
- Make sure your team never misses a meeting by notifying a channel in Slack of upcoming Google Calendar events...
- Help keep projects organized by copying new Trello cards into Evernote notebooks
Before we dive in further, let's talk about Zapier's terminology.
The first thing you'll want to know is what a Zap is! A Zap is an automated workflow between your apps. A Zap is a blueprint for a task you want to do over and over. In words, a Zap looks like this: "When I get a new thing in A, do this other thing in B."
Previously, we talked about saving your Gmail attachments to Dropbox as new files. That whole process is one Zap - one automated workflow.
A Zap consists of at least two parts: a Trigger and one or more Actions.
A Trigger is an event in an app you use that tells the Zap to fire, kicking off your workflow. For example, in Zapier's Gmail integration, there is a trigger called “New Attachment.” This will fire your workflow every time your Gmail account receives a new email attachment.
The next part of your Zap is the Action. The Action is the event that the Zap takes in response to the Trigger event. For our Gmail to Dropbox Zap, the action is saving the Gmail attachment to Dropbox. One Trigger may have multiple Actions attached to it. In this case, I've added a Slack message to my Zap, so that I get notified about my new attachments too.
Finally, we have Tasks. Each piece of data you run through your Zap counts as a task. That means if your Zap adds 100 email attachments to Dropbox automatically, your Zap just performed 100 tasks. Every task your Zap executes is another task that you don't have to perform manually.
And that's it for now! You just nailed the first step to becoming a Zapier expert. Check out our next video to learn about how to get around the Zapier app.
By the end of this course you'll be a Zapier expert. We'll go over what Zapier does, how to build Zaps, some of Zapier's built-in tools and features.