Automation in No-code tools
Hello fellow no-code tools users!
I'm currently exploring the do's and dont's of automation, especially around marketing and customer management. I wondered, if in the midst of no-code tools users, some of you tried to / did implement some basic or more complex automation practices around your users (connecting them to your Mailchimps or CRM), Traffic, Uptime monitoring / alerting, all that kind of stuff.
Basically, wondering HOW automation is done when building 100% no-code solutions.
Eager to hear your feedback!
Cheers,
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I made a quick video using our automation platform to show you what is possible. This workflow uses Webflow, Clearbit, Twitter, Sendgrid and Twilio. You can do this type of simple automation using any no-code tools. I am using pandaflow.io in this example. (I am a founder here)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwDzx2Uqjcs&t=
Hope this gives you some ideas on what is possible. You can connect to free CRM tools like HubSpot or if you want to keep it even simple connect Airtable or Google Sheet and then automate it based on the action taken by your users.
Here is another example of Sales Prospecting
Cheers!
Welcome to the no-code bubbles @ben_chrn
Usually, you need to consider how frequently and how much data you need to map. Pick the right integration on tools like Zapier, IFTTT and Integomat.
For me, I've created some simple processes for my small project to help facilitate customer info. and email workflow.
If I'm reading your question correctly (as well as your clarification below), there are really two different ways of answering, depending on the type of automation desired:
Single event automation: for example, taking your list or spreadsheet from Google sheets and using each line as it's own unique entity for performing some sort of action in Mailchimp like a custom email, or adding them to a campaign (to use your example).
Data automation: taking that same list and automating actions to manage the data more effectively, i.e., removing duplicates, or missing values, or grouping values into new segments. This is a bit more tricky because the abstracted code has to take into account many different possibilities, as well as user knowledge, to provide context into why and how data should be manipulated. For your example: do you want to see site traffic as a stream, or do you want to bucket traffic by time or location?
You can do both, where but data automation tends to be foundational since you don't want to create single events that are incorrect (emailing a prospect twice, etc). Additionally, when you're saving and/or "hacking" these automations, are the hacks built in a way that another non-technical user can understand what you did? Most people don't understand macros, cron jobs, etc. At least from my perspective, if an automation can't be replicated by another non-technical user using no-code tools/principles, then how is that created automation any different than those built using code?
This is the main reason building tools for no-code makers tends to be rather difficult, the abstractions have to be built to satisfy most of the issues above in a "simple" way.
Depends what you say by "non-technical" users. We're trying to find a target in between the "full-technical" users and the "non-technical" users. There is a middle ground here, where someone can hack together a few lines of JS but doesn't want to mess with API error handling, deploy his stuff to AWS and putting a CRON in place, have to deal with websockets or webhooks, use Docker, you name it.
What you call "single event automation" seems to be much answered through a lot of tools, and some big ones too. But apparently, these tools come short as soon as some customability comes into play, and that's how I understand your second bullet point. We aim at removing this by justing getting down to the core of it: do it your way (and in a way that's simple as well, without having to handle all the tedious coding stuff). To come back to your remove duplicates example, it could be easily done with something like:
That's a very basic usecase but tells you how I imagine things : API wrappers + snippets to allow even beginner coders or to automate their things. That's why my first target idea was no-code tools users. BUT I might be wrong. If you wanna discuss more of your own usecases, I'd be glad.
Thank you for your detailed answer, much appreciated and very helpful.
Thanks for the response! I think that we're going to have differences in what we believe the definition of a non-technical user is (i.e., I'm pretty advanced with Excel, but there's no way I could hack together most things in SQL, let alone JS). I look at non-technical users as your average business user that just wants to get data from one place to another, or wants to automatically perform an action when something else occurs, in order to free up time.
If you're looking for these users that are more technical than out of the box Zapier automation, etc, but less technical than being able to deploy to AWS and manage error handling, the question then becomes whether your market segment is more "developer-lite" than "no-code plus". Both markets are possible to go after, it just comes down to what each of those customers value in a solution.
I'm already in the no-code space as a founder, so happy to share some of the use cases and feedback we've encountered building Phiona. Maybe they might help on your journey!
We have couple of options in DronaHQ - used in several users projects, like
DronaHQ offers adding automation to their workflows , which will have widest range of tasks offered by a No-Code Platform.
Hi. The most often things users automate in their projects on Tabbli:
And yes, it is no-code automation, but requires some efforts and knowledge of course
Thanks for sharing, much appreciated!
I've been thinking to work on this (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/idea-validation-almost-no-code-automation-eb02c42251) for a few days / weeks now and am still at the stage of evaluating the idea itself. I feel like no-code tooling could benefit from a not no-code solution to increase customability, while still keeping things extremely simple.
Some of the usecases you describe would fit in there perfectly, but I'm wondering whether the pain of having to twist things to your usecase is enough to justify such a solution
I'm not sure what you're asking exactly. I guess here's a few automations I have set up when it comes to working with customer data:
Sorry if this wasn't clear. The idea behind my question is basically : at some point, you're going to need custom behaviors for your app, ones that aren't met by the standard no-code app builders. How do you overcome this? In which area do you need some custom behaviors? How did you implement them?
I guess your answer boils down to "automation tools". So my next question would be: ever had any shortage or had to "hack" the existing automating solutions? And if so, in which way?
Thanks so much for your answers!