When I Use Automation Tools Like Zapier or Make I Start With My Trigger But in Taskmagic I Start With My Recording and Set Up My Trigger After, Why is That?

Automation tools have become an essential component of streamlining tasks and improving efficiency in various fields. In the realm of automation tools like Zapier and Make, a common practice is to start with setting up triggers to initiate actions. However, in Taskmagic, the approach is slightly different as it advocates starting with the recording of actions before configuring triggers. But why is that the case? Let's delve deeper into the logic behind this unique approach.

The process of automating tasks often involves a sequence of actions triggered by specific events or conditions. While traditional automation tools prioritize setting up triggers to kickstart workflows, Taskmagic takes a distinct path by emphasizing the importance of recording actions first. This strategy is rooted in the premise that not all automations necessarily require triggers to function effectively.

Taskmagic encourages users to start by recording the sequence of actions they want to automate. By capturing these actions within the browser interface, users can simulate manual tasks and fine-tune the automation flow. The recording process allows users to interact with web elements, perform tasks, and validate the sequence of steps necessary for the automation.

One key aspect highlighted in the Taskmagic approach is the significance of scraping flows. Many automation scenarios involve extracting data from websites or applications, a process commonly referred to as scraping. By recording scraping flows first before configuring triggers, users can focus on perfecting the data extraction process without the immediate need for triggers.

Once the recording phase is complete, users can seamlessly transition to setting up triggers in Taskmagic. This transition occurs after the automation flow has been recorded and validated. Users have the flexibility to determine when and how triggers should be integrated into the automation process, ensuring a tailored approach to workflow initiation.

Taskmagic emphasizes a strategic approach to trigger implementation. Users are encouraged to consider the necessity of triggers based on the nature of the automation task at hand. By analyzing whether automated actions should be initiated by specific events, schedules, or external triggers, users can ensure the seamless operation of their workflows.

An important aspect of automation logic is the integration of APIs and data sources. Taskmagic prompts users to evaluate whether existing apps or webhooks can serve as data sources for their automation tasks. By leveraging APIs and data connections effectively, users can optimize the flow of information within their automation workflows.

Taskmagic advocates for a gradual and iterative approach to building automations. Instead of aiming for perfection in the initial setup, users are encouraged to start simple and gradually enhance their automation workflows. This approach allows users to grasp the logic behind triggers, actions, and data sources, enabling them to refine their automations over time.

In contrast to a purely event-based trigger setup, Taskmagic emphasizes considering the human element in automation tasks. By viewing automation as a tool to replicate human actions and decisions, users can design workflows that efficiently mimic manual tasks with precision and scalability.

In conclusion, Taskmagic's unique approach to automation emphasizes the value of recording actions before configuring triggers. By prioritizing the recording of automation flows, users can hone the sequence of tasks, optimize data extraction processes, and customize trigger setups to suit their specific needs. Understanding the underlying logic behind automation tools not only enhances efficiency but also empowers users to harness the full potential of automation in their workflows.

As you embark on your automation journey with Taskmagic, remember to start with the recording, navigate through trigger setups strategically, and embrace the iterative process of building and refining your automations. Taskmagic's approach offers a fresh perspective on automation logic, empowering users to create tailored, efficient, and scalable workflows in the world of automation tools.

Whether you're a newcomer to automation or an experienced user, Taskmagic's methodology brings a nuanced understanding of automation logic and workflow optimization. Start recording, set up triggers thoughtfully, and watch as automation transforms the way you tackle tasks and streamline processes.

Hey everybody, Jeremy Redman here, uh, with Kyle below me, and we are, we're starting this course, I don't know, this isn't the start of the course, but we wanted to walk you through some of the questions that we get from people. And one of them is this right for the start of this course. So we have this question.

When I use automation tools like Zapier or make, I start with my trigger, but in task magic, I start with my recording and set up my trigger after why is that? Okay. Now, Kyle, generally speaking, why do people start with their recording? We have them start with their recording. Cause not all automations.

need triggers and usually people's first valuable automation ironically has not needed a trigger at all and a lot of that's because people start with those scraping flows oh yeah right so a lot of people after you record your flow inside the browser you will actually just hit play steps right That's how most people build their automation because you build, you run it once to test it, then you connect your webhook, your variables, your apps, et cetera.

So let's demonstrate that really quick, Kyle. So go into one, go into an automation here, one that we're trying to set up a schedule or a trigger for, or no, or yeah. One that you want a trigger for one that just show me an automation. So you can show me this one. So like. Or show me one that scrapes. That's fine.

Okay, cool. So, here is the recorded automation. Okay, you see the steps, Kyle Scroll. You see all the steps that you're doing. You're scraping the things from the pages. You might be delaying. You see all the steps that you actually recorded. Right there. Step 1 through below. Then you see, right now, as it is, we could just hit play steps and this could run.

Correct, Kyle? Correct. Right. We don't need to trigger it. So, it's not necessary, but after you're done recording the thing you want to automate, or the thing you want to scrape, or the messages you want to send, you can then hit play steps or trigger it. And it says right here, Trigger and it's light gray.

So click trigger. This is going to let me edit it. Ah, so show me one where you actually have the, or is that live? Can you just edit it? Show me one that you can, you know,

okay, this one. All right. So go to trigger. So this is the same thing you want me to like set one up. Yep. There we go. Hold on. So here. You can, after you have recorded yourself in the browser, doing the manual web task, right, or going through the guided template, whatever, you can then schedule it to run that thing on a schedule.

So, it recorded the clicks, types, copy, paste that you did, the scrolls, inside the web browser, and now you want to schedule that thing to run. You might hit schedule. If you want to trigger it from a list, which a list is like looping, correct Kyle? Yeah. Okay, great. So you just want to run through a list of things on a CSV or a Google sheet.

List is a fancy version of schedule. Correct. Yes. Right. With just a spreadsheet attached. Yeah. Right. Okay. And then you can trigger it with a webhook. Which is a custom webhook where you can essentially fancy word to say a link that brings in and out data. All right, that's all that is. So most people, if you're familiar with a webhook, we kind of make it easy to do.

We make it a lot easier than a lot of other things do. Or you can trigger it with one of our, what? Oh, we have over a hundred apps. I want to say it's like 160. 160 apps that you can trigger this. This run from so that's why we start with it, but kyle if you go back to this flow Okay now as i'm recording right as i'm actually recording And making the flow how do I put in my head?

I'm, I'm, I'm going to need a trigger for this later. Like, what advice would you give to someone that's like, I, how would we teach them how to think about doing a trigger later? You need to find out if this is something that you decide should start or if something else is determining that it should start.

So what I mean by that is I send a lot of Instagram DMs. That's how I do some of our marketing, but I don't, I, if I scrape a list of Instagram usernames, I now have 10, 000 usernames, right? That was my automation was scraping usernames that I have that automation built to scrape Instagram usernames.

That's not something that I run every day. That's not something that I run every week. And that's not something that happens when a form is submitted. That's something that I just decide I want to run because I need more usernames. Right. So if I want more usernames, I'd go into the app. I'd go to my automation.

I'd click play steps because I want this right now. This automation is an automation that sends a text message to new clients. I as much as I wish I could just determined to have a new client. This is triggered by something else. So when a form is submitted, it runs it. That's not up to me. That needs to happen without me clicking play steps.

So that means I have a trigger. Now, if this was running every five minutes, every hour, that's still not you determining it. That's a trigger, which is a schedule trigger. So if you're not responsible for starting it, you probably don't have a trigger. Ah, that's a really. Really great. Maybe I messed that up.

If you're not responsible, if that, if they, if a customer or a client or someone wants to get ahold of you, let's just say they do. So you want to trigger your flow to run based on their action or someone else's action, right? Correct. So like if you want to base it based on your actions, the things you do, You record and then you essentially just schedule that to run or loop through data, right?

And a list, a list of data. So like, I'm actually not, that's a great way to think about that. One other really easy one is Vint. Like what Vince used to do with LinkedIn. Vince always sent LinkedIn messages, but it wasn't consistent. Okay. He didn't send them every morning at 9 AM. He just decided one morning that he was going to click play steps and walk away from his computer.

There's no trigger for that because it's just a person again, deciding. Right. Yeah. So it is still automation. It's running through your thing, but you clicked a button, left your computer on, or in the cloud. And then because you could turn and run on from desktop, run on from cloud or whatever, and then walk away, do whatever and let it run for six hours.

Right. So it can do that. So I guess that is a great reason why, like, how else would you, is there anything else you would get customers and users to think about setting up their trigger later? Is there anything else? Cause that was really good to focus on. Like, I think that when people break down what they need to build, it becomes more obvious what your trigger is.

Um, I think that like when you figure out, I think it becomes more, I mean, it obviously becomes more obvious as you build more automations. But I think what people can, I think what people confuse the most is do I need a schedule or not? Which again is a simple question. Do you want this to run every hour or do you want to tell it to run?

That's all that that question is, right? Or I'm probably using an app or webhook, which apologies everyone, it's the same exact thing. And that's the two things you're deciding between, right? Do I have a schedule running all the time? Do I have it being triggered by an event somewhere, which is a webhook, or am I telling it?

I just want to start because I want it to start. Yeah. For example, like, you know, I mean, there's a bunch of examples. It becomes more obvious, I think, as you complete it. And I also, yeah, I. I think that's the best way to do. Sorry, go. If you have trouble starting your flow, like I think that that's one thing that we had a lot when we were working with Laurel on her most recent flow, if you have trouble deciding how to start it, it's probably because the trigger is a little bit more complex and you're needing to use that type of a connection.

Like, and what I mean by that is Laurel had something where she's going to see new, let me like get a similar screen. Um, pause there for a second. Yeah. And let's think about this. Yes. So to sum it up, generally speaking, you can always get an idea for the triggers by looking at that, by trying to automate with apps first, right?

So if you go to apps first, if there is a trigger and an action there that accomplishes what you want. Amazing. Start start with apps first, right? Start go to apps, right? Kyle, show them apps, right? Go to new automation Oh apps, okay Do you want me to actually go in? Okay. Yeah, so go in and then you can start new flow, right?

Just to get your money and then look at the trigger. Okay, look at all these apps, right? So you can look at all these apps go to air table or typeform or well air table. Yeah, great So there's only two things here. I can You Select from there's only two things and those two things are new record or new or updated record.

Okay, great So I can't and I can't Trigger a, I can't trigger that someone duplicated a base. You know what I mean? But I can, so, so I'm not going to start with apps. I want to, I want to be alerted when someone in my workspace duplicates a base in Airtable. So, you know you can't do that in apps now. So, we can get out of apps and we can try to figure that out with the web browser.

So, you can do that by monitoring changes on a website. All right. Okay. So, and we also have a guided template for that, don't we, Kyle? Go to guided template. Which one is it there? Um, I don't think we have like adding new items in a list, which is what that is. Hold on. Scroll up. We have this one. Yeah.

Triggering things from the front end. So monitoring changes. Right. Yeah. So like, okay. So you can start there. Right. So going through the order of operations and saying, thinking, cool, I can start with apps, or if that app has a webhook connection, I can trigger it with webhook. Okay. Now, browser automation is you can, you can monitor that website for that base to be duplicated.

When it gets duplicated, you then will set up a trigger The trigger for that would be what schedule, correct? Yeah. And you can set up a trigger from five minutes. So every five minutes it would check that workspace and see if that base was duplicated, that would work. Right, Kyle. Yeah. The only other logic you need is.

Storing them somewhere. Like for example, you have a Google sheet of last results and now you have current results so that you can compare. I think that's one big spot to keep there is if you don't have a trigger, you need some way to compare old versus new. And do we, do you cover that in that template?

Um, We cover a type of it. There's a different version we should cover for like form submissions. So just keep that in mind. It's not the easiest thing, but it is possible. So again, this is just going through the order of operations, starting with apps and seeing if those triggers exist. If not, you run the recording.

Okay. Whether it's scraping this, that, and again, just to answer the question fully, we start with browser automation. All right, or we start with the recording and not what's your trigger is because a lot of automations don't necessarily, not a lot, but some automations don't have triggers, so we don't force that in there.

You can set up your trigger later. Is there any other thing that you would get people to think like, Hey, because I would say naturally people think about triggering it inside the automation. I think that there's, there's the steps to go is if I can use an app to start my flow, that's ideal. We always want to use API when we can.

API is the best option when available. It's just not available in a ton of scenarios, which is why, and by API, that, that means what apps. Okay. Okay. Um, so the process people should go through when they're trying to figure out a trigger is. Again, and this is if you need a trigger, can I use an app? That's the first thing, right?

And we may or may not have it because we have like 150, something like that. Then if I can't use an app, is there something that will allow me to? And what I mean by that is so many platforms have native integrations to Google Sheets that if we don't have an integration with App one, two, three, but they can send data to Google sheets automatically.

Maybe we can use the Google sheet new row trigger. So if we don't have an app trigger, we might be able to make one for us. Then the LA the other option to keep it in apps is using a web hook, which sounds terrible, but I promise. Trying to do this manually with filtering based on the front end is the worst option.

So if you can use webhook, awesome. If you can't, you're going down the more complicated route, which is monitoring and changing things on the front end. Which again is amazing. We're doing something that we can't do, which means it's a little bit more complex to set up. Cool. Something we normally can't do at least.

And also quick question for me, when I'm in, don't be afraid to just exit out of that recording that you don't know what you're doing and start playing around with the other ways. So a lot of people are like, Ooh, I'm stuck. I'm recording. And again, you don't have to record every suggested step. So suggested steps are the steps that you get when you're not confirming them beforehand.

So you're not with, you don't have the intent. You didn't click. You didn't press click and then actually click. You just clicked in the browser. If that's confusing, you will find that out when you go through, um, getting started or checking out the browser recording. But Kyle, last question, if I'm in there and I'm automating something, right?

Like you think. People coming from Zapier or make only think in terms of triggers and actions. I do this and then I do this. A lot of people that use our tool think about humans, right? Like VAs, like our tool is like a, is like a productized virtual assistant, right? Like it does. You can do most human interactions with conditional formatting, reading PDFs with like automating chat, GPT, things like that.

Reading screenshots. Even though you're doing human like actions, you still need to remember you're instructing it, you're instructing a computer the same way you were before, so it doesn't know those decisions the same way. The old versus new is a very complicated decision. So if we have triggers that are only sending us new data, that's a perfect world.

Great. So anything, would you add anything else to this? Um, I definitely think that. Like adding on what you said about people trying. Um, I don't think people should go in here and build the perfect automation first. There's automations that a lot of the customers that we've worked with that I've had the most success with.

They come in wanting to automate 100 percent and we automate 80 percent and they leave extremely happy with a very simple automation that they understand and they can build on rather than automating 100 percent and not understanding anything along the way. Um, and running into complicated things. So start simple, try to eliminate what you don't need.

Start with your absolute bare minimum. The whole reason the parent company is called your V1, I guess. Um, and go from there. So your view, one of your flow. Yep. Do the, do a little bit and it's worth a lot. I promise. Yeah. So again, I'm, as I'm, as I think about closing this out, I'm like, that makes sense because if we, what would happen if we did start with triggers, what would be the downside?

Is there a downside if we start with, like, in the recording, if we start with set up your trigger? What would that do? How would that look? I don't like it because so many people, okay. Most people's flows happen after I've scraped something. Okay. So this one scraping seniorly, they want to scrape a bunch of listings and then they want to do some stuff with it.

Right. We have to, we started with scraping, which has no trigger. If I want to send a hundred thousand Instagram messages, I start with scraping. If I want to send LinkedIn DMS, I start with scraping. If I want to. Send emails. I start with scraping emails. It's just, it's just, I think that we do that. Um, I don't know the word for it, but to give the best chance of success with your first automation.

Yeah, sure. That does make sense. I guess you're right. You can't. Ah, so with what we're doing, here's a good way to put this. With what we're doing, you are grabbing. So if you start with apps. Right. If you start with apps or webhook, you are, that is your data source, right? It's essentially the only reason why you would trigger using apps, right?

Is grabbing that, the data you get from those apps or from that webhook. So what you're saying is a lot of our flows, people are using, not, let's not call it scraping. They're grabbing that data from some website. and using that data to go somewhere else. So in their automation, they're automation, espn, and grabbing scores and putting those scores somewhere else.

Mm-Hmm. . So they're, they're using the automation to grab the data, right? Mm-Hmm. And go somewhere else. Yeah, versus if you wanna go, so it's kind of like, where's your data source? Is your data source on a website that we don't have an app for? Or are you creating the data source? Right? Yeah. So like, yeah. Or are you grabbing the data in a browser automation?

So that's a good way to think about it as well. It's like, can you get the date? Yeah, dude. Because every, every automation starts with data. Yeah. Every automation from Zapier make is someone filled out this form, right? I want to grab the data from that form entry. Right? Right. So there is, and a lot of people with ours with browser automation, the data source is something that they can't get from a form builder.

It's from Amazon or Etsy or Google results. You know, so it's not something you can get from an API or an app or a form, right? Or a form builder or a form entry or a spreadsheet. And a lot of times, right? Like air table or Google sheets. If you want to do that, you can then trigger with Google sheets or air table.

Okay. So my question is that Kyle, my last question, If in fact they wanted to grab data from their google sheet or their air table And they didn't quite know that while they were recording or they were trying to record and grab that data Okay, what would you say at that point? I think that When people build their first automation, they need to build the action to do exactly what it should and not really pay attention to the variables.

I think that, cause what you're talking about, are you trying, like, do you have a bunch of data and you need to do something with all that data or is this like, Hey, when a new row is added, I want to go do something. I'm thinking I'm coming in with the pre knowledge of. I know my data is an air table and that's how I want to start my automation.

You should build one automation with you. Correct my language on this, but build one automation with the normal, like set data and then make it dynamic. What do you mean? It's like, If I want to, if I want to record sending a text message on WhatsApp, I can't type app phone into WhatsApp. I have to type my phone number.

I need to build an automation doing exactly what the automation should do. The automation doesn't, I mean, the automation will be updated to use a variable, but you know, what would you say to those? So like I'm making it and I'm, I'm really want to get this clear. So, so I'm asking in a bunch of different ways, I run the automation that involves the data that will come from a spreadsheet or air table, right?

Meaning when I want to send a thousand text messages to a thousand different numbers, I run the automation as if I'm sending it to one number, right? Then I just set up and I pull from a list. Remember the list trigger. Okay. So I run from that list. So setting up an automation is doing a flow. once and then connecting your data source, right?

So I guess you have to think record, then replace. Yeah, record it once through, right? Your automation once through replace the things that you are texting, you're texting or typing with variables if you need, and you will be prompted during recording that when you type something, do you want to set this up as a variable later?

So yeah, that works. That's great. Anything else that you add, Kyle? I think that's funny. And if any, any of this isn't making any sense, try it, go through it. You'll kind of see and connect, but let us know in the comments, um, and give this video a like, but let us know what you think, um, on this getting started.

Anything, Kyle? That's it. Okay, cool. Thank you.