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Justin Blase has always been fascinated by automation. When he first started using Zapier for a previous employer over five years ago, he realized it would be a game-changer for him. With a background mostly in marketing, he didn't have coding skills. But he realized that the combination of Zapier and other tools like Airtable would allow him to build things that were never possible before without paying a developer to build and manage them. After becoming a Zapier power user, and eventually a certified Zapier expert, Justin wanted to see if he could build an eCommerce business that ran almost entirely on automation—but he didn't want to sacrifice the quality of the product or the uniqueness of the business. Justin was interested in print on demand services: he knew he could automate the fulfillment process via a dropshipper, and he loved the idea of not holding any inventory other than digital image files in the cloud. "I tested a number of products in the print on de...

Audience analysis is…complicated. But it can be less complicated if you home in on a specific way to capture the data you need. If you're looking to find new markets for your business, social listening is a natural choice. Social media is the world's biggest database of consumer insights, so it's a great place to look for gaps that your business could fill. In this article, I'll walk you through two different ways you can approach social listening to perform audience analysis and help you find new markets. I am the developer of Awario , a social listening tool. That's why I'm using Awario as an example in the workflow: it's the one I'm most familiar with and can personally vouch for. Monitor your own brand In every social listening tool, the first step is to create an alert for your brand: type the name of your brand as a keyword (or several keywords, if your brand is often abbreviated or misspelled). If all you're looking to do is track menti...

When I am stuck for one moment, I leave it and do something else. – Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) Over the span of thirty years, Niklas Luhmann published more than 70 books and nearly 400 academic articles—a measure of productivity that would make Stephen King blush (and George R.R. Martin cringe ). As a sociologist, Luhmann's interests ranged from law to mass media, religion to economics, but no matter the subject, even his critics agreed: the man knew what he was talking about. So how did a brewer's son churn out work after work of such consistently high quality? By pioneering a productivity system he called Zettelkasten —German for "slip box." Luhmann claimed that his Zettelkasten became a conversational partner, constantly challenging him and prodding him on to greater productivity. And thanks to its power and simplicity, today the Zettelkasten method has been adapted to fit the workflow and information management of any creative pro or knowledge worker. The Zet...

You try to improve yourself. It doesn't work. Why does this keep happening? In my experience, the problem is biting off more than I can chew. I'll have grand ideas for a better me but no clear plan of how to get there. Then, when I try to follow through, I'm using more willpower than necessary to create the change. The result? When I hit obstacles, my willpower is depleted, making me more likely to backslide. I've thought about this a lot. What worked for me was to design a system for accountability, then ramp up to big changes slowly within that system. This allows me to create habits. Set up systems that keep you accountable We all have things we wish we were better about—responding to emails in a timely manner, for example, or maintaining things around the house. You can tell yourself you want to be better about these things, in the abstract. You might even follow through. But if you don't change anything but your intention, the most likely outcome is that no...

About a decade ago, my co-founder, Ka Wai Cheung, and I found ourselves searching for a bug tracker for managing client work at our digital agency. At the agency, we helped clients build and develop custom apps. And no matter what bug tracker we tried, we couldn't find one that helped us during the testing phase of our apps—the phase where we find and fix any issues before launch. DoneDone co-founders, Michael Sanders and Ka Wai Cheung As we evaluated solutions, looking at feature sets, comparing pricing, and reading customer reviews, the same problem kept coming up: most of them felt like a kitchen sink of features that we were never going to use . Quickly discovering we weren't going to find our solution in the market, we began writing our own software and developed the bug tracking solution we needed. We realized the biggest help we could give users was an absence of the kitchen sink; each and every feature was stripped thoroughly before making it into DoneDone . That...

Most Gmail users don't think about their contacts. You type a name, the email address shows up, and you hit enter. It's basically magic. Every once in a while, though, this isn't enough. That's where Google Contacts comes in. You can use Google Contacts to keep track of email addresses, phone numbers, or physical addresses (if you're the sort of person who occasionally goes places and/or sends letters). It's probably not something you open often, or even know exists, but it's worth checking out if you're a Google user. In Google Contacts, you can: Clean up or update contact information, which is useful when someone changes their email address or phone number. Create groups, which is useful if you regularly email the same collection of people. Look up contact information for anyone inside your company (assuming your company uses G Suite). Import and export your contacts. Let's go over how to do all of this, together. Want to make G Suite m...

Your day is full of meetings with the occasional break for doing some actual work. It's not ideal, but Google Calendar helps you keep track of it all. Here are a few tweaks you can make to your Google Calendar settings to make your calendar a less stressful place to be (that aren't just canceling all of your appointments and running away to live in the mountains). All of these settings can be found by clicking the gear icon near the top-right corner, then clicking Settings . You can save time by connecting Google Calendar to all the other tools you use. Here's how to bring context to your calendar by connecting other apps . Show two time zones in the sidebar Collaborating across time zones means doing a lot of mental math. Google Calendar can help by showing two time zones worth of times in the left sidebar. Just open your settings and head to the Time zone section. Check the Display secondary time zone option, then choose your second location. You can also give the...

You probably don't know how to write code. In the 1970s, that meant you couldn't use a computer because early devices didn't really do anything unless you manually typed out commands. That's not true anymore—you don't need to know how to write code to scroll through Instagram. This is what allowed computers to go from an obscure hobby to a part of everyday life. Most people would never have bothered to learn to use computers if they had to learn a programming language. It probably sounds so obvious that it's not worth saying, but it's a big deal. A similar thing is happening right now. What does no code mean? Building interactive things on the internet, historically, required at least some knowledge of code. That's changing, thanks to tools that allow anyone to create these interactive things without any coding knowledge. Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt, calls these "no code tools" —and he's not alone. The term is catching on ...

Customer reviews are important: 90 percent of people read at least one user review before even visiting a store, according to Mention. And those reviews are powerful. An even higher proportion of online shoppers—94 percent—will avoid a business altogether because of a negative review. Reviews are essential for providing the social proof your potential customers need to make a purchase. But soliciting, gathering, and tracking all this feedback can take a lot of time and manual work. That’s where Zapier comes in. Zapier connects user review tools and websites with your customer management, eCommerce, and newsletter tools. These workflows, which we call Zaps, can automate huge chunks of the user review process, letting you get more reviews with less effort. To try one of the Zaps in this article, click the orange Use this Zap button. If you're logged in, you'll be walked through the Zap setup process, where you connect your apps and get started. If you're not yet a Zapier...

It's hard for any business to build brand recognition and grow a loyal following. But for the up-and-coming, shoestring-budget business, being discovered is much harder than that 15-year-old YouTuber makes it look. Add to that the intrusion of a global pandemic like COVID-19, and the struggle is real. But let's not get it twisted. Now's not the time to give up hope for your small business. Now's the time to get smart about funneling limited resources into business growth. Now's the time to diversify client base, grow audiences, and find cheaper, more ingenious ways to reach ideal customers—all roadblocks small businesses face. I've been working in marketing for over a decade, and I've seen people try all sorts of tactics to get new leads. Some of them work. Most of them don't. One that cuts through the lead gen noise: quizzes. To learn more about optimizing no-code tools like Typeform and Zapier, join us on Friday, June 26 at 1 p.m. PDT / 4 p.m. EDT ...

Google Calendar launched in 2006. And by "launched," of course, I mean "kind of just showed up." This was the era of Google quietly putting "beta" versions of apps on the internet and watching what people used. People found—and used—Google Calendar. In an era when web applications weren't common it stood out, not only because it ran entirely in a browser, but also because it was faster than popular desktop options at the time. Google Calendar was also packed with features. An early review by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch pointed out natural language processing for events, managing multiple calendars, and Gmail integration. These are still the biggest features over a decade and a half later (though the natural language processing is now missing from the web version , for some reason). Today Google Calendar is the most popular calendar service on the web. The app is installed by default on Android phones and shows up in Gmail's sidebar, which ...

I don't like seeing my face during Zoom calls for the same reason I don't want to do meetings in a room full of mirrors. It's distracting and mildly nauseating. Good thing I can hide myself in Zoom. Zoom, by default, puts all meeting participants at the top of the screen and shows whoever is currently talking below that. This is called the speaker view, and it features a thumbnail of your own face to the left (which is terrible, and I hate it). You can hide your face by hovering over it, clicking the three-dot menu, then clicking Hide Self View . So do that…immediately. Now your face will no longer show up in the top bar. Note that this only works in meetings with three or more people. The Hide Self View option is still there in a call with only one other person, but it doesn't actually do anything. But there's a workaround: switch to Gallery View or fullscreen mode. In fullscreen, the self-view will now be in a pop-up window. Click the line option to hide...