The CoachAccountable Blog

I’d never heard of Zapier until someone asked if CA integrated with it.  There is a veritable sea of other apps I might make CA integrate with, quite impractical to do them all and certainly not to be done in response to only one request, and so I tucked the idea away for the time being.

And then eventually I got another request.  And then another.  And then several more.

By about the third person to ask I gave it a good look and very much liked the premise: integrating with Zapier, it turns out, is not so much integrating with one app, but rather is a gateway to near-effortless integrations with a whole ecosystem of other apps.

Zapier makes it possible for your average person (specifically, NON-programmers) to make two different apps to talk to one another in order to accomplish certain tasks of automation, and with no programming necessary.  These include tasks of the form “when X happens over here, make it do Y over there”, like for example “When someone schedules an appointment with me from my WuFoo form, add it as an event to my Google Calendar.”

With the CoachAccountable API, CA is ripe for being one of the apps that can be integrated with others via Zapier.  I hadn’t yet made it a priority as of this past week, until just the other day I got another request for it, this time via chat from one Louise Beattie of Working a Better Life.

“Hey, since I’ve got you here, would you mind telling me specifically what you would use it for?” I asked.  She said she’d like to have it so that clients she added to CoachAccountable would be automatically added to her mailing list within ActiveCampaign.

Hmmm… “Are you going to be online for a little while?  I’d be happy to cook that up for you if you’d be willing to be my guinea pig on this, and let me know how it was working for you.”  I explained more or less how I myself wasn’t a Zapier user and so somewhat flying blind about the whole thing.  She was game.

So it was then that I spent some time putting the finishing touches on some toying around I’d done earlier, motivated by being able to serve a real and specifically requested use case.  Fun!

Even in this super early phase, this totally works, and is one of many MANY possible tasks that could be setup.

Louise was offline by the time I had things ready to go (being 7 hours ahead of me in the UK I suppose I might’ve suspected that) but the next day I’d got confirmation that the setup was a working success.

CoachAccountable as a Zapier app is now in invite-only mode.  Again, flying blind as I am (and more to the point, not myself chomping at the bit with specific integration needs), I’m leaving it up to users of both Zapier & CoachAccountable to guide in what would be useful, and the functionality of what can be easily setup via Zapier will grow and evolve in accordance with requests.

For example, two weeks ago another coach said this:

I’d love to have some rules fire when a new coaching client is added. Like connecting on LinkedIn, Facebook, maybe tie it in to a service that ships a card or brownies.

Automated brownie sending to new clients–nice!  I take it as proof positive that there’s a lot of room for creative ideas in this space.

If you’re a Zapier user and would like to link your CoachAccountable account to it for whatever purposes of automation with other systems you use, you can!  You’ll not find CA in the Zapier app directory yet, but you can connect it via this invite link:

https://zapier.com/developer/invite/29519/b40a6c79d29336524e270178ecba2252/

My thanks to Louise for being the well-timed push that got me finally really rolling on this front!