How to Connect Any API To Make.com

What's going on everybody? Welcome to another video in our course make. com, but for people who want to make real money. And in this video, I'm going to be diving deep into APIs, application programming interfaces, because I think it's one of the most commonly misunderstood concepts in both make. com and automation work in general. They're made way too complicated by virtually everybody that talks about them. and 99. 9% of the uh examples and stuff like that people are providing just are not really applicable to business use cases. So, in this video, I'm actually going to show you guys an applicable business use case, something very simple. We're going to customize some outreach just using uh available data from like a free API that I just found on the internet. I'm going to show you how to authenticate. to, you know, use request modules in make. com. And basically, I'm just going to show you everything you actually need to know to use this productively. If you guys watch a lot of my videos, you're probably wondering where the hell I am and why my background looks like it was filmed on a potato. I'm just at a hotel here in the beautiful city of Buffalo in the beautiful state of New York just on some client work. I do shadowing and delegation and automation work as part of my day-to-day. And so I figured I'd pick like a relevant example for you and just record this before it left my brain. So if all that sounds good to you and if you're excited to dive into this as I am, then stay tuned and let's get into it.

Okay, so first things first. What is an API? And why the hell is it when it every time that you Google this, you get a bunch of like matrix looking ass stuff where it's like APIs are brains that are embedded in the cloud, bro? Well, they're nowhere near as complicated as what a quick Google search would have you think. API stands for application programming interface, and it's basically just the way that different servers on the internet talk to each other. Um, it's like one of the language specifications basically of like the internet. It's like the simplest way that I found to explain this and probably like the dumbest way too is let's say you are going to a coffee shop and you want a specific type of coffee. Um, I go to Starbucks a lot. So I'll walk in and then I'll say, "Hi, how's it going? I'll have a tall blonde roast and I'd like you to leave room for cream, please. " They will kind of think about my order. You know, if they're competent Starbucks people, they'll know what that means. is they'll parse it and then in their mind they'll sort of translate that to a list of steps or a list of things that they need to do in order to like fulfill my order. They'll be like, "Okay, hm, tall blonde roast, I know where that is. Um, tall cups, you know, I know where those are. Uh, room for cream, okay, like he probably wants about an inch or something like that. " Right? And they can ask me follow-up questions. They can use natural language to try and determine uh the best way to answer my query. Right? Now the thing is APIs you can conceptualize as let's pretend you were going to a coffee shop API. Well, it works the exact same way as what I just talked about. The only difference is that the person that you are talking to is now really freaking stupid and they only understand requests that are formatted in an extremely particular way. And this isn't a knock against Starbucks um baristas. It is a knock against blends baristas. Y'all are morons. No, I'm just kidding. uh it's you know let's just use this for the sake of the example

and let me show you what I mean like let's say you walk into the Starbucks and then instead of you [snorts] you know being able to say hey I'll have a tall uh blonde roast with room for cream you know they only understand a request if you take a piece of paper at the front desk and then write it out in a very specific format and so the way that you'd write it out uh is first you define the roast type so in my case it would be blonde then you define the size which in my case would be call uh and then there's a variable for room for cream which you will fill out as true or false. And then in order to um you know access this API, you need a credit card number. And so then you walk in, you kind of like put in your credit card number which is like your API key in this case. Um and then what you do is you give that piece of paper over to the really dumb barista. Uh and then the really dumb barista looks at those like kind of parses out all of the information. It's like okay, roast type blonde, good. Uh size tall, good. Room for cream, true. Okay, great. credit card number. Let me just double check this. Okay, yeah, it looks good. We can make this request. They then go to the back, prepare my wonderful tall blonde roast, which is probably horrifically overpriced. Uh, and then they bring it back to me and then, you know, problem solve our transactions over. So, APIs work in basically the exact same way. Um, it's just instead of you, you know, going to a coffee shop or whatever, you're just doing this on the internet using various um software platforms that usually allow you to like connect to these things automatically. uh you can make requests like in your terminal, you know, on your computer. Uh if you're a developer, you can make requests just in code, but since we're in make. com, we're going to be making requests in make. com. And I really like doing this because it's one of the uh simplest ways to get up and running with this stuff. Like a lot of the formatting and whatnot is sort of scaffolded for you. And then all you have to do is just use a very simple module called the HTTP request module um to go out and then you know send or receive information. So, in this way, you can connect literally any two software platforms that have APIs on planet Earth and do some pretty amazing things. Um, in our case, we're going to do something that's not like super

incredibly amazing, but I still think it's cool. And, uh, we're going to make sure that it's applicable to business. Um, what we're going to do is I have a monday. com CRM set up here that I'm currently working on. And you guys probably recognize this from a previous video if you're watching this series. And what I've noticed here is that one of these fields is location. Now, the cool part about monday. com is in the location field, it provides like the address, but it also forces you to put in the latitude and the longitude. And so, we can pull the latitude, longitude information, and then presumably what I think we're going to do is we're going to use that information to call a bunch of weather APIs, maybe just one weather API. Um, and then we're going to get that information with maybe like what the weather is looking like or what the temperature is. And then depending on what the temperature is, then we'll use that to customize a line in in an outreach email. So we'll say like you know bombmy weather we're having here in California you know hope you're doing well I wanted to talk to you about x y and z right and so this is a very simplified use case obviously but um you know a lot of people in email at riches scale now what they're doing is they're grabbing information from some data source let's say LinkedIn and then they're calling an API to enrich that data or get some additional information about that data and then they will use GPT4 or some type of AI to then customize an email based off that information. So it seems like it's written in natural language. hyper relevant and hyperargeted to the person. Uh and this is basically like the stem of that whole flow. So you can build this out as arbitrarily complex as you want. Okay, great. So what I'm going to do here is I have set up a make scenario called get monday. com item. Then set latit send latitude longitude to a weather API and then customize email. I have two parts of this so far. I have the get an item from monday. com and what I've done there is I've just gone to the specific record that I'm using as an example. So location California USA and monday. com if you click on the open record page uh up at the top you'll see the URL changes and there'll be a slash pulses with like a URL. So I just know this from my time working with Monday but this is the ID of the record. So I'm going to basically go into this module here which is Monday get an item and you'll see there's an ID field. So, I'll just paste this in. Uh, and then I'll run this once for sanity. And yeah, you'll see that this like goes out and it grabs the specific name on the record and you know, everything like that's good. Um, the information that we are probably concerned about is probably this location field. Yeah, latitude, longitude. Cool. So, I imagine this is what we're going to need. I haven't actually looked into this. All I did was

I typed free weather API. I scrolled past all of the examples. Uh, I tried doing open weather map. uh that didn't really seem to work. So, I kept on scrolling. Uh and then I found one called weatherappi. com, which I think is going to work. I don't actually know even if it will. Uh but I'm just going to sign up for this and then we're going to see what happens. Um I received a comment earlier about how somebody really liked that I showed my mistakes while I was doing this. And I do believe that that's pretty informative, right? Like um API integrations and stuff like that, they don't always work out. And sometimes there's a little bit of debugging that needs to happen and sometimes the instructions aren't very clear. Um, so my hope is that you know by doing this I uh if I do run into any issues then you guys will be able to see what the debugging process looks like. So I just copying and pasting in this email verification. I'm going go to the login page now for the service and I'm just typing in um the credentials here and we're going

to see how we get the API stuff. So, okay, great. Um, this is awesome. They just provided us all of the information up front. So, one thing that you usually need when you're working with an API is you need what's called an API key, which is sort of like my credit card in the previous example. I mean, it's not actually a credit card, but it's just a way that you can verify that your requests are legitimate. Like, if I walked into Starbucks and I'm like, "Hey, I want a tall blonde with room for cream. " Um, and they're like, "Okay, great. Pay us. " And I'm like, "No. " Like, they wouldn't consider that request legitimate. They'd probably kick me out of the store. Same way uh that APIs work. If you don't have your API key, they don't really consider you legitimate. And then instead of sending you the information that you want, they usually just send you like an unauthorized request, which is equivalent to security throwing you out. Um, yeah. So, here's where we're at right now. You see that they gave us like some pro plus plan. We have an API key. How exactly does this work, though? So, I'm going to go to learn how to form HTTP request to get weather from API explorer or use our new swagger tool. That's interesting. I have a ton of swag, man. Um, okay. So, looks like they have an interactive API explorer. That's not what we want. We just want the docs. This looks more like what we want. Anytime you are connecting APIs, always go to down to the docs page first before you do anything. And then these docs will usually solve all of your problems. I will say they're written usually by like the super nerdy type that, you know, can't go outside or his skin will get burned by the sunlight. So, you do have to be a little bit careful in the way that you're parsing this. And sometimes it's just really annoying to try and convert this into natural language. You can't just paste APIs into GPT3 or GPT4. I've done that a couple of times and then just ask the questions in natural language. That's something you could do. Um, but you know, as you get more and more uh I guess competence at working with APIs, you know, you'll usually learn all the that you could skip. So, I'm just skipping through all the stuff here. What I'm really looking for is I'm looking for some type of like quick start or an example request that I could just pump in. So, um, let me see if I'll be able to find it. There's a getting started up here. Then there's a request URL. It says request to weather api. com consists of base URL and API method. You can make both HTTP or HTTPS requests to our API. This is an example of what I mean. It's just pointless. this probably doesn't do anything um tangible unless you really care about you know securing your HTTP requests to uh to a weather API. So what we see here is there's what's called a base URL which is http backapiweatherapi. com/v1. This is usually quite common so there'll usually be some type of base URL here uh which is nice and then there are a bunch of request parameters. Uh, this is sort of silly the way that they've laid it out here, like they're just giving you all of the parameters up front as opposed to just giving you an example URL that you can call. So, we want the weather API. That's what we're curious about. Um, so I'm going to do the real-time API. That's probably what that is. And this is super silly in so far that there is just so many there's so much random information whereas the only thing I really want is I just want the uh okay well whatever let's just do it this way. Um a lot of the time these APIs just have the entire string that you can just copy and paste but uh we're just going to do it the way that they want us to do it. So uh we have a base URL here

and then we have various endpoints they're called for different parts of the service. So there's um this API base and then on top of that what you do is you slap like a slashcurren. json or slashforcast. json or slash search. json and then depending on what you're doing um then you um you know depending on what field you're looking at then you can put in what are called request parameters which in our case is going to be a query. Uh, and we're going to put in a Q equals this here. So, this is probably what we're going to end up doing. Um, and let me just pump this in. So, first we have the base stem of our URL. And then what we're going to want is slashcurren. json. And then uh, our request parameter in this case is going to be Q. So, I'll always put a question mark. question mark is just how you start defining the list of parameters. Then you write whatever your parameter is. So maybe in another API that's probably written or specified a little bit better, you might do latitude equals whatever and longitude equals and you know um that's how you do multiple variables, but in our case it's just Q. And then it looks like we do some decimals. Uh so I'm just going to copy and paste this in. We're going to see what happens. And then I'm also going to grab the API key somewhere. I don't know where you do this API key though. Looks like it's just a key parameter. Okay. So I imagine that would just be and um key equals and then we have an API key up here which I'm going to copy paste that in. And I'm just going to try this as an example. We'll see what happens. Uh yeah. Okay, looks like it worked. We got a 200 request. Um 200 status code just means that everything is hunky dory. If it were a 400 or 401 or basically anything starting with a four, there'd be a problem. Uh and so if you open up this data, um you'll see that there is a location with the name of the place that you are referencing. Looks like they also give you the region, the country, the latitude, the longitude, they give you the time zone, local time, and then under current, they have temp in C, then F. Wow, this is actually extremely exhaustive. You could do a lot of cool stuff with this. You could just feed all this into AI and say like, "Hey, like write me a customized thing with all of this information. " Uh, and then the text is light rain. Okay, great. We're going to do something really funny with this. Um, anyway, that was way simpler than I thought it'd be. I thought we'd have some issues, which is sort of unfortunate, but uh, but yeah, while I'm just on that note, then let me run you through what a much better API would probably look like. Um, before this, I was looking at

one called openweathermap. org. Um, and the cool thing about open weather map is they just give you the whole URL up front. And this is usually what like the good APIs will do. So if we scroll down to open weathermap. org and then check out their API, they have a one call API 3. 0. You'll see they have an entire section just called how to make an API call. And inside of this, they literally have a whole URL with latitude equals lat and longitude equals long. And they have some exclude parameter and then app ID equals your API key. So, what you would do if you really wanted to scaffold this, get up and running, is you would just copy this and then you'd paste this into your make request module, which by the way, if you're unfamiliar how to find, just type in um HTTP down here. I've already found it and I've stuck it over here, so it's not popping up when I do the search, but uh the module that we're curious that we need to do is called make a request. Um but yeah, what you do is you just paste this in and then you just fill in these variables with the information um from your service. So there's a reason why this one costs money and this one's free probably. But um yeah. Yeah, a lot of APIs are unfortunately going to be quite difficult and quite dense to understand. So just gets um starts to be pretty valuable just to get in the habit of parsing this. Now while I'm on this, I might as well talk about a couple of other ways that APIs work. Um and these are like common requirements uh for various APIs nowadays. Not all APIs will be structured in this way. You'll see that in this HTTP make a request module there are a bunch of um parameters here. So the first is URL but then there's one called method which allows you to do get head, post, put, patch, delete options. The vast majority of the time you're going to be using either a get request to get some data from a resource or you're going to be using a post request which usually can be getting data from a resource but can also be like updating data or adding data to a resource or something like that. And so the real difference that uh people just can't seem to understand simply or explain simply I should say is uh in a get request you just put all of your information in the URL itself. So if you check this out what am I doing? I'm like defining Q= 48 whatever and then 2. 3508 and key equals whatever. Like I'm putting all this information just in the URL. But then uh if you were using a post request a lot of the time what you'd do is uh we we'd select raw and then we'd select JSON. So in a post request a lot of the time what you do is you just structure this in a JavaScript object. So what that means is you would um do the curly braces and if you go back to our coffee shop example you would structure all this like this. You can say latitude equals 48, whatever. Longitude, you know, I don't know if this is right. Probably not. Um, API key a lot of the time, right? And then you'd put the information down here instead of up here. And there's obviously some more nuance to it, you know, the more developer friendly uh this tutorial becomes. Uh, but I'm going to keep it pretty light. And essentially that's really the main difference. You'll usually find that information um somewhere in the API. You'll like type in get or something. And then a lot of the time they say you need to get request or post request or something. And so you'll see here that they say um you know if you wanted to send multiple locations you have to pass a JSON body as a post method with UTF8 encoding. This is just so silly and this is the sort of stuff that just really drives me up the wall. Like this is just extremely inaccessible. There are many different ways to say this. You don't need to pass a JSON body. Um, you know, they could have just given you the exact URL that you could have copied and then pasted, but they didn't because they want to seem like, you know, they're sophisticated, intelligent, whatever. Developers, man, they can drive me up the wall sometimes. Um, anyway, yeah, so that's uh yeah, that's basically the two differences. In our case, we're doing get requests. I'm going to go empty. And then now that we have defined the specifications, I think the first one was latitude, right? Let me scroll all the way over here. Uh

first was latitude then longitude. So what we have to do is we have to feed in the latitude of this record which we just pulled in under mapappable column values location lat and then long. So we have to feed in the latitude first. Go location latitude and then we have to feed in the longitude as well. Let's do this. And then let's go longitude. And then the key um is just uh the same key that we're going to over uh use over and over again. A good design pattern uh that you can use is you can store the key separately um in like a variable if you ever wanted to hot swap it or something. So you could just call this um I don't know set key or something. And we could call this like API key. And then we could grab this exact key, stick it in here. You can imagine we could also do this with the latitude and the longitude if we wanted to, but I don't really want to. Uh, okay, great. Now that I have everything set up, let me just auto adjust this. Let me save this and let me run this. We'll see if there are any issues. So, we grab the information just fine, set the API key just fine, and then we call the API. And then we got a status code of 200 just fine. And then the data that we got includes the condition, an icon for this, which is cute. Um the temperature, and then um the location of where we're making the request to based off the latitude and longitude. What I'm going to do here is I'm then going to use this to customize an email just to show you guys how you would apply this to a business use case. Uh let's just create a draft this time. And then I'm going to do the two as the email module. So email, text, email. So, I'm going to use this one here that's called email subject. Uh, I don't know. This will just be like some outreach. So, let's just say quick question. Let me see if I can grab their name from this as well. Their name is up here. Um, I don't want to go through the rigomearroll of like doing all the math. So, I'm just going to go split name. Uh, we're going to do the space. So, let's do space. And then, if you guys remember this design pattern from previously, we're just going to get the first entry. And a hot tip for you guys that are doing outreach at scale, uh if you just lowerase some of the elements in your subject line, a lot of the time you're improving conversion rate or um at least uh open rate because people will think that like it was written by a real person and not a robot. So I'm just going to do the same thing here. Um hi blank and then these BRs are just spaces. And then oh, you know what? Why don't I use this as an example to show you guys how routers work, too? Yeah, let's do that because I haven't actually discussed routers yet. So, I'm going to go over here and then

what I'm going to do is um okay, if you think about it logically, we want to send different emails depending on the weather, right? So, if the weather is above, let's say 15, we want it to be like, hey, you know, weather's looking great out here in California. How are you doing? Right? We just want to do that as sort of like a drop in sort of uh customization example that you can replace. Um if the weather's below a certain number then we want to say like hey you know frigid ass weather we're having anyway. So in order to do that simply um there are two or three design patterns. The first is you can just manually route every response. And what a router is a router allows you to just choose different uh outcomes depending on a situation that you've defined beforehand. So what you do is you select a router module like I did back there. Then you connect a router module to uh one of the routes. And then all you do is you copy and paste the initial route. So copy and paste. And then this ends up looking like this. Um if you auto align it'll look a little prettier obviously. And then uh what you do is you set the route using the filter. And so if I wanted I would say hot let's just say over 15 C. What I would do is I would find the current temp C and I'd say if this is greater than 15 go through this then I would say mild let's say 0 to 15C then I would say if this um temperature here is greater than zero and temperature is less than 15 and then I would say cold less than 0 C if the temperature is less than zero. Okay, so now I have basically three routes and all these routes are mutually exclusive. If you go down hot, you're not going to go down mild or cold. If you go down mild, you're not going to go down hot or cold. If you go down cold, you're not going to go down hot or mild, obviously. Uh, and then what you can do is you can just customize this with whatever you want your email to be. So, we could say, um, nice weather we're having. I'm in. And then let's put California like you and wanted to connect about X, Y, and Z. Let me know if you have time to chat next week. Thanks, Nick. Right. And then I'm just going to copy and paste this and stick this in three. Pretty good weather we're having. This is like the lowest hanging fruit in email customization. By the way, I'm just trying to not cringe at if I actually got an email like this. But anyway, I'm just using this as an example. Um anyway, and then uh and then what you do is you test the logic. So we're testing this running through um oh it looks like I need to verify this a little bit better. Oh yeah, I'm not using the right email here. So let me pretend that I'm using this email. This is probably better. So I need to verify this puppy. Sorry, that sounds like there's some housekeeping going on. Some very violent housekeeping. Uh, and then I think it was this one. Maybe I'm mistaken. Yeah. So, I might have to reverify all these. Just sort of annoying. [clears throat] Then down here, I'll reverify this one, too. Okay, I'm going to save this. We're going to try one more time. Uh, didn't draft it. Probably because this folder location was wrong. Let's see. Invalid credentials failure. Um, I don't really know what that's supposed to mean. Maybe I didn't actually swap out the uh, try that one more time now that I've swapped it out. Looks like it's working. Yeah. No, it didn't work either because unknown mailbox, right? So, uh, you have, so I tried mapping this because I, uh, there was some error here and it was because I wasn't connected to the inbox. So, just make sure that when you do this, um, you have an actual mailbox in your email server. Um, there are a bunch that you can just choose with a drop down. One of them's like all mail, the other's inbox, the other's drafts. I guess since we're creating a draft, let's just do this in drafts. Um, and then if you wanted to hardcode that in, you would write um square bracket gmail square bracket slashdrafts like this. So I'm just going to do that here and then I'm going to run this puppy one final time. There we go. Awesome. Um, so now this has actually been generated for us. And if I go to my email and then go under drafts, you'll see that we have the email generated. Uh, and it says, "Quick question, Phoenix. Hi, Phoenix. I'm in California like you wanted connected about XYZ. So, you can imagine how uh you could make this flow arbitrarily more complex. Um if you wanted to like add like a GPT4 module in the middle or something like that and then do stuff with the data that you pulled, you could probably just feed this entire string in all this current stuff and then just like customize this email based on this input. Great. So

that's that. Now you guys know how to connect more or less any two software platforms together using um some very specific but unfortunately difficult for most people to understand um API stuff in make. com. Super simple and straightforward. I think as long as you follow more or less the general design pattern and principles that I've discussed earlier in the video, APIs don't have to be difficult at all. And what I find too is the second that you understand them, at least to this like surface level degree, it basically instantly unlocks an entire new world of integrations that you can build for yourself and then also an entire new world of let's say jobs or gigs or positions that you can get as a freelancer or as somebody that's employed. So, I hope that's been helpful to you. If you guys have any questions or comments or anything, please leave a like, comment, subscribe, and we'll kind of pick it up from there. And if you have any requests for specific videos that you want me to do, then please leave them down below. The reason why I did an API video is because somebody reminded me that I hadn't talked about it yet.