Community Meetup December 3rd, 2021: Product updates, n8n Embed, Lightning talks

perfect all right if you're joining for the meetup for the first time i'm sure you are going to have a lot of fun we got some wonderful talks from the team and the community we regularly host these meetups to bring the community together share updates learn and have fun if you or anyone you know would like to speak at army tubs feel free to reach out to me i am marshall agrawal your host for this meetup now for every meetup starts with a nice ice-breaking question just to know a bit about you all so this ice-making question is around the theme of the holidays that are coming along i would like to know which is your favorite sweets well if you don't like sweets tell us which is your favorite dish wow a lot of good ideas over here a lot of nice names of lint chocolate band for uh ban uh i got this for my cousins and they really loved it i can definitely say that those are the best chocolates that i ever had big fan of bounty there's a french desert as well that's wonderful and coconut candy wow all right you folks are kind of making me a bit nervous because my idea was to pick out a few of this and try to cook them on my own with this list i don't know how many i would be able to do but i'll certainly keep you updated on my twitter alright so let's move forward and let's take a quick look at some housekeeping rules again this meetup is recorded so if you are not comfortable feel free to turn off your webcam ask your questions in the chat i have the chat window open with me i am gonna continuously collect your questions and ask to them to the speakers and be respectful and mindful let's taking a quick look at the agenda we'll start with the product updates from the one and only max and we'll move on to the talk by stefano and if you are interested to know more about the licensing and partnering with anytime this talk is for you we will then have a short q a where you can ask your questions to max and stefan so again don't forget to put your questions in the chat and then after the q a maxim will talk about how to integrate your daily tools and apps and we'll end the series of talks with a talk from jason titled putting the brakes on schweitzer now i don't know if he created a workflow to stop this while charge or not we'll find out in this talk

so let's kick off the session with the most awaited product updates max the head of design will give you a teaser of what is coming next in an attempt max over to you thanks marshall for the warm introduction as always and so good to see everyone uh a month later as you can imagine we've been busy so i've got a lot of exciting updates for you show you some stuff that we put out recently and some stuff that we're working on um so um in terms of um the first thing that i'd love to show you uh you might have seen it already if you've updated your version of ndn recently but we have deployed some exciting improvements to the workflow canvas um so if you've noticed a big change in the workflow canvas that's what i'm talking about i'll show it in a minute here um and i think whenever we're talking about new features i always like to explain the why because we do a lot of thinking and listening to your needs when we uh when we build a feature um and so the reason we felt we needed to sort of refactor and improve the experience um was we wanted to clarify what's happening in a workflow um both for simple workflows which sort of affects a lot of newcomers when they're trying out interdent but also for complex workflows so we see a lot of you it's amazing when we see it you know creating these 10 20 30 40 node workflows i think at times those could get a little busy and it might not be clear what's happening so we focused on improving the node states uh making sure that everything that we're doing is conveying some sort of information or helping you in some sort of way and so really sort of channeling function and form of artifice and so we also did a few things to make the canvas a bit more intuitive for newcomers that shouldn't conflict with any sort of established patterns for current power users and we also added some faster patterns for things like injecting nodes and existing flows or when you delete the node that is connected between two those autoconnect sort of studied these sorts of um things that power users are most likely to do and try to just have some sort of faster patterns to do that because the feedback we always get is that you know uh in nine you sort of you can create like this idea pace and so that's something we want to continue channeling with all of our features um and this is just the first phase for our cannabis improvement so what you've seen uh already is the majority of it are going to add a little bit more but we do have a much longer roadmap in mind for how we're going to continue improving canvas but as good as talking is i'm guessing you'd rather see it in action so i'll share my screen down here um and so if you can see an empty workflow canvas i'm sharing the right screen if not i should let you know but basically what you'll notice there is some sort of visual design that we've changed um you'll notice right away uh nodes no longer have colorful borders um and so a little bit of a debate about that um for us we really wanted to make sure that um workflows uh or each node is giving you some sort of information so now when we execute a workflow we can see that it was successfully executed so we figured that conveying something through that color would make it more helpful and there's also an error statement goes wrong you notice also here is we see the items of data coming out of the connector and if i reset this we now have this sort of plus here which we again can use to drag we can of course still use the existing one here and we can also click to add a node so in this case if i add a set node um for example um we can now also inject nodes in between and so if i delete the set node here you can see that that's auto connected so everything you're seeing here is already out uh except for this plus which should be coming up very soon um now if i open up an existing workflow kind of see some of this in action so here we're fetching a bunch of items and we're doing an if check so some items might route to the top some to the bottom here if i execute this now we can see that very clearly right so from start node one item's coming in this customer data store node is doing a get-all operation so it lists five entries we can now see a lot more clearly that two of those are routing up to the true branch three through the false and again we could insert more nodes if we needed to here right um and if we delete them that's sort of what it connects again so um small improvements that we hope help our power users um and definitely help also with the adoption of naden because the bigger our community gets right the more uh people we're gonna get helping contributing nodes workflows all that sort of thing so i think it's a win-win for everyone even when we make features that do help uh newer users because we kind of fuel the community um this feature um obviously touches a lot of like the core experience of internet it's not some sort of settings page or whatnot so as always we're always keen to hear feedback um and if there's anything that you'd like to see sort of continue to prove again we have a roadmap here so it's good to know that because that could match up with what we're doing and help of prioritizing what we do next when it comes to the canvas um so that's the demo portion of this um other than that i do have a few brief updates on some things that are in progress that i can talk about now so the big one that i'm guessing a lot of you are waiting for an update for is user management um so it's a big feature it's something we've been working on for a while um and the elephant in the room is it's not out there right so rest assured uh heavy hitters on our engineering team uh are on the case um we've got some very talented folks working on some really non-trivial uh cases that have come up when thinking about realizing uh user management where it actually works we don't just want to take boxes we want to ship a v1 that has a great foundation and then a plan for how we're going to build that out it's coming along nicely i would love to give you an estimate so far from being candid we haven't been so great at estimating this type of a feature so we don't want to break any more promises but rest assured it is a top priority um if you do want to beta test it this is obviously sort of a non-trivial feature we're going to be doing more testing than you know some of these smaller features do reach out to me you can reach me at twitter it's at max to catch my x tkac zed i'm also in the community forums this is max t um there's a few different ways to reach out to me but i'd love to put you on the list if you do want to help out in testing that out um one of the other sort of big features that we're working on right now is a workflow repository or workflow templates so one thing we've heard repeatedly is i don't know if i'm doing this right they're talking about how they're implementing a workflow or i want inspiration on what i could automate we see workflow templates as a solution for both of these things um so currently you can access uh workflows on nnio um what we're going to be doing with this feature is bringing it into the app and then doing some operational things to sort of improve the quality of those workflows and basically make it more useful for you to sort of help yourself um and also ultimately contribute workflows that can help others um so the design's almost finished of this um it will be getting rolled out into n8n once design is finished of course we'll go to implementation and um again to reiterate we're not just popping the nio explorer view in into naden we are cleaning up low quality workflows as part of this we're going to add workflow collections you can start seeing use cases of multiple workflows together we're going to add some metrics right now it's not really easy to see which workflows are popular um and then we're going to be working with some power community members to solicit high quality workflows because we could always use more there's all these different apps and whatnot you're using a good coverage of inspiration and best practices for that kind of stuff um and then lastly something that's in the works right now it's in early stages i don't have an eta on it but i think very exciting news is um we're starting to lay the groundwork for a much easier way to write nodes where they're basically represented all in json um so this should make it much easier to do things like importing um from swagger api um and using things like no building ui because ultimately it's generating json you'll still need to know uh what you're doing essentially but it should massively lower the friction of building a new mode um so as part of this up until now our focus has been you know on the core team on building new nodes going to soon rebounds that focus um to over overhauling these sort of existing nodes that are very popular people use so i hope here is by providing basically you know these fishing rods for people uh to build their own nodes and by making that a lot easier that we can ourselves do this sort of more complicated work on improving these very popular nodes and maybe um it needs a lot more thinking but then empower the community to be able to get coverage of all those apps and apis out there by making a lot easier um to make notes so as always this is just a sneak peek of what we're working on it's definitely not every ticket on the board is a lot more than this and finally as always i do want to thank everyone on the team and our community um everything you've seen here everything working on it is a team effort both our core team and you amazing community members so i appreciate all of your help feedback um and insights in making it as great as it can be cheers thanks max you were amazing as always and can't wait to see those news features coming out soon

oftentimes we get a lot of questions on anytime embed and how the licensing work so stefan our head of revenue wants to help you with that heading over to uh stefan to learn how to build software faster with nadine number thank you dave stefan thank you marshall i appreciate that intro um for those of you who don't know me i'll introduce myself real quick staphon aina head of revenue i've been with nan a few months now and i'm excited to meet you all in person someday but for now we'll do this remote let's jump right in so oh let me move this so we see a problem we often hear this and it's that native integrations and custom workflows are looking to become more powerful as the preparation of a sas is becoming more relevant and they're looking to add new features to their products and of course time and resources are always constraining factors here so in the last three months i've had about 100 plus conversations with different folks from around the globe including c levels technical architects developers etc you can see some of their feedback here but a lot of them are trying to decide whether they need to build or buy a lot of this functionality that they're looking for in their solution they're having a hard time maintaining new integrations that they've built or others or trying to keep competitors out of their space they're looking to add new features as part of their core product and rather focus on the core development of their products rather than maintaining integrations that they simply need to pull and push data for example and others are looking to automate certain parts of their software product that have repetitive tasks have come up quite frequently and you can see um not only are they different roles that we are speaking with here but also they come from a lot of different uh industry verticals so it could be security software e-commerce platforms healthcare um and again like i mentioned before this is quite a global effort so we're talking to folks from south america to obviously europe and the us as well but also have a lot of interest from south africa and the far east and if we move on to the next slide we see here that the solution to this is introducing software to accelerate the product development and reduce the maintenance effort and here what they're looking for is of course speed adoption flexibility and quality and they want to have the ability to communicate some of this to non-technical folks so looking for a low code approach maintaining uh product stickiness with native integrations flexible hosting options the availability to have access to the source code and of course maintaining the quality for both their internal workforce and their end users here and embed some of the technical features that they take advantage of are of course our ability to host both on-prem and on the cloud we have customers who need to keep specific parts of their user base completely off the internet for example we have someone who has it out of an island somewhere and it's completely disconnected from any other data sources so that's a great option for them we have others who are moving into the cloud even in the financial services space and here they're able to control their own data and maintain the security as many of you know we've been working very hard on our native integrations we call them nodes we have weekly releases and we're well over 350 nodes at the moment and of course this gives immediate access to our embed customers to a library of api connectors that we've built and maintain and that reduces the development effort we also have a large partner base that we work with that were able to create nodes on their side that are specific to our customers business and we provide out-of-the-box back-end logic so that they can rapidly create automation such as email alerts sending data writing data this overall reduces the amount of code that they need to maintain within their own solution automation capabilities so they're looking for a workflow automation engine to accelerate their time to market in order for them to focus on again their core solution whether that be enabling dashboards for their customers building different tools or looking to solve the specific user problems that they see in their market some additional advantages that edit and embed customers get are the ability to inspect the code for vulnerabilities and investigate bugs without waiting for our support low barrier to entry we have a very stable commercial model where we have a revenue share as a standard so there's no minimum annual fee and our customers get to control the cost of their end users so as their product improves over the time that they've integrated nad and additional functionalities they can then pass this cost off to their customers as they see that they're driving more value without worrying that the vendor may increase costs along the way furthermore i've mentioned this before we have a global network partner list of any then experts so they help our customers speed up their development and ramp up their internal teams when it comes to workflow capabilities in terms of building custom workflows for their users or developing nodes that are specific to their business we're backed by world class vc and angel investors so we're financially stable in terms of our long-term goals it's to increase adoption globally of any then but also to build a strong revenue driving part of the business and this is what we're planning to do with any of them in bed so our customers on the embed side enjoy open-ended relationships with us on the software side of things the commercial agreement has no um term to it meaning that they have the overall confidence that they've chosen a vendor that they can grow with over the next five to ten years of course most of you know this we're backed by a strong community so not only is it the internal teams that are pushing the product forward but when our customers choose to have new integrations be part of the core product by submitting pull requests they may they take advantage of the community of course building and giving feedback on those integrations and this again improves the overall quality and experience of their end users we recently reached 19 000 stars on github which is a major achievement and again this speaks to the viability and the confidence that the embed side of the business needs to have in the overall vendor that our customers choose one final thought the new joint venture that we seek is by having an improved oem technology embedded in our customers applications this of course provides increased value to their end customers we enjoy a new revenue stream and the licensee our embed customers who beat the benefits of having specialized experts as part of their vendor network the end customer is the beneficiary of a new and improved solution and everybody wins so i invite everyone who is interested in becoming an embed prospect to download the github code directly from github and access some of these resources here once you started to build and integrate and you're interested in finding more about the specific licensing terms and how we become partners you can simply email us at license. nan. io and i'm happy to have a conversation with you and answer any questions that you have and also perhaps put you in touch with a few of our customers that are so far enjoyed a special relationship with us thanks to everyone for your time and happy to take questions thank you stefan let me quickly share my screen

and here we go uh i'm sure this is gonna be helpful to everyone and now it's time for the q a so folks if you have any questions just post it in the chat and i'll ask your questions to stefan and max gathering some questions uh from the previous uh talk is uh once we have a really good question is uh do we have any option to auto organize the nodes in a proper order so i read that comment to reframe what i'm understanding by that is your sort of your nodes might be maybe not perfectly aligned that you can sort of click a button in the cleanup mode um so i would say that's definitely something we've discussed um being candid it's not something that i've seen on an immediate roadmap if we're talking the next month or two sort of thing um because there's user management there's a few other things that we think really helps everyone what i can say is that the canvas improvements update what we did do uh previously the sort of the minimal snap that you can move a node was 10 pixels we now have increased that to 20 pixels so we're hoping that by increasing that um it is a bit easier to kind of snap your nodes in a row because you don't have to go sort of aligning it now again that's not an auto cleanup feature um and i do understand like complicated flows especially for some of us we like to have things neat and whatnot so i would say um please do add that as a community uh request on the forums do the old upload thing if that bubbles up to the top we will re-prioritize that um but right now it's not in the sort of immediate next things that we're working on wonderful and if i'm not wrong there is already a feature request on the community forum so just go ahead and give an upload to that and make sure that you were running an attempt on hero because we have a question on that are you using anytime on heroku is it a good idea will it work for a web app let's say so um there's it sort of really depends right with these kinds of questions we use heroku um from time to time when we're like doing testing and we'll spin something up i think it's a very great way uh to use it in when you need something that's ephemeral um when it comes to something permanent i think it's like anything are you running a few workflows for yourself personally um are they mission critical these are the sorts of considerations i think on any infrastructure so um what i would say though is i have seen people running uh workflows on maybe larger instances more of a production instance and it works fine uh the other thing that would come to mind is you know are you processor using edit image node very different system requirements or resources that it would use versus processing csvs so like anything the answer is probably yes if it's very mission critical um you should probably do a little bit more thinking but then still likely yes just depends on which resources you're provisioning and whatnot perfect thank you for answering that uh stefan i've got a question for you uh how does multi-threading work and multi-tenants with embed good question so currently we don't have multi-tenancy as part of the feature out of the box we are looking to build this um for some time in 2022 but i think as max mentioned earlier in the conversation we are launching user management um relatively soon and there in the embed scenario as well you'll be able to have one instance for various users so they can log in and you can also have an admin account that you can of course administer in the backend so that gets us part of the way to multi-tenancy but for now you'd have to set up individual instances for each customer domain just to go off of that if that is something that you're looking to do um and in cloud is single tendency you know so we do have like a validated production business use case where we're eating our own dog food and doing that um and then with user management she finds absolutely right the v1 it is planned to have basically through some environment variables the ability to um deactivate certain things to sort of have users uh be in their own little silo and bucket um and then sort of more features around user management uh multi-tenancy all that will be part of the user management roadmap once we release the b1 we're just kind of trying to decouple all that other complexities we can get that v1 out there obviously and then iterate on it get your feedback and whatnot so that's why we're sort of going about it wonderful and uh max can you just give a quick overview of what you talked about the templates or the workflows depository just to rehash yeah sure so um tldr is people are asking how do i build good workflows people are asking what should i build i've done some basic stuff i want more inspiration we see workflow templates as a solution to that we want to bring a workflow template explorer into the name app to really lower the friction to doing that so that's what we've sort of designed out and we'll be implementing um so we could access that from within nfm and then at the same time that's on the sort of the demand side there's also the supply side about having high quality workflows so we're doing a bunch of sort of initiatives uh internally to make sure that we have a bunch of high quality workflows so cleaning up our current workflow repo that's available on nnio um for you know filtering out some of the lower quality workflows um adding better guidance of what is a good workflow um and one thing i think i may have forgotten to mention um we are considering moving workflow comments as a feature a bit higher up our roadmap to give everyone the tools to be able to sort of ship um better annotated workflows and whatnot so that'd be useful for templates also anyone working in a team we're trying to annotate their flows um hope that sort of sums up nicely perfect and one last question before you move on to the next talk is there any way to favorite nodes sure so something like pinning a node or favoring i'm assuming you mean like in the context of your notes panel so they kind of show at the top um that's not something we have right now it's something that when we uh some months ago we sort of refactored the nodes panel um and that was concepted out so something we do very often we design like this is the high fidelity version this is what we're going to build this is perhaps that next step and we do some sort of lower fidelity concepting out so we're not designing ourselves into a corner so that has been thought about um i think of that one it's really going to be a case of sort of getting this user management out the door and a few of these other bigger pieces and then focusing on some of these things one thing i can say though is it's very exciting to say like our team is growing we have more engineers more product folks are joining so i'm really excited for 2022 we're basically just going to have a whole lot more bandwidth to keep making it awesome that's awesome uh folks i am going to ask you to ask your question so keep them coming in we'll take it in the next segment of the q a but let's move forward

so maxim is an engineer working for wipe his role is to bring technical touch to the business operations of company creating processes implementing automations connecting tools creating a data architecture and facilitating the day-to-day operations for the employees maxim also partnered with ml school to teach other people how to create automation workflows with an attempt thanks for joining in maxine over to you hi everyone thanks for having me i'm super glad to be able to give you a little um talk during this community meetup so i'm just going to share my screen can everyone see my screen yep perfect yep so um today i'm going to talk to you a bit about how we use naden to connect our apps our product um to our everyday tools um so just to give you a quick idea of what we do at vibe so vibe is the web technology of visual support and knowledge management and basically we integrate video calls into everyday tools uh ibm maximo salesforce zendesk microsoft dynamics et cetera and what's the id why do we do this because by replacing you know radio and phone calls by video um we increase first call resolution rates increase that promoter score and decrease machine downtime displacements and seal tuitions so is the challenge so um each one of our clients has their own docker container on which they have their own web which means that for each docker container we have um a different database and it's very complicated for us to access all of our databases um without having to run through different logins and authentication um and honestly when i was talking with the tech team they weren't really glad with me authenticating to vibe through cloud platforms that we don't host ourselves so um what was the objective and the objective as i was saying earlier was to connect um so vibe to first of all um a google big query database on which we can plug for example a google data studio and better understand our user uh like user actions user interactions um be able to figure out you know when a customer is likely to turn how many calls how many tickets etc and also to have you know duplicate of all the information that was in vibe in our hubspot so our crm most notably user lists um bad feedbacks for customer success and tracking user onboarding and so a solution that we decided to go with it was web hooks so basically um every time that a notable event happens in vibe a web hook is sent to naden um and it then will of course work with this data and send it to bigquery and depending on different cases to hubspot um so let me just show you what it looks like this is a pretty big one so don't get scared quite a few nodes yeah i can see max shearing yeah it's pretty huge um but basically we have one single point where all of our web hooks are sent so this webhook node and then of course you know depending on the bajillion different options that we have whether it's a user web hook a ticket web hook a session web hook a creation of a call center or creation of an expertise you know we're going to format the data and send it all to bigquery and then we use the execute workflow here to do all of the extra actions so for example this is our bad feedback one here we have our user lists and our user onboardings this is also for bad feedbacks um if you guys want i can go a bit more in detail about how these work and then we also report everything to slack just to make sure that we see everything that goes through and don't have any specific errors um if so this was quite a big project um and it was actually co-developed with our tech team because i work on you know the more of the business operation side and don't really have like my hands in the product um and this was you know one of the things that was a bit more difficult when when developing this workflow compared to many others because you know having to constantly exchange with the tech team made it a bit more heavy and difficult to implement um and we were a little bit less agile because i wasn't the only one working on the workflow and every time there was you know something was wrong with the web hooks or that's some more missing we always had to ask for you know specific changes um some of the really cool points that um that this solution entailed were well first of all we host and then on our own servers so we're not limited by you know number of workflow executions so an execution of the workflow every time an action happens wasn't really a problem for us you know we don't use naden. cloud and we also didn't have to authenticate to vibe on a server that was not under our controller and it was also a real-time integration which means that um because of this we actually can keep if i can show you really quickly we actually keep user lists in hubspot so for each one of our clients we have a user list so here's the user list here's a user list and they're updated in real time and this means that you know our customer success managers can easily see from hubspot um where different clients are what different accounts have been created and how many calls have been going on you know we constantly update all of our contacts in hubspot with information from our product and um and this also allowed as i was explaining earlier to duplicate all of our data into google bigquery um and then we use this to create really complicated dashboards that we give access to the whole team so that they can you know analyze what's going on with our different clients um i have two more minutes um so this is what i wanted to talk about mainly today but i actually did something yesterday that i thought was really cool and i wanted to share with you so in google sheets there's a function called import data and basically import data mimics what a web hook like mimics a get web book called so what i did was i created a workflow that takes a user agent calls user stacks um api and parses the data that was like from the user agent and so the workflow looks something like this so basically here's webhook we set the query parameter called the api set the device browser etc and use the respond to webhook node to actually import the data back into google sheets so this is actually a really cool way that you can integrate um a then two google sheets like instantaneously without having to set up like complicated scripts or something like that um basically all you have to do is uh set up the webhook node and then use a string formula something like this and you can send data to any n and with the respond to web hook node you can actually send it back to google sheets um so i thought that was pretty cool and i wanted to share with you guys today um i think it has many different use cases so um i'd be happy to uh happy to learn more um if you guys have any questions or anything like that i'd be glad to answer them and if not thanks for listening and um again happy to be here well uh that was a great talk thank you for sharing your experience and the google sheet trick was pretty amazing i am gonna definitely try it out i thought you would like it yeah i thought you'd like it we'll come back to the questions uh after jason's talk so uh stick around i will come back to you soon

so let's move forward with the last talk so jason aka teflon dude is joining us from canada will demonstrate how to use anytime to increase the efficiency and accuracy of data ingestion and how to distribute data automatically among the systems take a division thanks marshall um welcome everybody and uh thanks for joining us again today so uh i just needed to start the whole uh conversation off i'm gonna maybe explain a little bit by what i mean uh about swivel chair so this is a term i don't know if it's north american specific or even just specific to my house um but there's been some confusion around that so when i'm talking about swivel chair i i'm typically talking about when you are jumping from application to kind of get a process done so you may have one application and you're working over here on this screen and then you've got to copy some information copy it over into another screen put paste that into there then you get some information from there and put it into another one and it's just this long boring arduous process and using nad is a fantastic way to uh eliminate some of that swivel chair so what i've done is i've actually created on purpose a relatively common type of a personal uh flow that you would have to follow in order to get a task done and i've recorded doing that whole task because it actually takes much longer than i would want to force you guys to sit through and so i'll kind of run you through the task and video and then i'll show you how uh i've automated all of those tasks using n8n with a workflow and taken that task from the manual task that it was to a simple entry of information into a an n8n system and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to share my screen if i can even remember how to share my screen too many screens here there we go so i'm assuming everybody can see my screen now so this here is kind of the overview of uh the workflow so what we have is um an individual you receive a client's name you have to go look up the client the client's files to find it amongst a bunch of files figure out what city they are located in based on that file name then you need to take that city name and look up an agent in an excel spreadsheet so that agent that you can take that agent information find their agent number do a request an appointment request for uh that agent so they can set up a meeting you need to record the appointment in the database and then you have to email out the client so i'm just going to kind of walk through very quickly here uh like i've recorded it and you can see at the bottom here's our timer showing how long it takes and so this is we're already into the first step of the process and they've put the person's name in and now we've got to find it in this whole list of pdfs which as you can see i've actually used a little trick where i can do a review of what the what's in the file so i don't actually have to open up the file but we're literally working through like a hundred different files to find the right person so we've had to actually go and see if we can get that person we'll speed this along a little bit oh looks like we actually found the person there it is victor heap so now that we've found who that person is we're just going to jump ahead here we got to get their city so we're already almost a minute into this process uh that's manual so we're going to copy that over and we're going to jump into yet another system and we've got to cross-reference their cities so now we've got the city now we've got to find out the agent reference number which is stored in an excel spreadsheet so now we've got this excel spreadsheet of all these roads you've got to filter through it try and find the right city again there's nothing here that isn't a process that somebody hasn't went into before we've all done this type of stuff so we're you know we're getting in further in here so we're going to keep moving ahead so there we go we got the agent's reference number now we've submitted it to the webpage and we've got the reference number for the meeting set up so now we can go and we'll just keep moving ahead here grab that reference number and we can move on to the next step let me speed us along here so now we've started entering this information into we're using base row here entering that information in to the base row session that allows us to record that data and we're going to keep moving along so now we've got the agent reference number we've got the reference number for the meeting and then we have to go back again and find the name of the person victor heaps that's who we're setting this meeting up for and we put that into the database so there you go so now we've got this running in the database so we're two and a half minutes into this process next we're going to set up the email so you got to go in you got to write the email you got to find their email address here it is again jumping back and forth once we find their email address we can put it in there we can throw in the subject name we type it in and i've even made this faster i've already tried to optimize it a little bit by um by having a template built up so here's the template that we're going to use and we're going to take that template we'll copy it and tweak it a little bit paste it in and then we've got to find all the different variables we've got client there agent phone number so on so like we're almost five minutes into this process as you can see it's boring watching it and fast forward let alone uh trying to do it manually so we get that all done we grab all the right information again paste it all in and we'll speed up here a bit and there we get to the final uh the final email which gets sent off and then from there we can we're done so we go back and so we're seeing we're at about seven just over seven minutes here for this entire process so that's not an insignificant amount of time so what i did is i jumped and i built a workflow so every single one of the things that you saw within that presentation uh is represented here in this workflow so for example where we have to um look things up in the file folders well that's represented here by the by this piece of the workflow we have to go look into the exchange or sorry the excel spreadsheet that's all in here this piece here will actually take the information and submit it automatically and grab the reference number from the web page update the base row create the email and send it out and if we go back to our video and because this one is so short we can almost do this in real time we're going to grab the person's name again that we have to uh do this for paste it into the uh the web interface that i created this is all in nan you hit submit and so we're about 15 16 seconds in so it's a little bit of work that's happening in the background it takes a little bit for it to process and we're done 20 seconds so what was a seven minute process now got converted down into seven or sorry uh about 20 seconds of effort and there you go there's the proof that the uh stuff actually all went out so this is something that i want you to start thinking about and i'm going to stop sharing um what you start thinking about for when you're working with uh with your own business working with your uh your employer if you do consulting for consulting this is something to start focusing on so anytime you get these types of processes that are relatively drawn out they're all fairly manual take a look and see are there ways that you can put anything in to replace the whole process or maybe even replace a part of it and this would make you know people's jobs so much easier so now we've got you know a process that was taken seven minutes well if you have to do that you know 100 times a day you go from 700 minutes a day down to about you know 30 minutes a day to do all of that work and there's a significant time saving those are the types of things that people really like to see and that employers will uh look at this and go hey that is the type of employee i want to keep on so there's a real advantage to that anyway uh if you have questions more than happy to answer them hi chef perfect thank you jason uh this was really interesting and every time i recognize that i am following some certain steps uh you know that can be automated i always try out to build a workflow and this is what i love to see do and i'm sure a lot of people also found this helpful so let's move forward to the next q a

now uh the first question was uh is for maxim mexican you showed us a wonderful workflow that huge workflow and nathan wants to have a bit more detail into it so it would be glad if you can share a bit more detail about what is going on in that sure uh you guys want me to share my screen sure let's go can everyone share my screen see my screen so um i think it could be smaller um and this is a point i actually wanted to talk about it and i completely forgot um if i were to start it again first of all i would factor all of these branches into execute workflows and specific workflows um because for example when you know someone says okay you know this client was this user was created at uh 5 p. m on wednesday and i have to look through the logs and find like the specific second where the web hook was sent it's a bit of a pain and having you know these execute workflows a bit like instead of every branch would have been so much clearer so if i dive a bit more into detail um so this is web hook all of our web hooks whatever type of web hook it may be a user or call center and expertise all of them are centralized here um first of all we parse it and send it to slack we actually have an naden channel where all of the web hooks that we receive are being sent to slack actually makes it a bit easier than sometimes going through the logs and then what we do is that we actually look at what kind of object it is and depending on the object it's going to go in its own branch depending of course on the branch we're going to have different options so let's say it's a user um so if it's a user we're going to so some of the function nodes here some web hooks will be a sum of actions so there might be a user created a call center created and an expertise created in the same like second and so we batch these together and send them all at the same time so these are going to separate the actions into different items and then we pass the items through different branches depending on what type of item they are so let's say it's a user we're going to set the properties um we're going to be looking if it's a deletion because if it's deletion we don't really we're not really interested in all of their properties and we just need to add a line into bigquery saying okay this record was deleted um for those of you that aren't really used to working with data warehouses and the idea isn't to have like a number of lines that you keep updating and what we do is every time we have new information we add a new line and then when we want to query the database we look for the most recent line for each id and so that's how we get you know the most recent version of all of our user data and we format some times set a timestamp and then send it to bigquery and then we have these two workflows here so 62 and 63. and these basically are going to be so 62 is user lists so this the idea of this is as i was showing earlier to have hubspot lists where we have all of our users if there's a new user so subdomain that doesn't have a list then i'll show you here if the subdomain does not exist then we create the list if it does exist then we add it to the list if it's deletion we remove it from the list and add it to the deleted list i mean we have a bunch of different cases that we have to manage um but yeah it's actually it's actually not that complicated it's many different branches because uh we have to look every time if it's a deletion if this if the list already exists if the contact already exists so we create contacts and keep them updated um so for example what we do is every time that we receive a web hook on a user one of our keys is their average nps and so we have a property in hubspot that is vibe nps and we keep that constantly updated and this allows us most notably to have you know a user list of our top users sorted by nps um which is you know really easy really great for us to find our champions and ask for interviews or stuff like that um the other one 63 is for new users so if the users we have a road based management system if the user is an expert an admin or a manager then we create a hubspot ticket in an onboarding pipeline that the csms are you know current constantly working on um depending on uh depending on the subdomain so here it's a bit specific because we actually enrich the the ticket with the user information so we use a google sheet with very very tight restrictions for example which csm is attributed to which account and then we use this information to attribute the tickets to the csm um yeah that's a few examples i can show you more if you want but um i don't know if that answers your question that was really good thank you for going into the details uh relative to that i think you might be able to answer this question so we have a question you know what would be a what would be the approach if you want to call one workflow from another workflow and i know you have already shown that but if you can just you know talk a bit more about it sure um so in so when using naden we use the execute workflow um which basically is going to take the list of jsons that is entering the node and send it to the next node from the start node so most of the time the start node has no output it's just an empty list but if you use the execute workflow node then it's going to take all of the information from this branch and send it to this workflow your question harshly if i can just have another minute um something really cool that we do too is in hubspot there's workflows and so sometimes you're limited um with what you can do in hubspot and so what we do is we have a pretty cool system where um we send so let me just see if i can put it up so in the hubspot um workflow builder um you can actually send web hooks and so what we do is we actually use a combination of sending web hooks and waiting until the property changes and this way we can actually make hubspot and any then communicate so for example let me quick example so here the problem is i have to parse data and set it as user properties and i can't do this in hubspot so we do is we send all of the information to naden use a workflow to process it and then as soon as one of the properties has been changed so this is one of the values that this property can take then the workflow will continue and this is the way that we can actually upgrade the workflow builder in hubspot using lan using this post and delay until event happens so basically the workflow will pause here for about i don't know 30 seconds a minute at the time that the time of the nhn workflow executes and then it'll just keep on going as it was before that's two ways to integrate whatever first well that's a nearly nice idea you are basically extending the uh the limits of hubspot with n10 and then getting giving it back top spot exactly i love that exactly all right i have a couple of more questions but to be respectful of everyone's time i have a couple of updates that i want to share and i'll be then you know moving forward with the questions after that

we have been busy with not just improving the product but also making the community experience amazing for you all and today i want to share a few of those updates with you so first of all thank you to everyone who has been creating content around automation and anytime your work is helping the fellow community members with their automation journey and to make uh to make your work discoverable we have started curating the list of all these resources be it articles videos hosting configurations workflows anything that you are creating that's going to help the community i have already shared the link on the community forum and i am going to create a new post on the community forum sharing all the updates about this so please do check out the community forum if you are interested to learn more about that now to continuously add new features and improve na10 we need more folks and we have opening for various roles across the team so if you are interested please do apply or if you know someone who would be a good fit you can refer them as a reward for your referral we will give you a thousand euros you can find more information this uh about this in our talks as well so if you go to contributing to anytime you will find more information around this too and last bus and last but not the least we want to hear more from you so please do share your reviews on about anytime on g2 website this is going to not help us you know just get your feedback but it is going to also help and it can be more discoverable out there so that's it for the community updates and as mentioned again i am going to share everything on the community forum with all the links so you can find the information now coming back to the q and a that has there were a good really good questions now jason you already answered this but uh just you know make sure everyone get the answers for this where does rpa begin and integration platform and so um it's interesting i actually run an rpa team with my full-time job and it's funny how we've kind of discovered that rpa has been one of these tools that has been getting a lot of hype lately but really i find that the majority of what i would normally do with rpa i actually do with any n um you know if i've got an api i can talk to if i've got a database i have ways to access the data i just finished actually writing an article and doing data access there really is no need to engage those more expensive and more complicated rpa tools really i don't jump into the whole rpa side of things often until i get to you know doing like screen scraping or having to control like a mouse or a keyboard where there's just really is no other way to gather the information other than that i stick to ending in and and frankly some of the clients that i'm working with are they're governmental clients and i'm getting any then potentially in those environments to help build up better tools for them that rpa would a be extremely costly to do and b the resources to manage and maintain it would be also very costly so ending in is a really good alternative for that type of thing wonderful and while i here have you here jason a really important question is how many of those wild shirts do you have so uh i believe as a blast count i think i have about a dozen of them and i actually have uh some custom ones on the way for as i'm building out my brand on uh youtube so uh youtube and twitter so kind of keep your eyes open there some people may find an extra present under the christmas tree that's wonderful maxim uh i have a question for you is how much time did it take for you to build and uh test those workflows um i mean it's a bit of a tough one because it was you know co-developed we started with a few web hooks at first it was only users sessions and tickets and then we started you know building out more and more um you know at first what we would do is we would do so i wrote a python script that uh locally connected to all of our databases um and would call our api get all of our call centers um expertises et cetera everything that we didn't have web hooks for um and slowly but surely we started moving away from you know this weekly update that i would do manually that would take like an hour i mean an hour of runtime it was just starting a script so it was pretty fast um so i think we built we built it out the whole like the whole lot over the course of two months two and a half months um it was a few months ago um i mean we keep finding bugs of course uh just yesterday i found out that when a user was created specifically from a specific page then the web hook wasn't being sent and so we were missing data and then i had to request the tech team it was a pain in the box but um the actual like implementation um honestly i would say a few hours i like the n8n part um it's not that complicated it's just you know laying out the i i like to work on paper uh first before drawing workflows um and so this was actually built with one of my um interns and so we set up with a huge piece of paper and throughout all of the different possibilities um and then just you know implemented it was pretty you know none of the javascript is that complicated most of the nodes are 15 seconds to configure um i mean if you were to delete the workflow and say okay start again it would probably take me two hours two and a half i would say but it's backed up so don't even try deleting it and aaron is curious to know how many events get triggered to your system at a certain time if you can yeah we do um so at the moment where we're trading about 25k a month um so it's it's not huge it's not nothing it's or if we exclude weekends because weekends it's basically nothing we have a thousand a day um the i think the most we have in like a short time period is going to be like if we mass update users so on the tech side we can um we can import from a csv like a list of users 10 20 100 000 users um but that specific use case and we didn't want to like over overcharge naden um so for that specific case we um uh how can i say like space out the web hooks give them like a half a second each time just to make sure that we're not overloading and we're on heroku so we don't have to restart the dinos but yeah we also uh so in advance would be you know the batching i was explaining earlier and the fact that we it's not as simple as one action equals one web hook we batch them every i think it's half a second and so we can have like super long work fl super long web hooks that are like uh tens even hundreds of actions theoretically um but that also helps with the like the amount of executions wonderful wonderful max i think you might be the right person to answer this so uh the community wants to know uh with the user management feature that that's going to come out soon can the users be isolated and can we prevent the cpu hogging sure so um can users be isolated yes in fact uh mvp that will be sort of one of the first things that you can do is to meet this sort of requirement of hey i want a bunch of people to use it and i want to spin up a docker container for each one so that will definitely be the case um something a bit more sophisticated like cpu allocation per user um isn't part of that mvp um i would expect that something like that will start coming when we start thinking about um features that allow for more complicated setups of better than so if we're starting to talk about workspaces or groups that implies we need that kind of um taxonomical or hierarchical structure because we've got more people collaborating an instance so functionality like that will be something we think about um but love the idea have not been sort of in the initial mvp you know thought about cpu hogging whatnot but of course with a lot of people i'm spending depending on the setup that's something that could happen so we will uh have a look at that when we're thinking about this sort of expanding our scope uh post mdp so thanks awesome uh i'm gonna wait for a couple of minutes to see if we got more questions for our speakers today in the meantime thank you everyone for joining in and thank you for all the speakers for taking out their time and sharing their knowledge with us uh yeah you can find me quickly i'm not sorry to cut you off but um maxim it would be amazing to see uh if at some point you update your version of editing to see how that new those canvas improvements are going on such a big flow like that i'd be very curious to see that i was actually waiting for the meet up to finish to update our rna and see what it looks like i'd be glad to share a screenshot or two fantastic cheers all right so thank you everyone for joining in uh we got a couple of minutes so what we are going to do is in the last meet up i got a really good feedback that people enjoyed the uh icebreaking session so we are going to continue with that so if you want to be a part of the icebreaking sessions connect with the community members and interact with them stay here for those who have to hop out thank you once again for joining in do share your feedback with us and let me know if you wanna give a talk or if you know someone who might be interested in giving the talk