When the Makerpad team spoke to 1 Second Everyday, the application that allows users to record a daily one-second video and then chronologically edits them into a single film, we got to talking about the internal processes they do all the time and that take the most time. They quickly pointed out three that they’d like to improve or have been on their wishlist for a while. Each served the very vital function of growing and engaging with their community—which for any social media platform is a do-or-die necessity. With that information, the Makerpad team got to work and came up with the following no-code solutions:

Find and Upload Instagram Videos by Hashtag

1 Second Everyday’s old, manual process: The team would search Instagram for their specific user-generated content hashtag (#1secondeveryday), use a third party app to download the videos and save the files individually and manually every couple of days.

Makerpad upgrade: As Tom shows in the tutorial below, we use no-code tools and a few integrations to create a workflow to collect and download videos from Instagram via automation.

1. Phantombuster allows us to pull specific information from the web. We used it to pull batches (the more you pull, the more content you have!) of videos from Instagram using the #1secondeveryday hashtag.
2. Integromat helps us create a workflow by connecting integrations to pull the videos and data we need. We used:‍

• HTTP to pull the videos from Phantombuster.‍
• Cloud Convert to convert the files that come from Instagram into mp4 video files for our usage.‍
• Google Drive to save the video files the team can easily look through.‍
• Airtable to keep track of all the relevant data we want including likes, views, comments, original links and Google Drive links.

Key Takeaways:

• Having the ability to quickly download, store and share video content from Instagram is super valuable for marketing teams because it ensures that they are consistently engaging with users who are generating content.
• By pulling data like likes, views, and comments, the marketing team can optimize their future campaigns by sharing video content with already high engagement.

Tutorial: Find and upload Instagram videos from by hashtag

Build a Customer Support site and Pre-fill Forms

1 Second Everyday’s old, manual process: The current system to submit bugs, product feedback, and feature requests is pretty ad hoc. This means they are not taking advantage of engaging with and managing this highly involved community.

Makerpad upgrade: Tom shows you how to set up a basic but super useful Customer Support site to quickly get all the information you need directly from your Beta Testers

1. Carrd allows you to create a basic site using images, a text editor and three buttons (“Request Feature,” “Submit Bug,” and “Give Feedback”) to collect the necessary data.
2. Airtable helps you keep track of all the submissions from the three buttons. For the user, you can make it easy to submit a form by prefilling information and remove any friction. For your team, you can create views that show only the information a team member might need to address an issue i.e. assign bugs to engineers or assign feedback to a customer service team member.

Key Takeaways:

• By making it simple for your Beta Testers to submit feedback, you can make this core group of users feel heard and engaged with in a timely manner.
• The feedback that Beta Testers submit is very useful for future product upgrades and features. By having a process that allows the team to quickly receive this feedback, you can ensure your product stays up to date.

Tutorial: Build a customer support site and pre-fill forms

Build a Birthday Bot for Slack

1 Second Everyday’s old, manual process: create a calendar invite to remind team members of birthdays, then send a birthday message the day of to those celebrating.

Makerpad upgrade: Amie shows you how to easily set up a Slack “Birthday Bot” to send automatic direct messages on a specified date and time to everyone based on Google Calendar notifications.

1. Use Google Calendar to schedule all team members, contractors, and vendors’ birthdays individually.
2. In Zapier, you trigger events based on the Google Calendar invites you set up and the Slack Bot Integration that sends a customized birthday message to anyone who’s birthday falls on that day.

Key Takeaways:

• Make your team members, contractors, and vendors feel special on their birthday by creating a simple and quick (only takes 5 minutes to set up!) “Birthday Bot” to deliver customized birthday greetings and gifts.
• 1 Second Everyday requested a bot that dmed users to add payment to their next invoice as a gift—but your company can choose a message that works for you and your team.

Tutorial: Build a birthday bot for Slack

Community building is one of the hardest tasks to achieve because it can take up a lot of time and manual hand-holding to make your users feel like you’re always paying attention. That’s why it’s such a make-or-break endeavour for growing companies that can’t quickly scale once they reach a certain number of users. Instead of letting your users feel like your customer service has worsened, use automation to enable you to set up workflows and systems to do the heavy work of pulling the data you need. That should free your team up to spend their time posting video content for engagement (as in lesson 1); responding to feedback and fixing bugs (a la lesson 2); and keeping your team members focused on your users by using bots to handle some of your most rote tasks (like in lesson 3).

We look forward to seeing how you set up these systems at your company and how they work out!