Zapier's second annual No-Code Day Contest has officially come and gone, and we were thrilled to see all the ways companies, non-profits, and small businesses are using no-code tools to automate their mission-critical workflows.
After evaluating every submission, we're excited to announce the winners of our 2023 No-Code Day Contest.
No-Code Transforming Businesses
Tori Phillips, Support Technical Analyst, Hudl
First up, meet the winner of the No-Code Transforming Businesses category: Tori Phillips, Support Technical Analyst for Hudl, a global leader in sports technology.
Over the years, Hudl has managed several acquisitions. Each time they do so, their support team grows with new people, processes, and specialized product knowledge. At first, bringing these new specialized teams on board made it cumbersome to fulfill user requests, as the Hudl support team would have to move the requests from Salesforce into Slack and then triage them and pass them along to another team. Sometimes those teams would then pass the request to yet another group or individual in Slack. And once the request was fulfilled, the completion notice would be passed back along the chain, eventually returning it to support and the user.
Tori observed this unwieldy process and decided to let automation and no-code tools take over. With Zapier, she built a series of automations that sent user requests directly to the appropriate team, depending on the nature of their request. And once the request was complete, the follow-up communication was also automated via Zapier. Combined with Slack's and Hudl's built-in automations, this enabled these teams to focus on their core work and ensure that Hudl's users would get answers and fixes to their issues much faster.
No-Code Changing the World
Winston Chiu, Executive Director, More Than a Meal
Next, meet the winner for our No-Code Changing the World category: Winston Chiu, Executive Director of More Than a Meal, an organization that partners with local organizations to build community-owned food programs.
Through the use of no-code tools like Zapier, More Than a Meal streamlines communication and demographic data management to improve their services and response time. With the implementation of no-code tools, they were able to better help their customers—over 40,000+ households in the New York tri-state area.
No-Code Empowering Small Business
Will Stopa, Director of Software Development, AWE Tuning
Up next is the winner for our No-Code Empowering Small Business category: Will Stopa, Director of Software Development for AWE Tuning, which creates top-quality performance components for many different brands of automobiles.
AWE Tuning ran into a manufacturing issue that required them to quickly pivot to meet customer expectations and save them millions of dollars in potential sales cancellations. The plan was to offer customers a variation of the affected product, with the ability to receive a cash discount, or wait to swap it out with what they'd originally ordered.
Rather than spending weeks coding a solution, Will turned to no-code tools to handle this mission-critical workflow—and he got it set up and running within a day.
Here's what the workflow looked like: As the customer order was about to go out, the AWE Tuning shipping team would scan the barcode to send a Webhook POST request to Zapier. From there, Zapier would look up the product in Google Sheets to see if it existed in the affected product list. If it did, Zapier would then generate a random coupon code, and a POST request using Zapier Webhooks would call the AWS API Gateway. It would trigger a print command to their internal printing software, which generated a label containing a QR code and the printed coupon code. The last step of the Zap was to record the product, coupon code, and time stamp to a separate Google Sheet for recording purposes.
With this workflow, AWE Tuning saved roughly $1,300,000 in potential sales cancellations.
No-Code Featuring AI
Ambar Shrivastava, Founder, CoverDoc.ai
Last, but certainly not least, is our winner for the No Code Featuring AI category: Ambar Shrivastava, Founder of CoverDoc.ai. After losing his job, Ambar spent his downtime learning more about AI and no-code tools. With Zapier's new OpenAI integration, Ambar saw an opportunity to build something that might help other job seekers. The result was CoverDoc.ai, a simple way to jumpstart the first draft of a cover letter based on the applicant's work experience, the job description, and using the applicant's writing style.
Here's how CoverDoc.ai works. It stores the job seeker's professional profile in Airtable. From there, a Zap triggers, sending a prompt to OpenAI to generate the cover letter using the information in the profile. Once the output is sent back to Airtable, Zapier creates a Google Doc with the personalized cover letter and sends an email to the job seeker with a link to the doc.
Job seekers provide their info, and within minutes, CoverDoc delivers a personalized cover letter that effectively highlights their unique qualifications.
A big thank you to all of our winners and everyone else who submitted their stories this year. We can't wait to see what you build for next year's No-Code Day Contest!
