Lesson 2 of 7
Your first scenario
6 min read
A new form response lands. Someone should add it to your spreadsheet. What if 'someone' was a scenario you built in two minutes?
Trigger, then action
Every scenario starts with a trigger — the module that watches for something to happen: a new form response, an email, a due date. When it fires, it hands what it found to an action — a module that does something: add a row, send a reply. Trigger watches; action acts. That pair is the heartbeat of every automation.
The trigger doesn't just start the flow — it carries the data. The action works on exactly what the trigger caught.
Run it once to test
Before you let a scenario loose, you run it once by hand. Make walks a single real item through every module so you can see what each one received and produced. If the row lands correctly, you switch the scenario on and it runs itself from then on.
A single manual run is your dress rehearsal — you watch one real item flow end to end before trusting it to run alone.
A trigger only fires on new things once it's on. Run-once borrows one recent item to test; it won't reach back and process your whole history.
The shape of it
- —A trigger watches for an event and captures its data.
- —An action receives that data and does something with it.
- —Run once to test the pair by hand before switching the scenario on.
You want new form sign-ups to become rows in a sheet. Which module is the trigger?
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