How to set up a Relay playbook (example with 1 Trigger + 1 Step)

Relay.app is an automation tool that lets you automate actions across Google Sheets, Slack, and many other apps.
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1

Add the trigger

First, add the trigger by clicking 'Add trigger' -> 'Google Sheet' -> 'Row added'

2

Fill in trigger information

Fill in the information on how you want the trigger to be, well, triggered. This will determine what factors would kick off this trigger.

In this case, because it's for any row added in a sheet, we just need to select the right sheet in the dropdown.

3

Preview trigger

You can get a preview on what the information would be passed along to the Trigger by clicking on Preview trigger. Depending on the trigger type, different information would be displayed. In our case, it shows us the various rows we have in the sheet that we just selected. By clicking on one of the rows, it shows us all of the available fields (i.e. columns) from that row.

4

Add a step

Now that you have the trigger set up, you can finish up the rest of the playbook by adding the automation steps.

You can do this by clicking on the Add step button. In our case, we'll use the Slack send message automation as an example, so that when a new row is added in the sheet we selected, it'll send a Slack message.

In any of these automation steps, you can refer to the information that was passed along via the trigger. In our case, it's all the information from the new row that was added in the sheet.

5

A word on "Review"

it's In the automation steps, you'll see a section for Review, in there, you'll see 2 options

  • Double check before running: pick this if you want to review this action before it's done. For example, in this case, we are sending a Slack message, I've decided I want to be more cautious so I've left the Review to be at Double check. In general, for most communication type of automations (e.g. Send an email, Send a message), by default, we have it the Review set as Double check.
  • No review required: pick this if you want the automation to be run automatically. For example, if you had an automation to always add a person in Pipedrive whenever an Apollo contact is created, mostly likely you just want that to happen without you needing to approve, then you can set it to this option.
6

Testing the new step

You can test a single step by going to the Test section. In this example, it'll send a message in Slack with the test value we selected from the trigger earlier.

7

Create a test run

The step above let us test individual automation steps. But if you have a playbook with multiple steps, you'll want a way to test the entire playbook with some test data.

You can do this by clicking on the Test button on top of the playbook. This will trigger a test run that'll let you test the entire playbook with a selected test data from the trigger.

8

Turn on the playbook

Once you are happy with the set up, don't forget to turn on the playbook so that the Trigger you have set up will start working for you!

9

How often do these Triggers run?

Most Relay Triggers are automatically triggered once an hour. Some of the triggers are more instantenous, like this one we are using as an example.

If you want to manually run the trigger, you can click on Check now button.

Any new runs that are created will appear in the Runs tab.

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