A roundup of innovative submissions from Zapier's 2023 No-Code Day Contest

Earlier this year, we launched our second annual No-Code Day Contest and asked you to submit your favorite no-code projects. After reviewing hundreds of submissions, we announced our official winners. From feeding the hungry to using AI to write the perfect cover letter, the innovation was beyond impressive.

While we couldn't name everyone a winner, we wanted to highlight a few submissions that might inspire you to use no-code tools to help you, your team, and your business move forward at growth speed. Here are some of our favorite 2023 submissions. 

Shawn Harris, Director of Product Services, HBO

Shawn Harris, Director of Product Services at HBO, noticed that his teams were relying on two different sources of truth: Airtable and Google Sheets. On top of that, these teams often worked in silos. So he used Zapier to link the two databases and automatically send updates to each team when new information became available. This automated information highway opened the channels of communication and allowed each team to better understand the other's project demands.

Looking to connect Airtable and Google Sheets? Try these popular Zap templates—our pre-made workflows—to get started. 

Alan Penn, COO, Around the Clock Alert

Alan Penn, the COO of Around The Clock Alert (ATC Alert), uses no-code tools to automate the process of filling out customer contracts and printing them to include in each client's package.

Here's what their workflow looks like. First, Zapier pulls customer info from website signups and delivers it to HubSpot. Then a Zap fires off and sends the info to PandaDoc, which parses the customer details into a contract template. From there, Google Drive saves a backup copy of the personalized customer contract. Lastly, e-Zep sends the customer info to the fulfillment department to print—and it all happens automatically.

With this automation, the ATC Alert team went from spending approximately 200 hours per month manually managing these contracts down to practically zero.

Owen Colwell, VP of Growth, POSH

Owen Colwell, VP of Growth at POSH, oversees a team of three, managing over 5,000 customers and their events. To avoid purchasing a potentially ill-suited solution, he opted to build a custom AI-powered customer relationship management (CRM) tool with Zapier.

With the power of Zapier and OpenAI combined, he's able to automatically parse important data, send it to his database, and even draft and send emails.

Want to add AI to your workflows? Read more about how to automate OpenAI.

Megan Belair, Editorial Business Manager, Delish

Megan Belair is an Editorial Business Manager at Delish, who needed a more efficient way to get planned monthly recipe and video content assignments into Asana. So she turned to no-code tools to help create a better workflow.

Here's how it works: assignments are added to the department's go-to database, Google Sheets, and from there, Zapier automatically transfers those assignments into production workflows in Asana. Through this workflow, the content team is able to produce 66 recipes and 30 videos in one month. 

Inspired by Megan's Google Sheets and Asana workflow? Try this popular Zap template. 

Piers Fawkes, President, PSFK

Piers Fawkes is the President of PSFK, a business intelligence platform that helps brands, retailers, and their partners identify and leverage innovation opportunities.

Piers likes to send weekly newsletters to keep the PSFK community engaged, educated, and informed. In the past, it took him three days to write, quality-check, and send a single newsletter to the PSFK community. Realizing that this wasn't scalable for the different communities and industries he wanted to communicate with, he turned to no-code solutions to help him. Now, with no-code tools like Zapier, Piers sends 30 AI-generated newsletters, reaching approximately 40,000 recipients.

Tommy Walker, Founder, The Content Studio

Founded by the former global editor-in-chief at QuickBooks, Tommy Walker, The Content Studio helps high-growth B2B SaaS startups and enterprises build human-centric, data-informed content marketing programs. One of the most time-consuming tasks Tommy and his team ran into was creating content briefs and blog outlines for clients. The solution? A delightful trio of ChatGPT, Airtable, and Zapier—ready to streamline the process.

Here's the new workflow:

• Airtable data creates a Google briefing doc.

• ChatGPT whips up an outline based on the article's primary keyword.

• The draft URL appears in Airtable.

• Slack gives the author a friendly nudge (and a draft link) to start writing.

• A Google Drive folder is created to house everything.

By automating this process and utilizing AI, Tommy has saved at least two hours per article. 

Taysa Mohler, Product Directory, Catalyst:Ed

Taysa Mohler is a Product Director at Catalyst:Ed, a nonprofit organization that helps schools, school systems, and education nonprofits become more effective, equitable, and sustainable by connecting them to expertise, funding, and hands-on support.

Taysa and her team had difficulty finding a CRM tool to support their complex, custom-matching process and automate the communications and tasks central to their services. So they built it. Using Airtable—their go-to database—they set up Zapier to automatically send emails, upkeep data accuracy, create documents, and more. Through the use of no-code tools, Catalyst:Ed has helped over 900 education leaders and teams complete over 1,300 projects to build their capacity to improve student outcomes.

To everyone who submitted to our No-Code Contest, thanks so much for sharing your stories with us. We're honored to be a part of your journey, and please continue to keep building!