HACK Notion - Trigger Make or Zapier Automations with Buttons

Hi guys, welcome back to my channel and to another video.

Um, let's talk about Notion buttons and how we can make them even juicier. But before we do, apologies for the very amateur backdrop. Um, I've flown from Sydney to Mexico City in the last couple of days, so I'm jet lagged. I'm staying in an Airbnb, and I don't have much control of my environment.

Uh, so ignore this reflection of my head right here in the mirror. There's no space in this room. Uh, and say hello to Pedro the Pirro. This is my girlfriend's, uh, and he comes with us everywhere.

So, let's talk business. Right, Notion buttons. They're a fairly new addition, and they're pretty cool. You can do some really interesting things with them within the kind of Notion environment. But, uh, wouldn't it be cool if you could kind of extend the functionality and make them trigger any of your automations on Make or Zapier or any other thing that can receive an HTTP request, essentially?

But let's just keep it simple and just say Make and Zapier for the purposes of this video. Um, so I'm going to show you this working, and then I'm going to show you how to build it. Then you can just take this, put it into your own workflows. It's free; you only need one app as a kind of middleman. I'm going to explain that in a second.

Um, but yeah, it's pretty cool, and it essentially unlocks a whole other route for you to get creative and to just completely power up your Notion workspace with buttons as triggers and like affecting things out in the world rather than just kind of staying in this Notion environment.

So, let me, um, explain this and show you so it makes a bit more sense. So let's jump over to my Notion workspace. Here's where we're going to make a button together. But before that, I'm going to just show you this working, right?

So, um, this is a client project that I have. Um, it's using a client portal that I've built for No, which, uh, does some fairly complex things that I won't get into here because I want to do another video completely on how this works. But just for the sake of brevity, I have a button here that says "Sync."

And sometimes I want this client, uh, sometimes I want these—I'm pretty jet lagged, sorry—sometimes I want these tasks to sync over quicker than my interval on my Make scenario. I have a Make scenario that is syncing these, but it runs every hour, and I don't want it to run any more frequent than that because of costs.

So, but there are times where I need to sync quicker. So I can click a button and trigger this entire scenario, which is really cool. Um, so if we just jump into it, uh, if your scenario starts with a webhook, then I'm going to show you that you can basically trigger this scenario with a button click.

So, super cool. So let me show you it working. I'm not going to—I've unlined this because I don't actually want to run this—but for the purposes of just showing you the triggering, all we need to see is when I click the button that something happens here, right?

So let's jump out and get this triggered. So if we hit "Sync," boom! You see how fast that was? So we jump in and look at the text output: "Tony clicked on Sync" and "Go Mammoth," which is this project here.

So it seems very simple, but this is ridiculously powerful. Um, you—so for this example, I'm syncing, uh, you know, tasks within my client portal, but you could do anything that you wanted. You could, you could, you could go off and do all sorts of requests to different modules and then come back to your Notion workspace and change things there.

So you can start to build really cool UIs and just absolutely rocket boost them with this functionality because what you can do natively in Notion is just fairly simple stuff, right? Like edit a page, navigate to a new page, but this unlocks literally anything that you want to do.

So that's it working to prove, um, that it actually works. So let's actually build this out. Um, so let's build a button. Uh, let's give it a cool little emoji. Why not? Here we go.

Uh, and let's call it "Print Money." So whenever this button is clicked, you can do a few of these options. Oh, sorry, I'm so tired, guys, but hopefully I'm getting the message across. You can do a bunch of this stuff, which is all native, uh, like I mentioned before, which is fairly cool.

But the thing that you're looking out for here is, boom! Even on the free plan, you have access to this option, which is "Send Slack Notification." Now, if you don't know what Slack is, it's just a messaging service, but it has all these like really cool hidden features within their app functionality, which I will definitely do a bunch of videos on in the future because that's like mind-blowingly cool.

But this, which anyone could use, even if you're on a free Notion space, you just need to get a free Slack account as well. Uh, this is going to be the solution. So in Slack, I have—this is my work Slack. Um, it looks a bit like this if you've not seen it before, but I have a bunch of channels organized into webhooks.

So what we're going to do is we're going to create a new channel, and we're going to send a Slack notification to that channel whenever this button is clicked. And then we're going to supercharge that channel with a Slack app, which is called Outgoing Webhooks, and then we're going to send a POST webhook request to that Make automation that I just showed you, and that's going to trigger it.

So Slack, essentially, here is acting as a middleman. Um, it is super powerful. So you're basically recreating webhook functionality here. You're pushing, uh, you're sending a signal to another app, in this case, your Make scenario, to do something based on a button click.

So you cannot do this, uh, normally. There's no, like, you know, send webhook request here, so we're just being a bit cheeky and getting a bit creative.

So let's, uh, actually, I'm going to show you how to make a channel in Slack first. So you come over here, you hit "Create Channel." Uh, I'm going to preface it with "Webhook" and just call it "YouTube Test."

Now, when you hit—when you create this, you need to make it public so that the Slack app can access it. I'll—this will become clearer in a second, but keep it public. Um, and then, uh, add anyone that you want, but I'm going to skip that for now.

So here we are, we're in this channel. Now what you want to do is you want to come down to the bottom into this apps section, and you want to click "Add Apps." You want to search for webhooks, and you're going to see "Outgoing Webhooks: Get data out of Slack in real time."

So when you click this, you're going to come to this page. You want to hit "Configuration," and it's going to send you over to the browser, and you're going to get something like this. You are going to press "Add to Slack," and it's going to take you to, um, a screen like this, and you want to want to go "Add Outgoing Webhook Integration."

Um, now there's a bunch of stuff here, but you don't really need to do much. All you need to do is scroll past this and click the channel that you want to add this app to. So we want to find the one that we just made, which is "Webhook YouTube Test."

We don't need a trigger word, although you can have one if you want, but it's kind of unnecessary for our use case. And this is the only other input field that you need to pay attention to, which is the URL. This is the webhook URL that Zapier or Make gives you, and you get that very simply by going into the webhook module and creating a webhook.

I've already done it here, um, but once you create one, which you do by clicking "Add," it will give you a nice little URL. So I'm going to copy that URL to the clipboard and feed that into, uh, this input field here.

And that's it! And then you can change the image or whatever, but we don't care about that now. Hit "Save."

So now what we've done is we have supercharged this channel. Where has it gone? "Webhook YouTube Test." Let's pull that down into webhooks. Here we go.

We've supercharged this channel to say, "Okay, whenever you receive something in this channel, whatever it is, then send a webhook to that URL I just gave you," and which is our Make scenario.

So let's do this. Uh, we're going to see it working. I'm going to hit something on Notion, and then we're going to see Slack receive this, and then Slack's going to do what we just asked it to do.

So we are going to go here, and we're going to say, "Once you clicked Send a Slack Notification," you just select the channel right here, your workspace. You find it, uh, "Webhook YouTube Test," and you hit "Done."

Right? Wouldn't this be magical if it did print money? Let's see if it does. So I'm going to hit this button, and very quickly we're going to see something in here: "Print Money." Boom! It's very quick.

"Tony clicked on Print Money" in buttons, and then this is now going to go over to our automation. And as you can see, look, it's, uh, 57—my time zone's all messed up—but you can see if we go in here, "Tony clicked on Print Money" in buttons.

So I hope you can see how powerful this is, guys. You can literally do anything. Uh, and I hope I've explained it clearly enough, even though I am jet lagged to hell.

Uh, if you've got any questions or if I haven't covered anything, then please do ask me in the comments, and I will clarify anything up that you need clarifying.

But, uh, yeah, simmer on this for a little bit because it's insanely powerful, and it's free, uh, and it's fast, as you can tell.

All right, guys, until next time, peace!