How Teacher Finder uses Zapier to power its business

This post is written by @AndrewJDavison, Luhhu's founder.

Teacher Finder was one of my very first businesses. It was setup, first in Budapest, and then in multiple cities worldwide, to give students a way to find language tutors in their local city.

Teacher Finder's tech stack started quite simple, just a Wordpress site, a Gravity Form for teachers and students to fill out and a Google Sheet to manage all the matches. As we grew - with more student inquiries and more teachers on our roster - I was in desperate need of some automation. After a match is made, we wait a few days and then check in with both teacher and student to see how things are going, and do further followups in the days and weeks following.

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This was done by hand, and to say that process was getting out of hand is an understatement - sometimes taking me an hour or two each morning.

That's when I learned about Zapier (and I honestly can't tell you where I found it - but hey!). After creating some very basic zaps to learn the ropes, I created my first complex zap - and one I'm still very proud of. It was a zap, triggered by a webhook and ending in a webhook that made the zap loop on itself. I set this one a schedule each morning and it would go through every row on my Google Sheet, sending out a customised email to the student/teacher asking for an update.

As Teacher Finder grew, we moved away from Google Sheets and built a custom CRM using Bubble. But we still have 20 zaps running taking care of various things like backing up some of our reporting spreadsheets to Google Drive and Dropbox, processing incoming Stripe, Transferwise and PayPal payments and recording them on Xero, as well as managing our teacher application process.

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While we're a small business, it's safe to say that Zapier saves us at least 5 - 10 hours of business admin per week.

Looking to the future, we've got some new zaps planned - to help us get our blog posts syndicated more widely on social media, and to help us curate interesting content to share.

Onwards and upwards!

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