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Comment by bdunn | Hacker News Reader

Sure, so whenever someone cancels their Planscope account I send myself an email with their name, email address, LTV, plan, and cancelation reason (this is also stored in my database.)

With this, I could simply CC that email to Zapier, they'll yank out all that info and shove it into a Google Spreadsheet, which will let me do certain things that would be a pain to program myself.

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I don't understand.. if you send automated emails to yourself in a human-friendly format, why not just use a Google API to push the same data into the spreadsheet at the same time?

Zapier may be really cool, but it still seems like you're taking raw data, converting it to human-readable form, then sending that to Zapier to attempt to extract the raw data again. Or am I misunderstanding?

The difference is that you have to do new work every time the destination of the data changes. Using an interface to say "here are the relevant parts" is a lot nicer than having to code it yourself.

Or just push your entire object to google spreadsheet: https://github.com/firmafon/to_google_spreadsheet

you will have to change the zapier parser template as well when the destination format changes.

That's clever! I had never thought to CC/BCC into our parser...

Brennan, thanks for sharing your use case. What kind of things would you do with the parsed info in Google spreadsheet?

Contacting users and offer a discount maybe?

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