what's going on everybody welcome to another video in our course make. com but for people who want to make real money and in this video I'm going to be diving deep into apis application programming interfaces because I think it's one of the most commonly misunderstood Concepts in both make. com and automation work in general they're made way too complicated by virtually everybody that talks about them and 99.
9% of the uh examples and stuff like that that people are providing just are not really applicable to business use case so in this video I'm actually going to show you guys an applicable business use case something very simple we're going to customize some Outreach just using uh available data from like a free API that I just found on the internet I'm going to show you how to authenticate I'm going to show you how to you know use request modules in make. com and basically I'm just going to show you everything you actually need to know to use this productively if you guys watch a lot of my videos you're probably wondering where the hell I am and why my background looks like it was filmed on a potato U I'm just at a hotel here in the beautiful City of Buffalo and the Beautiful state of New York just on some client work I do shadowing and delegation and automation work as part of my day-to-day and so I figured I'd pick like a relevant example for you I just record this before it it left my brain so if all that sounds good to you and if you're excited to dive into this as I am then stay tuned and let's get into it okay so first things first what is an API and why the hell is it when every time that you Google this you get a bunch of like Matrix looking ass stuff where it's like apis are brains that are embedded in the cloud bro well they're nowhere near as complicated as what a quick Google search would have you think API stands for application programming interface and it's basically just the way that different servers on the internet talk to each other um it's like one of the language specifications basically of like the Internet it's like the simplest way that I found to explain this and probably like the dumbest way to is let's say you are going to a coffee shop and you want a specific type of coffee um I go to Starbucks a lot so I'll walk in and then I'll say hi how's it going I'll have a tall blonde roast and I'd like you to leave room for cream please they will kind of think about my order you know if they're competent Starbucks people they'll know what that means they'll parse it and then in their mind they'll sort of translate that to a list of steps or a list of things that they need to do in order to like fulfill my order they'll be like okay H tall blonde roast I know where that is um tall cups you know I know where those are uh room for okay like he probably wants about an inch or something like that right and they can ask me followup questions they can use natural language to try and determine uh the best way to answer my query right now the thing is apis you can conceptualize as let's pretend you were going to a coffee shop API well it works the exact same way as what I just talked about the only difference is that the person that you are talking to is now really freaking stupid and they only understand requests that are formatted in an extremely particular way and this isn't a knock against Starbucks um Baristas it is a knock against blend's Baristas y'all are morons no I'm just kidding uh it's it's you know let's just use this for the for the sake of the example and let me show you what I mean like let's say you walk into the Starbucks and then instead of you you know being able to say hey I'll have a tall uh blonde roast with room for cream you know they only understand a request if you take a piece of paper at the front desk and then write it out in a very specific format and so the way that you'd write it out uh is first you define the roast type so in my case it would be blonde then you define the size which in my case would be tall uh and then there's a variable for room for cream which you will fill out is true or false and then in order to um you know access this API you need a credit card number and so then you walk in you kind of like put in your credit card number which is like your API key in this case um and then what you do is you give that piece of paper over to the really dumb Barista uh and then the really dumb Barista looks at this like kind of parses out all of the information it's like okay roast type blond blond good uh size tall good room for cream true okay great credit card number let me just double check this okay yeah it looks good we can make this request they then go to the back prepare my wonderful Tall Blond Rose which is probably horrifically overpriced uh and then they bring it back to me and then you know problem solve our transactions over so apis work in basically the exact same way um it's just instead of you you know going to a coffee shop or whatever you're just doing this on the internet using various um software platforms that usually allow to like connect to the things automatically you can make requests like in your terminal you know on your computer if you're a developer you can make requests just in code but since we're in make. com we're going to be making requests in make.
com and I really like doing this because it's one of the uh it's one of the simplest ways to get up and running with this stuff like a lot of the formatting and whatnot is sort of scaffolded for you and then all you have to do is just use a very simple module called the HTTP request module um to go out and then you know send or or receive information so in this way you can connect literally any two software platforms that have apis on planet Earth and do some pretty amazing things um in our case we're going to do something that's not like super incredibly amazing but I still think it's cool and uh we're going to make sure that it's applicable to business um what we're going to do is I have a monday. com CRM setup here that I'm currently working on and you guys probably recognize this from a previous video if you're watching this series and what I've noticed here is that one of these fields is location now the cool part about monday. com is in the location field it provides like the address but it also forces you to put in the latitude and the longitude and so we can pull the latitude and longitude information and then presumably what I think we're going to do is we're going to use that information to call a bunch of weather apis maybe just one weather API um and then we're going to get that information with maybe like what the weather is looking like or what the temperature is and then depending on what the temperature is then we'll use that to customize a line in in an Outreach email so we'll say like you know bommy weather we're having here in California you know hope you're doing well I wanted to talk talk to you about X Y and Z right and so this is a very simplified use case obviously but um you know a lot of people in email reaches scale now what they're doing is they're grabbing information from some data source let's say LinkedIn and then they're calling an API to enrich that data or get some additional information about that data and then they will use gp4 or some type of AI to then customize an email based off that information so it seems like it's written in natural language it seems like it's hyper relevant hyper targeted to the person uh and this is basically like the stem of that whole flow so you can build this out as arbitrarily complex as you want okay great so what I'm going to do here is I have set up a make scenario called get monday.
com item then set L send latitude longitude to a weather API and then customize email I have two parts of this so far I have the get an item from monday. com and what I've done there is I've just gone to the specific record that I'm using as an example so location California USA in monday. com if you click on the open record page up at the top you'll see the URL changes and there'll be a SL pulses with like a URL so I just know this for my time working with Monday but this is the ID of the record so I'm going to basically go into this module here which is Monday get an item and you'll see there's an ID field so I'll just paste this in uh and then I'll run this once for sanity and yeah you'll see that this like goes out and it grabs the specific name on the record and you know everything like that's good um the information that we are probably concerned about is probably this location field yeah latitude longitude cool so I imagine this is what we're going to need I haven't actually looked into this all I did was I typed free weather API I scrolled past all of the examples uh I tried doing open weather map uh that didn't really seem to work so I kept on scrolling uh and then I found one called weather ai.
com which I think is going to work I don't actually know even if it will um but I'm just going to sign up for this and then we're going to see what happens um I received a comment earlier about about how somebody really liked that I showed my mistakes while I was doing this and I do believe that that's pretty informative right like um API Integrations and stuff like that they don't always work out and sometimes there's a little bit of debugging that needs to happen and sometimes the instructions aren't very clear um so my hope is that you know by doing this I uh if I do run into any issues then you guys will be able to see what the debugging process looks like so I just copying and pasting in this email verification go to the login page now for this service and I'm just typing in um the credentials here and we're going to see how we get the API stuff so okay great um this is awesome they just provided us all of the information up front so one thing that you usually need when you're working with an API is you need what's called an API key which is sort of like my credit card in the previous example I mean it's not actually a credit card but it's just a way that you can verify that your requests are legitimate look if I walked into Starbucks and I'm like hey I want a tall blonde with room for cre um and they're like okay great pay us and I'm like no like they wouldn't consider that request legitimate they probably kick me out of the store same way uh that apis work if you don't have your API key they don't really consider you legitimate and then instead of sending you the information that you want they usually just send you like an unauthorized request which is equivalent to security throwing you out um yeah so here's where we're at right now you see that they gave us like some Pro Plus plan we have an API key how exactly does this work though so I'm going to go to learn how to form HTTP request to get weather from API Explorer or use our new Swagger tool that's interesting I have a ton of Swag man um okay so looks like they have an interactive API Explorer that's not what we want we just want the docs this looks this looks more like what we want anytime you are connecting apis always go to down to the docs page first before you do anything and then these docs will usually solve all of your problems I will say they're written usually by like the super nerdy type that it you know can't go outside or his skin will get burned by the sunlight so you do have to be a little bit careful in the way that you're parsing this and sometimes it's just really annoying to try and convert this into natural language you can just paste apis into gpt3 or gp4 I've done that a couple of times and then just asked it questions in natural language that's something you could do um but you know as you get more and more uh I guess competence at working with apis you know you usually learn all the that you could skip so I'm just skipping through all this stuff here what I'm really looking for is I'm looking for some type of like quick start or an example request that I could just pump in so um let me see if I'll be able to find it there's a getting started up here and there's a request URL it says requests to whether api. comom consists of Base URL and API method you can make both HTTP or https requests to our API this is an example of what I mean it's just pointless this probably doesn't do anything um tangible unless you really care about you know securing your HTTP requests to uh to a weather API so what we see here is there is what's called a base URL which is HTTP backb api. wether ai.
com V1 this is usually quite common common so there'll usually be some type of Base URL here uh which is nice and then there are a bunch of request parameters this is sort of silly the way they've laid it out here like they're just giving you all of the parameters up front as opposed to just giving you an example URL that you can call so we want the weather API that's what we're curious about um so I'm going to do the real time API that's probably what that is and this is super silly in so far that there is just so many there's so much random information whereas the only thing I really want is I just want the uh okay well whatever let's just do it this way um a lot of the time these apis just have the entire string that you can just copy and paste but uh we're just going to do it the way that they want us to do do it so uh we have a base URL here and then we have various endpoints they're called for different parts of the service so there's um this API base and then on top of that what you do is you slap like a SLC current. Json or slash forecast. Json or slash search.
Json and then depending on what you're doing um then you um you know depending on what field you're you're looking at then you can put in what are called request parameters which in our case is going to be a query and we're going to put in a q equals this here so this is probably what we're going to end up doing um and let me just pump this in so first we have the base stem of our URL and then what we're going to want is slash current. Json and then uh our request parameter in this case is going to be Q so I'll always put a question mark question mark is just how you start defining the list of parameters then you write what whatever your parameter is so maybe in another API that's probably written or specified a little bit better you might do latitude equals whatever and longitude equals and you know um that that's how you do multiple variables but in our case it's just Q then it looks like we do some decimals uh so I'm just going to copy and paste this in we're going to see what happens and then I'm also going to grab the API key somewhere I don't know where you would do this API key though looks like just a key parameter okay so I imagine that would just be end um key equals and then we have an API key up here which I'm going to copy paste that in and I'm just going to try this as an example we'll see what happens uh yeah okay looks like it worked we got a 200 request um 200 status code just means that everything is hunky dory that were a 400 or a 401 or basically anything starting with a four there'd be a problem uh and so if you open up this data um you'll see that there is a location with the name of the place that you are referencing looks like they also give you the region the country the latitude the longitude they give you the time zone they give you the local time and then under current they have temp in C then they have temp in F wow this is actually extremely exhaustive you could do a lot of cool stuff with this you could just feed all this into Ai and say like hey like write me a customized thing to with all of this information uh and then the text is light rain okay great we're GNA do something really funny with this um anyway that was way simpler than I thought it would be I thought we'd have some issues which is sort of unfortunate but uh but yeah while I'm just on that note then let me run you through what what a much better API would probably look like um before this I was looking at one called openweathermap. org um and the cool thing about open weather map is they just give you the whole URL up front and this is usually what like the good apis will do so if we scroll down to openweathermap.
org and then check out their API they have a one call Api 3. 0 you'll see they have an entire section just called how to make an API call and inside of this they literally have a whole URL with latitude equals lat and longitude equals long and they have some exclude parameter and then app ID equals your API key so what you would do if you really wanted to scaffold this get up and running is you would just copy this and then you paste this into your make request module which by the way if you're unfamiliar with how to find just type in um HTTP down here I've already found it and I've stuck it over here so it's not popping up when I do the search but uh the module that we're curious that that we need to do is called make a request um but yeah what you do is you just paste this in and then you just fill in these variables with the information um from your service so there's a reason why this one costs money and this one's free probably but um yeah yeah a lot of apis are unfortunately going to be quite difficult and quite dense to understand so it just gets um starts to be pretty valid valuable just to get in the habit of parsing this now while I'm on this I might as well talk about a couple of other ways that apis work um and these are like common requirements uh for various apis nowadays not all apis will be structured in this way you'll see that in this HTTP make a request module there are a bunch of um parameters here so the first is URL but then there's one called method which allows you to do get head post put patch delete options the vast majority of the time you're going to be using either a get request to get some data from a resource or you going to be using a post request which usually can be getting data from a resource but can also be like updating data or adding data to a resource or something like that and so the real difference that uh people just can't seem to understand simply or explain simply I should say is uh in a get request you just put all of your information in the URL itself so if you check this out what am I doing I'm like defining Q equals 48 whatever and then 23508 and key equals whatever like I'm putting all this information just in the URL but then uh if you were using a post request a lot of the time what you do is uh we we'd select raw and then we'd select Json so in a in a post request a lot of the time what you do is you just structure this in a JavaScript object so what that means is you would um do the curly braces and if you go back to our coffee shop example you would structure all this like this you'd say latitude equals 48 whatever long longitude you know I don't know if this is right probably not um API key A lot of the time right and then you'd put the information down here instead of up here and there's obviously some more Nuance to it you know the more developer friendly uh this tutorial becomes U but I'm going to keep it pretty light and essentially that's really the the main difference you'll usually find that information um somewhere in the API you you'll like type in get or something and then a lot of the time they say you need to get request or post request or something and so you'll see here that they say um you know if you wanted to send multiple locations you have to pass a Json body as a post method with utf8 encoding this is just s so silly and this is the sort of stuff that just really drives me up the wall like this is just extremely inaccessible there are many different ways to say this you don't need to pass adjacent body um you know they could have just given you the exact URL that you could have copied and then pasted but they didn't because they want to seem like you know they're sophisticated intelligent whatever developers man they can drive me up the wall sometimes um anyway yeah so that's uh yeah that's basically the two differences in our case we're doing get requests I'm going to go empty and then now that we have defined the specifications I think the first one was latitude right let me scroll all the way over here uh first was latitude then longitude so what we have to do is we have to feed in the latitude of this record which we just pulled in under mappable column values location lat and then long so we have to feed in the latitude first location latitude and then we have to feed in the longitude as well let's do this and then let's go longitude and then the key um is just uh the same key that we're going to over use over and over and over again a good design pattern uh that you can use is you can store the key separately um like a variable if you ever wanted to hot swap it or something so you could just call this um I don't know set key or something and we could call this like API key and then we could grab this exact key stick it in here you can imagine we could also do this the latitude and the longitude if we wanted to but I don't really want to uh okay great now that I have everything set up let me just auto adjust this let me save this and let me run this we'll see if there are any issues so we grabbed the information just fine set the API key just fine and then we called the API and then we got a status code of 200 just fine and then the data that we got includes the condition an icon for this which is cute um the temperature and then um the location of where we're we're making the request to based off the latitude and the longitude what I'm going to do here is I'm then going to use this to customize an email just to show you guys how you would apply this to AB business use case uh let's just create a draft this time and then I'm going to do the two as the email module so email text email so I'm going to use this one here that's called email subject uh I don't know this will just be like some Outreach so let's just say quick question let me see if I can grab their name from this as well the name is up here um I don't want to go through the rigar roll of like doing all the maths I'm just going to go split name uh we're going to do the space so let's do space and then if you guys remember this design pattern from previously we're just going to get the first entry and a hot tip for you guys that are doing Outreach at scale uh if you just lowercase some of the elements in your in your subject line a lot of the time you're improving conversion rate or um at least open rate because people will think that like it was written by a real person and not a robot so I'm just going to do the same thing here um High blank and then these BRS are just spaces and then oh you know what why don't I use this as an example to show you guys how routers work too yeah let's do that because I haven't actually discussed routers yet so I'm going to go over here and then what I'm going to do is um okay if you think about it logically we want to send different emails depending on the weather right so if the weather is above let's say 15 we want it to be like hey you know weather's looking great out here in California how are you doing right we just want to do that as sort of like a drop in sort of customization example that you can replace um if the weather's below a certain number then we want to say like hey you know frigid ass weather we're having anyway so in order to do that simply um there are two or three design patterns the first is you can just manually route every response and what a router is is a router allows you to just choose different outcomes depending on a situation that you've defined beforehand so what you do is you select a router module like I did back there then you connect a router module to uh one of the routes and then all you do is you copy and paste the initial route so copy and paste copy and paste and then this ends up looking like this um if you Auto align it'll look a little prettier obviously and then uh what you do is you set the route using the filter and so if I wanted I would say hot let's just say over 15 C what I would do is I would find the current temp c and I'd say if this is greater than 15 go through this then I would say mild let's say 0 to 15 C then I would say if this um temperature here is greater than zero and temperature is less than 15 and then I would say cold and then I would say less than z c if the temperature is less than zero okay so now I have basically three routes and all these routes are mutually exclusive if you go down hot you're not going to go down mild or cold if you go down mild you're not going to go down hot or cold if you go down cold you're not going to go down hot or mild obviously uh and then what you can do is you can just customize this with whatever you want your email to be so we could say um nice weather we're having I'm in and then let's put California like you and wanted to connect about X Y and Z let me know if you have time to chat next week thanks neck right and then I'm just going to copy and paste this and stick this in three pretty good weather we're having this is like the lowest hanging fruit and email customization by the way I'm just trying to not cringe it if I actually got an email like this but anyway I'm just using this as an example um anyway and then uh and then what you do is you test the logic so we're testing this running through through um oh it looks like I I need to verify this a little bit better oh yeah I'm not using the right email here so let me pretend that I'm using this email this is probably better so I need to verify this puppy sorry that sounds like there's some housekeeping going on some very violent housekeeping uh and then I think it was this one maybe I'm mistaken yeah so I might have to rify all these just sort of annoying and down here I'll reverifying to try one more time uh didn't draft it probably because this folder location was wrong let's see invalid credentials failure um I don't really know what that's supposed to mean maybe I didn't actually swap out the uh let try that one more time now that I've swapped it out looks like it's working yeah no it didn't work either because unknown mailbox right so uh you have so I tried mapping this because I uh there was some error here and it was because I wasn't connected to the inbox so just make sure that when you do this um you have an actual mailbox in your email server um there are a bunch that you can just choose with a drop down one of them is like all mail the other's inbox the other's drafts I guess since we're creating a draft let's just do this in drafts um and then if you wanted to hardcode that in you would write um square bracket Gmail square bracket drafts like this so I'm just going to do that here and then I'm going to run this puppy one final time there we go awesome um so now this has actually been generated for us and if I go to my email and then go under drafts you'll see that we have the email generated uh and it says quick question Phoenix hi Phoenix pretty good weather we're having I'm in California like you want to Connected about XYZ let me know if you have time to chat next week so you can imagine how uh you could make this flow arbitrarily more complex um if you wanted to like add like a gp4 module in the middle or something like that and then do stuff with the data that you pulled you could probably just feed this entire string in all of this current stuff and then just say customize this email based on this input great so that's that now you guys know how to connect more or less any two software platforms together using um some very specific but unfortunately difficult for most people to understand um API stuff in make.
