Ask HN: What are your favorite recipes on IFTTT/Zapier?

I'm a huge fan of anything of the general form:

When happens, send a brief, well-considered message to the appropriate channel in our company's Slack account. (Hipchat/Campfire/etc also an option, but I prefer Slack for UX reasons.)

For example, when a new lead is added in Close.io, send to #ar-sales:

New lead for AR: Customer Foo ( foo@example.com )

https://app.close.io/lead/$REDACTED

Dashboard: https://www.appointmentreminder.org/a/admin/show_account/$RE...

This lets people who care about AR sales have conversations in that room about it and get notifications right when a new lead happens. Then someone can say "Spiffy, I've got a minute, I'll give them a call." "Gave them a call. Not a great fit for our solution, but we'll try again in a few months." or "That looks to be a doctor. @patrick can you deal with them? It will likely involve the HIPAA discussion." "Can't do it right now -- do me a favor, call them and get as far as you can, then do the HIPAA handoff over email if they express interest in it." "Turned out they didn't ask." "Great, thanks for handling that."

I'm Slacking up all the things these days. It's easier for people to subscribe to Slack notifications (by being in the right channel) than to have them spend days configuring Gmail to e.g. filter out notifications from the monitoring software except when, spreads out the knowledge of events among time and people, and helps make the company feel like a community of purpose rather than N disconnected inboxes which happen to receive checks from the same bank account.

I'm cheating here a bit as well, since I work on the Zapier team, but some of my favorite use cases are ways my wife uses Zapier for her small business. Whenever an Ebay or Etsy sale comes in via PayPal, Zapier records the sale, along with fees and shipping price, in a Google Docs spreadsheet, and then copies the shipping address to a plain text document in Dropbox to easily print out address labels. It's a tiny thing that saves a ton of time.

Then, I've got Twilio integrations with Zapier that let me get Twilio SMS messages on my phone, and more, which I wrote about here: https://zapier.com/blog/how-to-twilio-international-phone-nu...

I have people working with me on Appointment Reminder. This is a very recent thing. Writing about it today, actually -- essay will be out to the mailing list later about sales processes.