Mission: Customer Relationship Manager

Speaker 0: Hi. Welcome back to another episode of 100 apps. 100 hours where we build some of your favorite apps or try to rebuild some of your favorite apps in 1 hour or less, or get publicly humiliated trying. Alright. Super excited to be back for another season.

If you are new to 100 apps 100 hours, there are 2 basic rules. Number 1, you have 60 minutes to build and plan and build, no more, no less. So when that clock strikes 0, that's it. And then the second rule is there are no other rules. Use whatever you have at your disposal to complete the functionality.

That's it. Let's dive into this episode. So today, I've got a custom CRM. Tools like Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, they really need no introduction. Everybody needs a CRM.

A lot of them, depending on your purposes, may be way too much for what you need or they may not be specific enough for your industry. So we are going to build our own custom CRM in 1 hour or less. Let's do it baby. Alright. So, let's start the clock and away we go.

So, when we plan our CRM, what do we need out of a CRM? Right? What kind of functionality do we want to see inside our CRM? So basically, we want to manage all of our contacts. We want to manage all the different organizations those contacts belong to.

What else? We wanna manage our sales pipeline. Manage sales pipeline. That's gonna be deals or activities. We want to be able to track activities and follow-up.

So this seems like a a pretty good set of functionality for a basic CRM. I'm sure we might embellish this a little bit depending on how far we get, but let's dive into actually fleshing out what the data model just might look like for something like this. So we'll drag a nice square up here. We're gonna have contacts. We could just call those people.

I'm a big fan of that. We're gonna have organizations. There's definitely gonna be a relationship between those 2, but I I feel like this could be a many to many relationship because one contact could belong to multiple organizations, and and some CRMs make that a little more difficult to do than others. What else do we have? We're gonna have deals or opportunities.

Deals is kind of a a standard nomenclature. We're gonna have activities that are attached to what, those are attached to organizations, they're attached to contacts, they're probably also gonna be attached to deals. What else are we going to have? We're probably going to have some sales reps, those are going to be our users inside our accounts. This looks pretty good for a a base set of functionality.

Let's dive in and actually start building something. So, I'm just gonna pull up my Directus instance, that's what we're using on the back end. Totally blank instance, we'll zoom in on this, and let's start building. Right? Let's create our first collection.

Let's start with contacts. So we're gonna give this a contacts as the name. For the primary key, let's use generated UUID. What kind of fields do we wanna add for our contacts? Right?

When we think of contacts, we're gonna need name, email, but we may also wanna track when this was updated, when it was created. Directus makes that super easy. And one tip that you may not have realized if you've used Directus before, is I can go in and change these to be whatever I want. So if I wanted this to be created at and created by, I could go in and update those, change them to be whatever I want. Updated at, updated by.

That's the the nomenclature that you're used to. Do we actually need a sort for our contacts? I don't think. Let's just go ahead and save this. Alright.

So for our contacts, we're gonna add a first name. Great. We'll make that a string. Let's do half width for that. I can go in and click the three little dots here and just quickly duplicate this field to save myself some time.

And, of course, as I am plotting away on this, Directus underneath is mirroring all these changes to my database schema. So we've got our first name, we've got our last name, we're gonna need a email or an email. Great. Let's require this value. And, you know, I could even go as far as, like, making this unique if I I wanted to have some type of unique identifier to match these up with.

Alright. As far as an interface, you know, I could get fancy with this and we could add a little email icon like an at symbol. That's great. I think everything else is good. You know, one of the other nice things that's built into Directus is I can go in and add my own custom reg x validation.

So, you know, I can put in some type of reg x that matches email addresses. I don't have one of those handy here, but we'll go ahead and keep marching along here. So we got first name, we got last name, we got email. We'll probably have a phone number at some point, but let's let's go for, like, a job title, probably. I'm trying to think of all the standard fields.

Maybe we have some notes. We could set that to be a text area field. I don't really need formatting for those. Great. Job title.

And maybe honestly, let let's strip this out because I'm I'm thinking about that many to many relationship with organizations, and we may have, different titles at different organizations. So I'll show you how we can handle that coming up. Alright. So we got first name, we got email. We could go ahead and add phone number as a string.

Phone or phone number. Let's just keep it short. We'll say phone. Let's give it a phone icon. Great.

K. Phone, email. We'll put email above phone. Cool. Looks nice.

Alright. Let's just take a look. Right? We've got first name. Go ahead.

Oh, I was gonna add my wife here, but she's gonna get mad at me if I misspell it. Right? Ashley atexample.com. I had a phone number, 555-5555. Here's some nice notes for our contact.

These are looking great. Right? We've got our contact in here. I could potentially sort and filter this a a hundred different ways, maybe change the layout. But let's dive into the next collection that we wanna set up, our organizations.

So we'll have organizations, again, for the primary key, I'm gonna use ID and just use generated UUID as the type. And, again, I could change created at I could change this structure for these system fields to be whatever I want. Created by, date updated, that's gonna be updated at, if I can actually spell. And we use this one as well and call it updated by. Great.

Okay. So now we've got an organization. For our organization, what are we gonna have? We're gonna have a name of the organization. Right?

Probably, some addresses for that organization. Right? We could have multiple. So that's where we might reach into an another bag of just a different table. What else are we gonna have for an organization?

You know, let's just do something like country in case we want to, even, like, automatically route new organizations to a specific sales rep. Potentially, we've got a name. What are we gonna have? We're gonna have a website. You know, we may have a a logo if we wanna track that for a company.

So let's do an image file. Let's call it logo. You know, you might even add things like brand color, things like that if if you're really in tracking that. And then we'll just add another section for notes. This is gonna be a text area field with the type text, and we'll hit save.

So we've got our organizations. We've got our contacts. Let's make a link between the 2. Right? So how do we go about that?

Depends on how you want the data to actually be structured. Right? In an application, depending on the setup, maybe a user can only belong to one specific organization. But often inside of CRM and maybe I am working with the local little league. I am a member of the board there, and then I'm also a developer advocate here at Directus or, you know, a a founder at Better Side Shop.

So a lot of different relationships that is gonna be modeled with the mini to mini relationship inside Directus. Here's how we set that up. It's gonna be pretty easy. We'll just go to create field. We'll look for a many to many relationship.

And because we're on organizations, our key here is gonna be contact for the or contacts, I should say. Our related collection is gonna be contacts and then we'll just go through and paint by numbers here. Do we want to show these in a list or a table? I'm good either way. We definitely want to show a link to that item so we can get to that specific contact, but I'm gonna pop open this advanced field creation mode just to show you that you do have control over the naming of the junction collection and the individual fields within that.

So, the default setup here is just going to take this table name and this table name or this collection name and this collection name and marry the 2 together and we end up with organizations underscore contacts. Works for me. We'll leave that autofill set up. And then on the reverse, I'm gonna add that many to many field to the contacts as well. We're gonna keep that as the organizations.

Alright? In this case, we may have a sort field. So we wanna control the the sorting for contacts, like who's 1st, 2nd, 3rd, that could be helpful in, like, a primary contact situation. And then we have some of our relational triggers. Right?

On deselect of organizations' contacts, what do we want to do here? Yeah. Maybe I want to delete that association. So I'll set these to cascade. Great.

So now that back out, we can see we've got our contacts field here. If we go into, yep, looks like we've got, an extra contact table created. I might have typed something wrong. But, so we can see contacts there in the organizations. And then on our contact, I should see organizations here.

Let's just add an organization. Right? So let's say my wife worked at Tesla. That's in the United States. And, you know, we could add the website, logo, notes.

I could choose existing contacts. But I'm just going to go ahead and say 1. Right? So now, I could see I've got that organization here, but it's showing an ID, which is not super helpful. Right?

So I can go into the organization itself and control the display template where I have a name. I could even potentially add the logo to that if I wanted. So now if we check it again, we can see, okay, here's the organizations that they're a part of. Right? Now, you also have the ability to manage the data inside that junction collection.

Right? So if I go in and and like I said, I may have a different job title at all these different organizations. So I could go in and add a new field here inside this junction collection for job title. Great. Alright.

So, now if we go into Tesla, we can see the job title is down here at the bottom, but Directus also gives me an easy way to control where that displays. So if I go to our many to many relationship inside our contacts, I can go to maybe we wanna add a sort field for this just to make sure. And then if I go to the interface, I can control where my junction fields are located. So I can put this at the top, which should be great. Okay.

So now if we just check that out one more time. Right. Now I could see director of DirectUs. So now I could give a specific job title to this specific person within that organization. I could go in and add a new organization as well, like, hey, the little league.

We can say a board member. Right? Little League Baseball is the name of the organization. Great. Okay.

So now there my wife is a part of 2 organizations, different job titles for each. Right? Alright. How are we looking on time? We're looking great.

Let's move on to our next collection that we want to set up. That's gonna be what? Our deals, our activities, what do we want to set up next? Let's go for deals or opportunities. Deals is probably the standard naming for this.

So that's what we'll stick with. Could be opportunities. Could be something else. That's fine. We'll do created at.

Just to keep the same structure, we'll do created by. And by adding these, whenever this record is created, it's going to populate a timestamp and a user. The same thing for Updated, whenever it gets updated or who updates it, it's gonna populate that info for us. Updated by. Great.

Okay. So our deals what we're gonna have for our deal? We'll probably have a name or a title of the deal. Deal name sounds great. It could be good to prefix some of these sometimes if you're dealing with a lot of nested relational data.

So you get used to seeing name in there a 100 times. Could be confusing whether that's the actual deal name or the organization name or the contact name. So we'll just save the deal name. What else are we gonna have on this deal? Right?

We'll probably have a average dollar amount or a potential dollar amount. Let's set that to be, decimal. Deal value. We can add a nice little dollar sign to the icon to make this look nice and pretty. And then we are going to have some related fields.

But before we do that, let's just add, like, some deal notes or something like that. Sounds great. Okay. So we got a deal name, we got a deal value, you know, maybe these are side by side, not a big deal. Let's go in, and now we want to add a relationship to the organization and probably to our primary contact for this deal.

So those are both gonna be many to one relationships. And we'll set a key of organization here. So the related collection, we'll set that to be organizations. Great. And I could control the display template here.

We'll just use the name and we hit save. So now we've got an organization that we're gonna tie to the deal. I'll make that half width. And then we also want to add a primary contact. So we'll just say primary contact.

The related collection here is going to be the Contacts collection. And for the Display template, let's use first name, last name, and let's use this format, which I think is typically how it displays inside an email client where you have the email address inside these less than or greater than SQL or symbols. So let's save that. We've got our primary contact. We've got our notes.

We've got our deal. What do we need next? Right? We need to track where that deal is at. So we could use, like, a a status field as, like, a drop down for that potentially.

Right? What's the status of this particular deal? Blah blah blah. Or we could do something else where we have a relationship to a deal stage or our individual pipeline. Right?

Because then we may want to, potentially have separate pipelines or we we wanna give more control back to our users, so the the sales reps or the sales manager to control that actual pipeline without getting into the admin section. So how can we do that? Right? Looks like I've got a little extra couple of fields that I've been creating here inadvertently. Alright, so now let's add a new collection.

Let's just call it Deal Stages. We want to manage what are the stages of a particular deal. As far as the optional fields, maybe I don't really not super concerned with these, deal stages. We're gonna call this the name of this particular stage. Maybe we wanna give it a color so we can add some color to it.

And, you know, I guess we could even give it an icon if we wanted to. We could play around with that and see what that looks like. Deal stages. Let's make both of those half width. And, now, let's just go through and map some of these particular stages.

Right? And I and I, you know, I've got this s on here. One of the other things that you could do inside Directus, you can't control the translations for all of these. So even if you're working in English, on the the back end, you may want to use prefix tables to keep things nice and organized as a developer. This is a great way to control what displays via the interface to your actual users within the application.

So I could just call this deal stages or pipeline stages, whatever makes a lot of sense here, and hit save. Alright. So it still shows me deals_stages here, but when I start looking inside the actual app, there we go, we can see our pipeline stages. So, let's create our first one. Right?

Let's just say, New, this is inbound. Do we have a symbol? We do have a symbol for this. Right? So let's say red.

This is we need to take action on this. What's next? Right? Qualified, maybe? Contacted?

Or, let's say assigned. Right? We forgot to assign those to a sales rep. Assign assignment. That's a nice looking icon for that.

Then we'll say qualified. You know, if we're doing software sales, like, a check mark. Okay. What else? Demo.

Let's save green. Oh, let's make this orange. Do we have like a demo? Maybe a TV? What have we got?

Yeah, there we go. That works for a demo as far as the icons. And then we are going to set, like, a last stage, like, proposal. Great. Let's just go gray.

Cool. Document. Awesome. Alright. So I can control the way that these are displayed through my actual settings, here.

So I can go into each specific one. And on the display tab, let's display a colored dot for the color. And then for the icon, we're just gonna display the actual icon. Alright. Great.

If we take a look now, I can see what these actually look like. Cool. And then for my display template for the deal stages, I may even go in and just mirror that same structure where I have a color, then I have an icon with a name. Okay. So, now, what we've done, we've effectively given control over these, and we probably actually need a sort on these as well, so so we can control that value.

So, let's go in and quickly add a sort. That's going to be an integer value. And because this is coming after the fact, after we've created this actual table, I'm just gonna scroll down a little bit, and I will have a sort field here. So we'll choose sort just to make sure we manage that. And now I should be able to drag and drop these, in whatever order that I like.

Again, we're giving control back to the users of our custom CRM. We're definitely gonna prevent them from getting inside the admin so they don't mess with the data model. But here, we give them the ability to control what those pipeline stages are gonna be. So now we need to add those to our actual deals. Right?

So we're gonna go into our deals. We're going to create a many to one relationship. And, you know, this is going to be the deal stage or just stage. And we're gonna use deals underscore stages as the related collection. We can open this up and and just see what's going on.

I I don't really need to create that inverse relationship. I could. Doesn't make a ton of sense, though. I'm not sure. Alright.

Display related values, validation. Let's keep it very simple, and then we're gonna use our deal stage. Alright. So now if I go into our deals Why is this oh, it goes in the machine. I don't know what's going on on this particular example, but it keeps creating additional fields that we don't need.

Alright. So let's create a new deal. Alright. This is gonna be a new deal. We can see, hey, there's our stage.

That looks great. The deal name is 100 apps, 100 hours contract. It's worth $1,000,000. So we'll add that. How many zeros do we have there?

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Alright. Let's make this for the Little League team. Great. My wife is the primary contact.

Here's some notes on this deal. Great. Did we save it? Numeric value and deals is out of range. Uh-oh.

Wouldn't be a 100 apps, a 100 hours without, some type of issue. Right? So let's take a look at this. The deal value, what did I set? Precision and scale.

Maybe we bumped this up way up. Probably could have gone with integers for this as well. Do I have a minimum and a maximum? I I don't have that set. So not entirely sure what's going on.

Let's just try this again. 100 apps, 100 hours contract, 1 100,000, 1,000,000. Try it again. Save. Okay.

Alright. So now, we've got this particular deal set up. This is kind of an underwhelming view. Right? And, again, I might control how these things display.

So if I just go into our deals, we go to the deal stage. If I wanna control how it displays, I can go in and set this. So let's do the color, do the icon, do the name, just because, I'm a I'm a very visual person, and I suspect, a lot of your end users may be as well. We still don't see the organization there. So, again, we'll go back.

We'll adjust our organization. We wanna display related values. We want to show the name of that specific organization. And let's get even fancier and maybe we wanna show that logo. I'm gonna click on this and then you'll see this one that has a little magic beside it that's a thumbnail.

That's just a shortcut for, like, a nice thumbnail sized image instead of loading the actual image size. So I donit have a logo for this company, but I could quickly find 1. Alright. So, we'll just copy this image address, go back to our instance, let's load up that specific company, they who shall not be named, Hit import. Oh, that's a data URL.

Let's find an actual URL that we can just copy. Great. Let's try this again. We can import via URL. Cool.

And now when I'm looking at my deals, I can see the logo of that organization. That makes it really handy, when I'm working on a deal just to have that extra extra visual reinforcement. Now, when I'm looking at deals, I may want to set up like a traditional pipeline type of view. So I could do that really easily just by switching the layout here inside Directus. So we'll change this to a Kanban layout.

Let's group by the deal stage and the group title is gonna be the name. So I can see new assigned qualified demo. We have that Kanban view that we're used to. As far as the text, what do we wanna look at? We want to control, let's say, when this was created.

I'm not really concerned about that. The tags, what do we want to set that to be? Do we want a card image? Honestly, this looks okay. Do we need an actual user on here?

Probably not. Cool. Alright. We'll just keep it as is and let's let's start fleshing this out a little more as well. Right?

So within a deal, when I'm working this deal, we're going to have activities assigned to this as it moves across the pipeline. And, for that, let's just go in and add a new table, a new collection, we're going to call it activities. Activities, I think that's the correct spelling. We use generated UID, we'll do created at, createdby, create up, updatedat, updated by. Great.

And, in this case, maybe we do give a status for this particular activity. Right. Status, great. Let's give a name of the activity, probably a type of activity. Makes sense.

We use a drop down for that. It seems pretty straightforward or, you know, maybe they're not gonna need to change the activity types on a a very frequent basis. So we'll call it the activity type, and let's add a couple choices to this. So this is a relatively new addition to Directus within the drop down, the ability to have an icon and a color. So let's say text is a phone call, value is a phone.

One of the other cool things if you want to translate this value, you could use this phone t, or this dollar sign t for a translatable string. And then anytime you have users who are using the app within a different language, inside the settings, you can control all those custom translations. We'll take a look at that in a moment. Let's call this what? Phone call.

The value could just be phone call, depending on how I wanna store this. Right? It may have an underscore within it as well. It could just be the same thing. Either way.

Look for that phone. Great. And I could even add a color for that if needed. Maybe I just wanna keep these all the same. Phone call, we'll call it a meeting.

And for this, do we have a meeting icon? Right? We calendar looks nice. Maybe we want to track demos separate from meetings. Alright.

So we drag a demo. That was the TV icon that we had. Great. What else are we gonna need? Like, an email?

Not sure I would Yeah. Maybe, like, a follow-up email. We wanna reschedule that. And then we'll do an email. Great.

Demo, phone call. I think I'm gonna set this to be underscore value. Cool. Alright. Looking good.

Activity type. Okay. What else are we going to need for this? We need a due date for this activity and the status, we can use as as is. It's published draft, archived.

What do I really care about this activity? It probably isn't completed or not. Right? So maybe we scrap status, and maybe we just go for a toggle instead. Right?

Hey. Is this completed? The default value, great. For our label, maybe we change it to completed and give it a color of color on. Color off is red, just to show that it has not been completed.

Great. And let's just clean up this form a little bit, making sure everything looks nice. Okay. We are going to add a date for this, and let's set a specific date and time that this thing occurred. Call it due date, end date.

Due date seems reasonable, but when do we actually need to complete this specific task? Okay. So now we've got an activity. We want to, link this to our actual deal so we can track those. Right?

So, what I'm gonna do in this case is create a mini to one relationship because this activity could only belong to a single deal. Right? We're gonna use the key of deal. The related collection, we'll set that to deals. We'll show the name of that deal.

Maybe we show the actual organization as well so I can actually dig into the related collections and and show values from that? Excuse me one second. Sorry about that. Cool. Alright.

So now, what I forgot to do is create that inverse relationship. You can actually set that up via direct us when you're creating that relationship. But now I can also just go into our deals, not deal. We'll go into our deals, and now we're gonna create a one to many relationship back to those activities. So we'll call this key of activities.

We've got activities. The foreign key will be deal. That already exists. Maybe we wanna show these in a table. We'll choose the columns, due date, Name, Due Date, Activity Type.

Seems pretty savvy. And I can even filter these, right? So if I wanted to see just activities where they were not completed. We can enable search and filtering and show a link to these. We'll take a look at what all these look like in just a moment.

But we've forgotten one important step through this whole process is, hey. We need somebody to assign these deals to. Right? So, let's add a many to one relationship. We'll call that the deal owner or, you know, you potentially say who this is assigned to.

Like, the deal owners, again, kind of standard naming in these scenarios. And for the related collection here, we're gonna use directus underscore users. So these are gonna be actual users of the application that we're assigning this to. Invalid payload collections can't start with direct us users. Oh, deal owner.

Let's go to our related collection, and let's get direct us underscore users. And, in this case, we're gonna show the first name, last name. We may back up and do an avatar as well. So just the the thumbnail, the avatar, I could move these around just by using edit raw value. You'll see these are just, the standard mustache syntax that you see throughout Directus as well.

Excuse me. Let me get this a drink of water. I'm actually dying. That's a turn of fate. Okay.

Alright. So we're gonna save this. Deal owner already exists in deals. Okay. Alright.

Great. Let's move this around. Maybe we make deal stage half width. We slide deal owner up there. Let's actually take a look at this now.

I should be able to assign folks. So let's create a new user. We'll just call it sales rep. Salesrep@example.com. And maybe we give them a nice avatar.

Right? Sales rep, avatar. Let's just see what Google comes back with. John's inside sales rep. Yeah.

This looks this is perfect. This is my guy right here. Alright. There's his avatar. We'll just save that.

And now we can see who we've assigned this particular deal to. And now maybe within the deal card user here, I wanna show who that deal owner is. Great. Mister sales rep. Looking good.

Alright. One of the other things that we need to do on our activities, we probably got a an owner of that activity or assigned to. It's been assigned to somebody on the team. Again, that's going to be assigned to a direct us user. We'll save that.

And lots going on here. Just some type of weird glitch. I could see a couple of extra collections. I'll just remove these. Alright.

Cool. So now weive got a deal. Weive got a table full of activities. I can go ahead and add these, like, follow-up on proposal. This is assigned to Mr.

Sales Rep. We've got the activity type. We can see that's going to be, just a quick phone call. This is completed. We can see that conditional, conditional formatting for that.

And we can add a due date of, let's say, the next Friday. Great. Save that. Keep editing. Cool.

Alright. So, now, we've got the basic inner workings of a CRM. Right? We've got our deals, we've got contacts, we've got organizations, we've got our different pipeline stages. Right?

If I wanted to organize these things a bit, we could go in and add different icons for each of these. So, you know, maybe we set some people icons for our contacts. We've got our organizations. Do we have an organization option? Let's look and see.

Business. Is there a business? There you go. That looks somewhat like a business. We've got activities.

Maybe this will be like a checklist. Cool. We've got our deals. Let's make those the money. Dollar signs, that's great.

And then, deal stages, to me this is like a settings. Right? So I could create a new folder, let's just call it settings folder. You don't necessarily have to add this, but maybe we just do to keep it clean. And we look for, like, a settings icon just to use here.

That's great. This one looks magical. Settings suggest. Right? And, again, I can change the name of this to just say settings.

So, it still creates this collection, but, we can call it whatever we want. So we'll drag this up within settings folder. We'll drag deal stages and, this will be, what, like the Kanban view. There we go. Awesome.

Okay. So now we get a little more organization to this. One of the other things that you might do and, you know, that you use all the time within ACRM are saved views. Right? So Directus gives you that ability with bookmarks.

We'll just go in to the top here and maybe I want to sort by a specific sales rep. Right? Like, the deal owner is, a specific person and specific name is sales rep. That's the only one at this point. But I could go in and create a bookmark for this, and we could call it, deals sales rep Man.

And we can change this up, give it a color. Now, within that collection, now we can see we've got our deals for Sales Rep Van, and I could save that bookmark. So even if I go into the main deals view, and maybe we change this back to a table view, which could be easier for, you know, maybe a sales manager or something who's controlling this. So I had deal owner back to this as well. Now if I go back, deal sales rep man view, boom, there it is.

It's saved. I could go in and update this if I wanted to as well. So now we've got our pipeline. When we go into each one of the deal, we have our name, we've got our organization, we've got the notes, we've got our activities. You know, we can mark these activities off as completed.

That seems like a great CRM baseline. Let's let's take a look at where we're at. Right? We got, like, 16 minutes on the clock. This feels like a win.

I don't I don't know if we wanna run that one, let's discuss where we could go from here, right, maybe we want to automatically send some emails when it hits a certain stage in the pipeline. So let's just call these things done. Right? We can manage all of our contacts. We can manage all of our organizations.

We can manage our sales pipelines. We can track our activities and follow-up. So let's say, you know, we get a new deal inbound. Maybe we want to automatically assign that to a a particular person, or we want to send a notification to our sales rep when that assignment happens. Let's figure out how to do that.

Right? So I'm gonna go in. Let's just create a new deal. We'll say actually, let's wait a moment. Let's go into our flows.

This is a good example. Right? Whenever a a new deal comes inbound, we want to send an email notification to our sales rep to to let them know. Alright. So we're gonna create a new flow.

We'll just call it new inbound deal. Pretty straightforward. We could change this to the new symbol if we want to and just do a trigger setup. So what are we going to choose here? Directus gives you a ton of different options, as far as what to use when you're creating a flow.

In this case, we're going to use the event hook. So when a certain event happens inside the platform, we wanna trigger an automation. The type that we're gonna choose here is action non blocking because we don't, the the filter allows you to basically either adjust the payload when a new deal gets created or a new event happens. Action non blocking, again, that runs after a create or update action. So in this case, let's do the items dot create.

Whenever we're gonna trigger this based on the deals collection. And cool. Alright, so now I'm just going to save this, right? I'm going to go in and let's create a new deal inside the system. It's in the new stage.

We're gonna assign this to mister sales rep. New deal automation. And we add, let's set this one to be for the little league. Again, we choose a specific contact, add some notes, and, maybe, the deal value, we'll just ballpark it at $5,000. Great.

If I go back, now I can see that in my logs, I've got this flow. Here's the payload of this particular flow, and we could see who the deal owner is on this particular deal. How do we send an email notification to that specific owner? Right? I'm just gonna take this, copy it, and I open up just my Versus code editor where I've got my 100 apps, just, Docker Compose file here set up to run this locally.

I'm just going to save that in case I need it. And, next, let's flesh this out a little bit. Right? So you can see the data we're getting back here. We're probably gonna need to look up that specific user.

We can find them there. Those are the deal owner. We could send them a notification inside the app or we could send them a notification via email. Right? There's 2 options there.

We've got notification. In this case, we've got the UUID of the user that we're going to send that to. So, you know, potentially, you want to send that in app. App. In this case, if there's a new deal, they're probably gonna be in their inbox.

We're going to send that new deal to them. But let's actually find that email address first, though. Alright. So we're gonna read data from a specific collection. Let's call it Find User is the actual step we're gonna do here.

For the permissions, let's just give full access. And, for the collection, you can see I don't have the Directus Users collection here, but I can go in and edit my raw value and just use Directus underscore users. And for our IDs, right, what are we gonna put here? So if I open this back up, we're gonna use the trigger. Payload.

Dealowner. So we'll do this, we'll do trigger dot payload dot deal underscore owner. And I'm gonna wrap this in mustache syntax. And let's try this again. So we'll read the user.

Let's go ahead and maybe just add this send email as well. So we'll send the email, and this is gonna be the read underscore user. We're using the key that we set of the previous operation within that flow. Readuser. Email should be.

We'll input that. New deal assigned to you. And hey. Read_user.firstname. We've assigned a new deal to you.

And then I can even go through and add those different variables if I wanted to for things like the deal name or the deal ID and and add a link back to that. So let's just try trigger. Payload.deal_name. Great. We'll save it.

And now let's just test this out. I'm not actually sure if I've got emails set up here locally on this particular instance though, so that could be fun. But we should be able to actually see if this runs. In light of that bit of news, because it just looking at my configuration here, I do not have email configured here locally. So let's let's detach that one, and let's just test the notifications.

Send notification. Cool. Send notification. The find_user.id. Cool.

Full access. And it was a new deal assigned. We'll just add the key here. So that'll be trigger dot payload. Or no.

Actually, it may be something like this where we have key. Alright. Let's just take a look just to make sure. Alright. Within our payload, we can see the key there.

That's good. In that case, we probably didn't need to get the actual user there, but that's okay. I'm just gonna copy this message that we set here. Just paste that. And let's take a look at where this gets us.

Alright. So we've got a new inbound deal. We're going to read the data of the user that we've assigned that to and we're going to send a notification to that specific person. Alright. Now we've got a new deal, deal stage.

Let's just set it to new. Deal owner. I'm gonna choose myself here so we could test this notification. Say deal name. Test deal.

It's worth $6,000,000. Very nice deal. We got a primary contact. Here's some notes. We'll just save that and let's see what happens.

Right? We go to our Flow, we get a new inbound deal, we can see our logs, send notification, recipient is so and so. Hey, undefined. We've sent you a new test deal. Underscore first name.

Why did that not come back? Read underscore oh, that's why I used the wrong key. Sometimes that happens. Find user dot first name. Great.

So now, if I look and I check my activity log, I can see that I've got this new deal signed. Here's the notification for that. And if I click on it where it says view content, it should take me to that specific test deal. Great. Awesome.

Let's call that a win. Right? We've got our custom CRM built out. We've set up some automation for this. We could go further and flesh this out a a ton of different ways.

Right? If we talk about it, like, we could go through and send emails to our actual primary contact when it reaches a certain stage, that would be fairly easy to do using direct dis flows. You know, we could maybe even go as far as, like, a future future iteration of this could be setting up an inbox to parse incoming emails like a BCC functionality and add these to those specific deals as well. But this this feels really good. I'm I'm calling this a win.

That's our custom CRM. Thanks for joining me on this episode of 100 apps, 100 hours. We'll catch you on the next one.