Getting Started

Lindy 101: Getting Started

What is a Lindy?

Lindy is a no-code platform that allows you to build your own AI agents to automate business workflows.

Triggered by specific events, Lindy connects your favorite apps and communicates with you through any platform to complete tasks.

Lindy can respond to emails, schedule meetings, assist with sales, take meeting notes, handle data entry, and provide customer support, helping you automate entire business workflows.

Building Your First Lindy

Welcome to Lindy!

In this guide, you are going to learn how to build your first Lindy email assistant.

This will take no more than five minutes, and after you’re done, you will have an email responder (because no one loves to answer emails themselves).

Let’s get started!

Create a New Lindy

Click the plus sign beside Lindies to start building your Lindy.

Click "Start from scratch" to create a new Lindy.

Add a Trigger

Triggers are events that “wake up” a Lindy. Examples include time-based triggers (e.g., every weekday at 9 am) or event-based triggers (e.g., when you receive an email).

A single Lindy can have multiple triggers, either managing different workflows, or acting as entry points into the same workflow.

You can apply filters to your triggers to reduce costs and ensure all workflows are initiated by desired events. Guide to using Filters here.

Click “select trigger”, then click “Gmail”, then add an “Email Received” trigger.

Add a Condition

Conditions let you define different paths in your automation based on specific criteria.

Now that Lindy is going to wake up with every email, we are going to set a condition to define which emails we want Lindy to act on.

Hover on the branch below the Email Received trigger and click “Add Step”

This time, we are going to add a Conditional.

Set the Condition to “[Only continue if..] the emailer is asking a question about my service, product, or company” so only relevant emails pass through.

Add a Knowledge Base

The knowledge base is a repository of data from which Lindy can retrieve knowledge. Lindy’s search through a knowledge base is “semantic,” so she will find results whose meaning is similar, even if their text doesn’t match exactly.

For example, searching for “refunds” will also find entries related to “returns” in the knowledge base. Learn more about using a knowledge base here.

Now that Lindy receives your emails, and filters out the irrelevant ones, we’ll give her knowledge about your business, so that she knows what to reply.

Click “Add step” and add “Search knowledge base.”

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Then, click Website.

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Insert your personal or company website, and click “crawl” for Lindy to index all pages linked from your site (you’ll have the option to remove pages later).

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Add an Action

Actions let Lindy complete tasks in external services such as Gmail, Hubspot, or Notion.

Full guide on Configuring Actions here.

Lindy is now receiving emails and reading your website to understand your business. All that’s left is for her to use that knowledge to draft a response.

Click “Add step” (Or the blue plus sign beneath the Knowledge Base) and select “Perform an action.” Click the Gmail action and select Send Reply.

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Now you can customize how you want your Lindy to respond using the knowledge in your knowledge base.

To do this, ensure the ‘Body’ field is set to ‘AI Prompt’ and add a prompt, instructing Lindy on what to draft as a response.

Example prompt:

You are a competent email responder that will use context from a knowledge base to succinctly respond to emailers’ questions about my service, product, or company. ONLY respond with exact information extracted from the knowledge base and keep emails friendly and informative. Never more than 3 sentences.

Set the ‘Reply To’ field to “sender-only”. This ensures Lindy will respond to the email sender (although you do have the option for Lindy to send a response to yourself as the user, if you prefer to have visibility on the email draft and reply to the email sender yourself)

Optional: You can BCC yourself in Lindy’s responses by selecting the “Set Manually” setting on the BCC field and inserting your email address. This is another way to have visibility on Lindy’s responses.

Test!

Click the Save button and send yourself an email inquiry!

Click the back button to see your Lindy in action — you will see your email “wake up” Lindy.

When you click the last Gmail Thread card, you will see in the ‘text’ field, the body of Lindy’s response email.

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Taking it One Step Further

Now that you have an email assistant responding to inquiries about your product, service, or company, let’s take it one step further!

Lindy can triage emails, pre-draft responses, alert you on Slack, create reminders, send follow-ups to recipients, and more.

In the Getting Started Guide 102, we show you how to create a priority list that alerts you on Slack with a pre-drafted response when an important email comes in.

Guides

Meeting Scheduler: 101

Building a Chatbot: 101