Learning Lindy

Triggers

Learn everything you need to know about using triggers.

Triggers are events that “wake up” a Lindy and start a workflow. These can include time-based triggers (e.g., every weekday at 9 am), chat-based triggers (when a user starts a new chat), 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.

The three types of triggers are:

Time-based: Starts the workflow at a set or recurring time.
Chat-based: Starts the workflow when a user initiates a chat.
Event-based: Starts the workflow when a specific event occurs.

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

How To Add a Trigger

Create a New Lindy

Click the plus sign beside Lindies.

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

Click “Select Trigger”.

Search for a tool or trigger that will initiate a response from Lindy and begin the workflow.

For example, if you want Lindy to join your interview calls, select the Calendar Event Started trigger. This will wake Lindy up on the Calendar Event Start, assuming there is a meeting on your calendar.

Account Selection

If it is your first time setting up an app for a given trigger, you must authorize your desired account. Lindy supports multi-account authorization. You can select which account you want to use for the trigger in the Trigger Settings. The trigger will only fire for the selected account.

Trigger Filters

How and when to use filters for your triggers

A trigger filter allows you to set conditional logic to filter which events will cause Lindy to wake up and execute the workflow.

You can enable trigger filters at the bottom of the trigger configuration settings. This means you do not have to add additional steps to filter out triggering events from your workflow.

Note that:

Trigger filters are not case-sensitive.
You can add multiple filter conditions and combine them with AND or OR conditions.
Condition Groups allow you to build more complex, nested filtering logic.

In the below example, Lindy will only trigger if the Calendar Event name contains "Interview" AND the location contains "1841 Market Street". Lindy will also trigger if the Calendar Event description contains "In-Person Interview".

Some triggers, such as the Calendar Event Started trigger, offer a Minutes Offset, which allow the trigger timing to begin before or after the event start time.

A negative Minutes Offset (-) sets the trigger before the event start time and a positive Minutes Offset (+) sets the trigger after the event start time.

For example, if you wanted a Meeting Prep Lindy to prep you 10 minutes before a meeting, you would set the Minutes Offset to -10. In this case, the workflow would begin 10 minutes before the Calendar Event Start time.

Multiple Triggers

One Lindy can have multiple triggers, either initiating the same workflow or triggering entirely different ones.

Multiple Triggers for The Same Workflow

For example, if you receive lead emails from a contact@company.com email address and also have a form on your website that sends leads to a Google Sheet, you can configure two triggers to aggregate your leads.

One trigger would be on an Email Received and the other would be on a New Row Added to a Google Sheet.

The workflow would execute exactly the same for both triggers.

Let's take a look at how this would work:

I have a Lindy built that will fire on a New Row Added, search the internet for the lead's LinkedIn profile, create a contact in Hubspot, and then send the team a Slack channel message to alert them of the new lead.

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I am going to click New Trigger in the top left of the Flow Editor to add an additional Trigger.

This time, I am going to add the Email Received trigger.

Now, we are going to drag the grey arrow beneath the Email Received trigger and connect it to the step after the New Row Added trigger. In this case, the Search the Internet action.

Now you have a Lead Creator Lindy that will fire for two different events and execute the same workflow, regardless of the type of trigger.

A Lindy With Multiple Workflows

Under some circumstances, you may want your Lindy to have two distinct workflows.

For example, let’s say you want to build a Meeting Notetaker Lindy that can also answer meeting questions in the Lindy app.

To do this, you’d first set up a meeting recorder Lindy that joins your meeting, creates a Google Document with meeting notes and saves them in a Folder. The trigger for this would be on a Calendar Event Start.

Then, you could create a second workflow under the same Lindy to answer meeting questions, with a Message Received trigger. The second workflow begins when a user sends a message to Lindy. The subsequent steps involve searching the knowledge base (which queries all the Documents in the Folder created by the first workflow) and then responding to the user.

This example outlines two workflows with different triggers. One workflow will join your meetings and take notes. The other allows the user to chat with their meetings and get instant answers to questions about their meetings.

Guides

Building a Chatbot: 101

Email Responding: 101