TopolearnEvery other Zapier feature is built on this one picture, so getting it clear first makes the rest easy.
Think of a chore you do by hand: every time someone fills in your website form, you copy their name and email into a spreadsheet and send them a welcome email. Zapier does that chore for you, every time, without you being there.
The automation is called a Zap. A Zap is a small recipe with two kinds of steps:
- A trigger: the event that starts the Zap. "When a new form entry arrives" or "when a new email lands in Gmail".
- One or more actions: what Zapier does after the trigger. "Add a row to Google Sheets", "send a Slack message".
Each step talks to an app (a service such as Gmail, Slack or HubSpot). Zapier connects to more than 9,000 apps, and it also has built-in helper apps whose names end in "by Zapier", such as Formatter by Zapier or Webhooks by Zapier.
Every time the trigger event happens, the Zap runs once from top to bottom. That one run is logged in your history, and each action that succeeds normally counts as one task, the unit Zapier uses to measure how much you automate.
Building a Zap always follows the same three moves: build it (choose apps and events, fill in the fields), test each step, then publish it so it starts running on new events. A published Zap only reacts to things that happen after you publish it, not to old data.
Beyond Zaps, Zapier offers Tables (a simple database), Forms (simple pages and forms), Canvas (a whiteboard for mapping processes), AI steps, and MCP, a way for AI assistants to use your apps. This course covers all of them, starting with Zaps.
Remember
- A Zap = one trigger + one or more actions
- Each time the trigger fires, the Zap runs once and successful actions usually count as tasks
- Build, test, publish: a published Zap only handles new events
Watch out for
- Expecting a new Zap to process old emails or rows that existed before it was published.