3 Things to Consider When Hiring a Make.com Expert (Formerly Integromat)
So you heard Make.com (formerly Integromat) is a great platform to automate your business and are looking for a specialist. As an expert myself, there are 3 things I recommend you consider/look at to find a good expert.
Be clear about the tools involved in your project on top of Make.com
Make.com doesn’t work on its own. It’s simply an iPaaS tool that works as the middleman. It connects all the apps that you use so that values can be passed around. For example, you get an order in Shopify and you want to pass the name of the purchaser to Airtable. Make.com takes the value (name of the purchaser) and bring it onto Airtable.
What this means is that you don’t just have to find someone who knows how to use Make.com, but also feels comfortable using the tools that your organization uses. Take HubSpot for example. They offer very versatile API endpoints, and oh boy they are complicated for first timers. So whenever you are making a job post or something, make sure to say you are looking for a Make.com expert to build an automation process using tool A and tool B. This will make things a lot more smooth.
Find the ones who change the module names.
It’s a bit hard to leave notes and comments in Make.com. You can leave notes in each module, but it’s really not the most useful feature they offer.
So what should the experts be doing? In my opinion, they should be changing the name of each and every module. Let me show you a bad example.
Even though this scenario seems to work, the names of the modules have not been changed by the expert. Now, let me show you a good example.
If you look at the text under each module, you can see they have been changed from the original name to something that somewhat gives you an idea of what it does.
This practice helps everyone involved understand what the scenario does without leaving the “bird view” (no need to open notes). It also implies that the expert has the soft skills that you need to work with you remotely/asynchronously.
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See if your candidates properly handle errors
One of the things I love about Make.com is it lets you handle errors. Handling errors lets you:
- Debug efficiently
- Let the user know what is happening
- Automatically restart scenarios
Of course, for simple scenarios like the one I shared above, error handling isn’t a must. But as things get more complicated, experts should be looking into how to handle errors.
Let me give you an idea of what an error-handled-scenario look like. This is a scenario I made for a client of mine.
The ones marked in orange are the error handlers in this scenario. If you don’t see these in the expert’s portfolio or sample scenario they made for you, it’s a yellow flag.
Final thoughts
Make.com is an incredibly powerful tool, so much so that things can become quite complex as your project progresses. It’s not uncommon for a scenario to grow to over 100 modules, which isn’t a problem in itself as long as it functions and everyone involved understands the workflow.
So what becomes important at this point?
I think it’s the expert’s mindset towards clear communication and transparency.
From some of the things I talked about in this article, you can probably tell if whoever you are talking to is someone who would make sure that you are on the same page, not leaving the automation scenario a black box.
