I know it sounds very clickbaity, but before you say anything, i litteraly made a video just to prove that your mistrust is misplaced:
Now that this video is out of the way, let's get into it.
When you get into a rythm when you automate your worflows, you sometimes find yourself wanting a little bit more.
A missing integration is the worst feeling, so if you ever wondered if it was possible to quickly develop one, it is !
If you have a couple of APIs to connect or a webhook to build, AWS Lambdas and Serverless are a life saver.
Here are the prerequistes to get started:
- An AWS account
- Node JS installed
- Serverless framework installed
- Python, Node or Go
As a resume, lets walk through the video together:
- I first create a index.py file containing my hello_world function
- The hello_world function is the handler of my new API route
- Any handler function has to return a 200 status code and a body even if it's empty
- Finally, i create a serverless.yml file which parameters our service, namely using the "http" serverless event with aws as a provider
- The `handler` mention should point to the function targeted handling the route
- I added the `cors` parameter so I could call the API with a browser without error
I have a little public repo of this little api, and you can check the output right here.
For something tangible, for my current company, I wanted to scrap a weekly french business newsletter: MaddyMoney
The reason I wanted to scrap this newsletter is because it summarizes a week of company fund raises, which gives me targets to enrich and reach out to.
Knowing me, you know I looked for the automated way so here's what I did:
1 - To know when an article is out, I subscribed to the newsletter with my gmail account.
2 - This trigger a POST to my custom API
3 - My custom API does everything : Scraping with BeautifulSoup, enrichment with Hunter's simple API (it's a referral link) and forward the enriched leads to my Lemlist campaign also with their API.
This targeted campaign yields nice results, and until the sites changes (at which point I will have to change my scraper), it will scrap and enrich new leads every week.
Let me know if you want to know about this type of flow, I can detail it in another article.
That's it for today, contact me if you want me to talk about this article or anything growth related !
Anas
