Disclaimer: Tal Bussel, our Engineer in Residence, and Uri Ar, our Chief Brand Experience Officer, wrote this post together following a burst of extreme enthusiasm from using Ply.
Have you ever wished you could just create a button that adds that one little feature you’ve always wanted to the app you’re using? That action that requires so very little of your skill, but so much of your time and focus? We definitely did. And then, luckily for us, Eden invested in Ply.
“I’ve always been a productivity buff. I love automating processes, maybe out of productive laziness,” said Eden, when we asked him how he had the foresight to invest in Ply.
“When Yaniv Tross, Zohar Sakal and Guy Schlider first showed me Ply, it seemed like magic. Once you see how you can modify any existing application, add buttons, integrate data and automagically integrate functionality, you can’t go back to living within silos.”
Bring the Walls Down
Ampliphy, our proprietary platform at Aleph, connects people, networks and software to cultivate growth for our portfolio companies and the entire Israeli high-tech ecosystem. We’ve designed the Ampliphy platform to help our companies navigate networks, access unique connections to people, knowledge, companies, and insights, and automate serendipity on a large scale.
But even with Ampliphy, we often use a variety of different tools and platforms to actualize this connection process — like Asana, Notion, Slack, Salesforce and LinkedIn — and desperately wish for better integration between them. Our team faces the challenge of constantly switching between different applications and platforms as we work.
A typical scenario at Aleph could be one of us receiving a task in Asana that would lead to looking at a person’s profile on LinkedIn, then searching for that person on Salesforce to see if we have their contact details in order to reach out to them on behalf of a portfolio company. We then copy their email address, paste it into Gmail to reach out to them and end the process by logging the email to Salesforce: a tedious series of menus, clicks and tab switching.
To smooth this workflow in the past, aside from depending on the mercy of services and tools to create the integrations we wanted — we had to use APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and have our engineers write custom code to connect different platforms and services ourselves. This process was time-consuming and required maintenance. We often avoided the task and longed for a quick solution. Enter Ply.
Ply enables you to add your own features to the apps you use. It’s contextual, meaning that you can take data from the item you’re looking at and use it in your own feature or interact with data and features from other platforms and services. This eliminates the need to have everything live in a million browser tabs (aka browseritis) and allows you to create a new feature in just a few minutes. It’s almost as easy as imagining what you want a feature to do. You use a visual editor, not unlike those of some standard automation tools to assemble a series of actions, publish and voila! You have a new feature that connects your apps magically; no code required. But that’s not all. If you’ve created a feature you think others will benefit from using, you can share it as an installable: a Chrome extension that others can run in their browser.
Empowering… Everyone!
We were blown away by what we could build with Ply, so we reached out to the Ply team to run a workshop for everyone at Aleph; luckily, they obliged. We all had workflow pain points that we’d been dealing with for a long time but never had the time or resources to resolve.
The results of the workshop were outstanding. For example, Shaked Aricha Levi, Tomer Diari’s EA, created a workflow that generates a brief based on past interactions from any profile in our CRM, preparing Tomer for every meeting. Gilad Zirkel, an Engineer in Residence on our deal flow team, built a feature into LinkedIn that identifies a new investment opportunity in our Ampliphy platform based on a person’s profile. We also created a button inside LinkedIn that allows us to send an email from our Gmail to that person (if we have their email in our Salesforce database) and log the email automatically once it’s sent.
We created these tools and features in just three hours, with little to no code. In just a few days of using them, we saw a tenfold return on time invested in building them.
Since the workshop, our team has embraced Ply. It has saved us hundreds of work hours, and we’ve only scratched the surface of its capabilities. Contextual no-code features in the browser open up infinite possibilities for workflow customization, from simple actions to complex cross-application workflows, speeding up business building and time-to-market and expanding capabilities.
Ply is an excellent tool to help you reclaim your focus, control and sanity in a world filled with cognitive overload and tool inflation. We may sound like evangelists; we’re actually true converts, proud to be Ply’s too-early adopters.
