Hi, ​@Seeburg!

This is possible using Manychat's own API (https://api.manychat.com/swagger) and External Requests in the flow…
But it relies too much in the contact sending the right phone number in the right format. And in today's world, it's hard to remember anyone's phone number without looking at the saved contacts… this makes the user leave the conversation and maybe get distracted by other things or even can make them share the contact directly in WhatsApp, which won’t work to the automation.

That said… 

• First you have to create a Custom User Field and a simple automation with just an Action and setting the value as the WhatsApp ID
  • This Automation must be set with a trigger for every new contact created
  • To populate existing contacts, make a broadcast to all contacts just with this action step 

    

This is necessary because to find a Contact ID (necessary to send a flow), the system fields available are only Email and Phone. But here's the catch… If you're using WhatsApp, probably your contacts just have the WhatsApp ID as phone numbers, and this is not the same as the Phone field…

Next…

• You'll need two more Custom User Fieds
  • One for saving the informed phone numbers.
  • Another to store the User ID from the contact that did the indication.

1. Use the Data Collection block to get the phone number
2. Set the type to Phone
3. DISABLE all the toggles to save the phone as WhatsApp ID or System Field
   - If you let this activated, the number informed will be saved to the contact sending it.
4. Select the Custom User Field you created to store the informed number

   

5. As Action on reply, inset a External Request searching for the phone number in the custom field you created and populated at the beginning.
   • To get the field_id, go to Settings/Fiels and hover the mouse cursos over the Field. It will show the ID.
   • Change the Request Type to GET
   • ​​​​​​The field_value will receive the variable for the field containing the informed phone number.
   • Remember to insert your API Key as Authorization headers
   • Map the ID in the response in your second Custom Field

     

      

     

6. Another Action with an External Request. Now to send a flow to the informed contact
   • Set it to POST and use the sendFlow request
   • subscriber_id will get the Custom Field previously used in the Response mapping
   • flow_ns you find in the flow URL

     

      

You could also do it with an external automation tool linke Make, Zapier, n8n… but the logic and the drawbacks (no form of phone validation) continue the same.

Hope it helps somehow!

Oh my god, what a dedicated response Fabio. A million thanks to you and congratulations on your problem solving skills. I’m goona try it out. 
Best

Hello ​@Fabio Gaulke 

I did follow all your steps and it’s working perfectly well, so congratulations, the tutorial was excellent, I’m very greatfull.

I wanted to ask you a very specific question.

Right now, I can send a flow to an external contact, just as you greatly taught me, the issue is that this “external contacts” we have not been chatting with for more than 24h, therefore, when the flow tries to be sent, it doesn’t work if we hadn’t chatted with this contact in the last 24h.

Therefore, I wonder if there is a way to either:
A) Send the flow, (even if we have to pay per each cold sent)
B) Send a template message (I have one approved, but I don’t see a URL that I could paste into the existing automation to trigger the sending of that message template.

Message templates can be sent to contact with whom we’ve not recently spoken.

Let me know if you have a solution for this!

Thanks lot!

 You are on the right way, ​@Seeburg!

To send a message outside the 24h window you need a Message Template.

After it gets approved, in your flow, change the first message to “send outside 24h window. A button to choose a template will show up:

If you add a Quick Reply to your WA Message Template, it will be possible to connect a flow as usual to it.

Wonderful, I think it worked perfectly, thanks a lot.
I’m enjoying Manychat (and it’s support community ;)